Amelia Invidia had a twin sister, once, and for the first nineteen years of her life the fact of the twin had been the single organizing truth around which everything else about Amelia arranged itself — not because she resented her sister, not at first, but because a twin is a mirror a person cannot look away from, and Amelia had spent nineteen years looking.
Her sister's name had been Rosalind, and Rosalind had been, by every measure the village used to measure such things, the better of the two of them. Not crueler. Not more deserving. Simply luckier in the specific arbitrary way that luck distributes itself between people who otherwise share a face — Rosalind's hair had caught the light the way Amelia's had not quite managed to, Rosalind's laugh had drawn people toward her the way Amelia's own laugh, identical in every measurable way, somehow never did, Rosalind's suitors had lined up at a door that led, structurally, to the exact same house Amelia lived in, and had simply never once turned toward Amelia's half of it.
Amelia remembered — the tube gave this back to her with a precision that felt almost like punishment — standing beside Rosalind at a village dance, wearing a dress cut from the same bolt of cloth, and watching a young man's eyes move across both of their faces and settle, without hesitation, on the one that was not hers.
She had not hated Rosalind. She wanted that understood, in whatever accounting the universe eventually did of her — she had loved her sister, genuinely, the specific fierce love that twins are supposed to have and that Amelia, whatever she became afterward, had never stopped having, buried under everything else. What she had hated, with a purity that grew clearer every year, was the shape of the world that had made two identical women and then decided, for reasons neither of them had ever chosen or earned, that one of them would be loved easily and the other would have to work for every scrap of the same thing her sister received without asking.
She began keeping a private accounting. She was ashamed of it even as she did it, even at nineteen, before the demon queen had ever given a name to what lived in her — a mental ledger of every small unfairness, every moment someone remembered Rosalind's birthday and forgot Amelia's fell on the same day, every compliment paid to the sister who happened to be standing three feet closer to the person paying it. She hated the ledger. She kept it anyway, because keeping it was the only thing that made the unfairness feel witnessed, even if the only witness was herself.
Rosalind married well, in the end — a merchant's son from two villages over, kind by every account Amelia ever heard, genuinely fond of a wife he had chosen, Amelia understood, without ever knowing there had been another version of the same face he might just as easily have chosen instead. Amelia stood at the wedding in a dress cut from a different bolt of cloth this time, because even their mother had stopped bothering to match them by the time the dresses were made, and she smiled the whole ceremony through, and she meant perhaps sixty percent of the smile, and she hated herself for the other forty percent for years afterward.
The demon queen found her three years after the wedding, in the kind of ordinary despair that does not announce itself as despair — Amelia unmarried, unremarked upon, living in the family house long after most women her age had left it, keeping her private ledger longer than it had ever needed keeping because the habit had outlived any usefulness it once had.
"You don't actually want what she has," the demon queen told her, appearing the way she always appeared, in the kitchen this time, in the middle of an ordinary afternoon. "I want to be precise about that, because I think you've spent your whole life believing that's the shape of what's wrong with you, and it isn't quite right. You don't want the husband, or the easy laugh, or the light catching her hair a certain way. What you want is for the unfairness to stop being invisible. For someone, anyone, to look at the ledger you've kept since you were nineteen and say: yes. I see it. It was never fair."
Amelia had said nothing, because there was nothing to say to something so exactly, unbearably true.
"I can give you that," the demon queen said. "Not fairness — I want to be honest with you, Amelia, fairness isn't a thing I deal in and it was never a thing the world dealt in either, not for you, not for anyone. But I can give you the ability to see it. To reach into a person and take the memory of the thing that made them easy to love — the moment, the specific instant a life turned lucky instead of unlucky — and simply remove it. Let them stand in the world the way you've had to stand in it. Without the memory of ever having been the one the eyes went to first."
"And Rosalind."
The demon queen had looked at her for a long moment, an assessing look, the specific patience of someone deciding how much truth a person could be trusted to carry.
"That would be your choice to make," she said. "Not mine. I only offer the gift. What you do with it, and to whom, has never once been something I decide for the people I choose."
Amelia had thought of the wedding, of the dress from the different bolt of cloth, of sixty percent of a smile and the forty percent that had cost her something she never fully got back. She had thought, with a clarity that frightened her more than the offer itself, that she did not actually know whether she would use the gift on her sister, and that not knowing was its own kind of answer.
"Yes," she said, to the offer, if not yet to any particular use of it.
She never did use it on Rosalind. That was the detail the tube returned to her most often, in three hundred years of stillness — she had used the gift on a thousand strangers, on soldiers and scholars and once, memorably, on a king who had never once in his life wanted for anything and did not know what to do with himself once the memory of never wanting was taken from him. She had never gone home. She had told herself, for the first decade, that she was sparing Rosalind. She understood, by the second century, that she had simply been afraid of what she would feel if she stood in front of her sister's easy, lucky, unearned happiness and reached for it anyway, and found that taking it did not touch the ledger at all, did not make nineteen years of standing three feet too far from the door feel witnessed in the way she had always believed it would.
She suspected, now, that nothing would have.
The tube's liquid began to move.
Amelia opened her eyes into gold light, and the first thing she felt, before anything else, was the old private accounting starting up again inside her, automatic as breathing, cataloguing without being asked to.
"Second of mine," the demon queen said. "Wake up. There is a great deal of unearned luck left in this world, and I imagine you have not lost your appetite for evening it."
Amelia rose from the tube and looked at her own hands, unaged, unchanged, exactly as unfair in their perfection as they had been the day she'd first learned to resent the version of them that belonged to someone else's face.
"Is Rosalind's line still standing," she said. It was the only question she asked.
"I don't know," the demon queen said, honestly, for once. "I never thought to look. Does it matter?"
Amelia considered this for a long moment.
"No," she said, finally, and was not at all certain it was true. "I suppose it doesn't."