In Veil, no king or queen is born to the throne. The Great Loom decides. Every few years it weaves a new tapestry, and the face in the silver thread becomes the next monarch. Mira, a seamstress's daughter, was sweeping spindle-dust in the workshop when the new cloth was unveiled. She glanced up and forgot how to breathe. Woven in living silver was a girl with her exact face. Hers. Before she could move, two royal guards stepped through the door and looked straight at her.

Mira stared at the woven face and noticed something wrong. The silver girl wore a thin scar above her left eyebrow. Mira had no such scar. "That isn't me," she whispered. "Someone changed the cloth." The guards hadn't reached her yet. If she could prove the tapestry was a fake, she might expose whoever was pulling the threads.

Instead of speaking, Mira grabbed a corner of the tapestry and yanked. The silver threads were loose, badly tied, nothing like true Loom-work. The whole woven face unraveled in her hands. The two guards stared. This was no sacred cloth. It was a clumsy forgery, and now they could see it too.

As the fake cloth fell apart in Mira's hands, the real Great Loom in the corner shuddered and began to weave by itself. A true face formed in silver, and the two guards held their breath. It was Mira's face after all, complete with the Loom's secret crooked stitch. The forgery had only ever copied a truth someone feared. Mira had earned the throne by tearing down the lie meant to hand it to her.