I was loved from the day I was born.
Everyone loved me. Everyone spoiled me. I was the princess of the North and the future Saintess, the girl with the highest Purelight talent in the world, and there was nothing in the world I couldn't have by asking for it nicely. When I took my first steps, the court photographers took them from seventeen angles. When I sneezed, three physicians came running.
But being loved isn't the same as being safe. My mother taught me that.
I was five. My mother was a Seer, and she had seen something—nobody has ever told me what—and it broke her. For weeks they kept me away from her rooms and wouldn't say why. Then one afternoon her door was open a crack, and I missed her so much that I went in.
She knelt down and hugged me and called me her sweet angel. Then her eyes started to glow, and she laughed in a voice I'd never heard, and then she hit me.
