Fairest recap

Levana Blackburn is fifteen, the younger and unloved princess of Luna, whose elder sister Channary holds the throne and treats her as a joke. Beneath a glamour she never lets slip, Levana is scarred from a childhood burning her sister caused. She fixes on Evret Hayle, a married palace guard, and when his wife Solstice dies in childbirth she uses her Lunar gift to manoeuvre the grieving widower into marrying her, taking his infant daughter Winter as a stepdaughter. Channary bears a daughter, Selene, and then dies, leaving Levana as regent for a toddler queen. Unwilling to give up the throne, Levana arranges the nursery fire that is meant to kill her niece, and is crowned in her own right when the child is declared dead. In the same years she authorises the engineered plague intended for Earth and the programme that turns Lunar children into wolf soldiers. Evret dies, Winter grows up in her care, and Levana - telling the entire story herself - never once concedes she has done anything but what was necessary.

A note before starting: Fairest is a prequel novella, set years before Cinder, and it is told entirely from Queen Levana's point of view. It explains where she came from, how she took the Lunar throne, and where the plague and the wolf soldiers came from, which means it gives away several things the main sequence reveals gradually. It reads best after Cress. What you need going in is only this: Luna is a settled colony on the moon, its people can control what others see, feel and believe, and its royal family holds the throne by blood. Levana is the younger of two princesses. Her sister Channary is queen. Everything else in the novella is Levana's own account of her own life, and she is not a reliable judge of it.

Levana Blackburn is fifteen, the younger princess of Luna, living in the palace at Artemisia under a sister who enjoys humiliating her in public. Their parents were assassinated, and Channary took the throne without any interest in the work of it. Levana holds a glamour continuously, day and night, projecting a face that is not hers, because a childhood fire left one side of her body badly burned - something neither sister treats as worth discussing. Levana has settled her attention on Evret Hayle, a palace guard more than twice her age, who is married to a seamstress named Solstice and expecting his first child. He is unfailingly polite to her and nothing more, and she has decided that this is a technicality.

The origin of Levana's scars comes out: the fire that burned her as a small child was her sister's doing, and Channary has never treated it as anything but a story worth retelling at parties. Solstice Hayle dies giving birth to a daughter, Winter. Evret is left a widower with an infant, and Levana sets about turning his grief into an opening. She makes herself indispensable in the nursery, wears a glamour tailored to what she believes he wants, and applies her Lunar gift where persuasion is not enough. Within months she has a marriage: Evret agrees to it under a pressure he cannot name and would not be permitted to refuse, and Levana becomes his wife and Winter's stepmother. She regards this as being loved, and records every sign to the contrary as somebody else's failure.

The marriage settles into something Levana can neither improve nor admit is a failure. Evret raises Winter, tolerates his wife and grieves his first one, and Levana's response is to tighten her control rather than loosen it. Meanwhile Channary produces an heir, a daughter named Selene, and shows no more interest in the child than in anything else. Levana, who has been running much of the practical business of the court by default, is entirely aware of what a niece means: a queen in waiting, and a lifetime of standing next to the throne rather than on it.

Channary dies, and Levana becomes regent of Luna for a toddler queen. She rules well, by her own account, and finds the arrangement intolerable, because it is temporary. She begins to think about the nursery, about what a fire in the royal wing would settle, and about how easily her niece's death could be made to look like an accident. In the same period she takes up the two projects she considers her real legacy: a disease engineered in the Lunar laboratories to be released on Earth, so that Luna can hold the only cure, and a programme for converting Lunar children into soldiers for the invasion that will follow. Each is set out in her narration as prudent statecraft.

By the close, Levana has everything she set out to take and none of it in a form anyone would envy. Channary dies, leaving her infant daughter Selene as queen and Levana as regent. Rather than surrender the throne when the child comes of age, Levana arranges the nursery fire that is meant to kill her niece, and Selene is declared dead. Levana is crowned queen of Luna in her own right. During the same years she sets in motion the two programmes that will define her reign: a bioengineered plague, developed as a weapon to be released on Earth and then cured on Lunar terms, and the surgical soldier programme that takes children from the outer sectors and rebuilds them for an invasion. Her marriage to Evret ends with his death, and Levana keeps his daughter Winter as her stepdaughter and her ward. Years later, Winter, who has grown into the beauty her stepmother could only manufacture, cuts her own face rather than be valued for it - a refusal Levana never understands. Nothing in Levana's own account of any of this is presented as a crime. The novella closes with her secure, glamoured, unloved and completely certain that she has been wronged.