It begins where it ends: beneath the yew tree.

The yew stands in the wood like a great queen grown old, limbs wracked with age, head bowed by the weight of her crown. In the gnarled grain of her trunk there is a woman’s face, with weeping cankers for eyes, and in her heartwood there is a sword driven so deep that only the hilt is still visible. You already know the name of that sword, I think; who doesn’t?

They say time runs strangely, beneath the yew. They say many things are lost there, among the tangled roots: years, hearts, lives. But they say, too, that some things are found: fates and fortunes, beginnings and endings.

And, once, a child. You know her name, too, or at least one of them.

She was still pink and toothless when the woodcutter found her, and he fretted. He needn’t have; she grew quickly and well, as wild things do.

As a child she was all mischief, her fingertips stained with yewberries, her hair light and fey as dandelion down. As a girl she turned solemn, studying the woods as a saint would study the word. From them, she learned everything.

She learned to run as the stag runs and to be still as the goshawk is still; to stalk and to swim, to wrestle and to whistle; to vanish so thoroughly her own father could not find her and to kill so cleanly she left nothing but a tuft of fur, the metal scent of entrails.

She was strong, and arrogant in her strength. She was a young lion, a child-king, a lord of the wild woods.

And yet, she was no one at all. She was nothing, daughter of nothing, heir to nothing. Just another of the numberless, featureless small folk of Dominion, whose name would not be forgotten only because no one ever learned it in the first place. She would die a heathen death, unchristened and unshriven, so that even God would not remember her.

But then came her twelfth winter, and the Brigand Prince.