Uncrowned
Kings
by
Seanan McGuire

It is easier to watch over one hundred fleas than one young girl.

—Polish proverb.

1876

They buried Zosia yesterday.

She never hurt anyone in her life, which was barely long enough to serve as a sentence, much less a story; she was born, she lived, she loved her family, she got sick, and she left in the night, hand in hand with tall, fair Death, the woman in white and the girl in gray walking away into the streets of Warsaw, leaving her weary, worn-out body
behind.

It wasn’t right. Mama and Papa said that it was God’s will working through the world, but Maria couldn’t see how God’s will wasn’t an affront to His own creation if he thought killing a fifteen-year-old girl was somehow the right and kindly thing to do. As if it were just. Zosia had been bright and sweet and kind. She had been of an age when her eyes trended toward the boys in their parish, and when her cheeks flared red if one of them brushed her hand in passing at the market or commented on her hair ribbons. She had been old enough to fall in love if God’s will hadn’t ordered her to wait until marriage or if she hadn’t been so bound and determined to be a good, obedient daughter and bring neither attention nor shame to her family name.

Instead, she had brought bills from the physic, treatments that were not enough to save her, and sleepless nights for all of them when her coughing stole sleep away. Maria was ashamed to remember how weary she had been, so angry at her oldest sister, as if Zosia had somehow chosen her illness, had chosen to keep her family awake as she wheezed and struggled for each and every breath.

By the end the coughing had been a welcome confirmation that Zosia was still alive. The doctors had stopped taking Papa’s money two days before, saying that it would be a crime in thought if not in deed to let him continue to pay when they already knew they couldn’t save her. He wept more when they pressed the bills back into his hand than when the coughing had finally, horribly, mercifully, brutally come to an end.

Maria had been lying awake when Zosia had finally stopped coughing. She had almost drifted off to sleep by the time her mother’s scream split the air into two tidy halves: the world in which she had an eldest sister named Zosia, stubborn, sensitive, tender, terrible, and all the things an eldest sister ought to be to be worthy of the title, and the world in which Bronisława was now the eldest of them and always would be. Bronia was an excellent sister, and Maria loved her fiercely, but she wasn’t meant to be the eldest. She was meant to have someone to set herself against, someone to serve as a magnifying lens for her own brilliance and to sharpen her the way she, Józio, and Hel