Excerpt from The Age of Calamities by Senaa Ahmad, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

There is a version where she gives birth to a daughter. In this version of the story, Anne still dies in the most ignoble and depressing of fashions: a sword, a Frenchman, a chopping block, gawking ministers, a wordless husband. It is her daughter who will avenge her mother—with the throne she takes by force, the wars she wages, the playwrights she patronizes, the papacies she outwits, the rebellions she crushes, the cults she accidentally spawns, the enemies she forgives, through all the many people she meets and never marries.

* * *

SHE WAKES UP one morning and the whole castle is closed for renovations. The imperial estates are empty and eerie. Set painters are giving the outer walls a fresh coat. A few crew members crawl on their hands and knees in the chapel, swabbing delicate graining details into the marble flagstones so they don't look like plastic. In the state room, a prop maker wheels away a vase, completely oblivious to her presence. He replaces it a few minutes later with an almost identical, slightly more era-appropriate vase.

When she passes Henry in the hallway, he's just as perplexed as she is.

But later that day, on instinct, he swipes a can of paint from the art department. He composes a sprawling landscape. A canyon, right in front of Anne's apartments. He's not the best artist, but what he lacks in talent, he makes up in cruelty. When she steps out of her room, she plunges down, all the way to the bottom of the canyon, where she breaks her leg.

She tries to call for help, of course. She yells until her voice is hoarse. Her leg is an unsteady line of fire beneath her. For days after, she can still hear the sound of the bone breaking.

And this time, yes, it's bad. She's hungry, thirsty, in tremendous pain. She is depleted from the ache of the last death, a grief she didn't know was still possible. She's worn down by his anger, his relentless need. There's a limit to what she can endure, maybe, and it doesn't seem so far away. She can't do this forever. Did you think she could do this forever?

Still, she looks for a way out. She tries to set the bone herself, with little success. She prays to her god for an answer. It would be better if she knew how to die, if she had the grace of a dead girl. But she isn't a body washed ashore at the start of a film, or arranged artfully in a back alley for the cameras to find. No, she's disorderly, desperate. There's skin beneath her fingernails, and throw-up on her T-shirt.

And do we want her to die? Do we want this to be the end? Isn't it better if she finds a miracle, a mystery machine swooping out of the sky to save her?

Think about it: Do you want her to be just another dead girl? Do you really, truly want her to die?

* * *

SHE DOES NOT die this time. One of the production assistants drops a permanent marker down the canyon by accident and Anne scrawls an amateurish ladder to freedom. Or, no, as everyone's packing up to leave, a decorator spies the velvet flag she's manufactured out of her French hood. He doesn't seem to understand who she is, but she bribes him to haul her out with two fat pearls.

Why don't we let you decide?

Either way, it's definitely a miracle. Most unexpected.

* * *

ON ANOTHER DAY, she rolls over and looks at him.

"What?" he says.

"It doesn't have to be this hard, right?" she says. "We don't have to live like this."

He doesn't respond right away. He takes so long, she thinks he is considering the enormity of her question, that perhaps it has left him winded. She thinks maybe this is the moment he will realize how pointless it is, how hard she's trying, how much time he's wasted, how defeated they both are. Maybe he'll say, Huh, why didn't I ever think of that.

But he doesn't answer, no surprise. Maybe it's too obvious for words. Maybe he doesn't think she deserves a response. Maybe he doesn't know. When he looks at her, she has the sense of a man who is making up his mind one way or another. A man who stares at a dead end and sees his opportunity.

* * *

MAYBE YOU'LL WANT to look away for this part.

Excerpted from The Age of Calamities by Senaa Ahmad. Copyright © 2026 by Senaa Ahmad. Excerpted by permission of Henry Holt and Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.