Chapter 1 The King's Last Breath
The last thing Elara carried to her father was a bowl of pears.
He had missed supper again. At twenty-five, she was old enough to chair a grain council and still young enough, apparently, to be told that the king’s business could not wait for a meal. She took the pears herself, dismissing the servant at the stair. Aldric liked them cut with a little salt. She had remembered that and forgotten a knife.
Outside the throne room she heard her uncle laugh.
It was not an unfamiliar sound. Malrec had laughed at her first attempt to dance, at the solemn treaties she had made between wooden animals as a child, at her father’s habit of falling asleep over accounts. But this laughter ended abruptly, as though he had closed a drawer upon it.
Elara stopped beside the door.
Inside, Aldric stood before the hearth. The crown rested on the throne arm, and something silver turned between his fingers. An arrow, too slender to be a soldier’s weapon. Its light made his tired hands look young.
“You’re late,” he said.
“Forgive me. I had preparations to make.”
“For what?”
“Your funeral.”
Elara saw the dagger before she understood it. Black metal disappeared beneath her father’s ribs. The bowl slid against her hip, but she caught it. A pear fell silently onto the runner at her feet.
Aldric gripped his brother’s wrist. His mouth opened. Elara waited for a command, an angry word, anything that might return the room to the world it had occupied a moment earlier.
“Thirty years,” Malrec said, almost gently. “Thirty years in your shadow. The crown. The bow. Even their love. All because you arrived first.”
Aldric’s knees struck the step below the throne.
“The bow will never answer you.”
“Then your daughter will find it for me.”
The silver arrow vanished from Aldric’s hand. It did not fall. It folded inward upon its own light, leaving him clutching nothing.
Malrec’s face changed. He seized the king’s collar, demanding to know where he had sent it. Aldric looked past him toward the door.
Toward Elara.
For one terrible instant she thought he would call her name. Instead his fingers opened against the stone. Go, the gesture said, with the same small movement he had used to send her toward the garden when lessons became unbearable.
She moved. The fallen pear rolled from the runner and struck the door.
Malrec turned.
“Come out, niece. I can hear you breathing.”
Elara dropped the bowl and ran.
The first doors slammed before she reached them. Violet fire uncoiled across their hinges. She flung herself sideways into a tapestry of the first king’s hunt, found the servant’s latch behind it, and bruised her shoulder forcing the narrow panel open. Flame followed her through. Heat touched the skin below her collarbone like a needle.
She slapped at her gown and found no fire.
Behind the panel, Malrec called for the guard.
“Bring me the princess alive!”
She took the stairs in darkness, one hand sliding along the wall. Her father had shown her this passage during a summer storm when she was seven. He had said a ruler should know how the people carrying his supper reached him. She had remembered it as an adventure. Now she counted the turnings through tears she could not afford.
At the lower landing a kitchen girl stood holding a bucket. She was younger than Elara, with flour in the crease of one wrist.
“Your Highness?”
“Do you know the west drain?”
The girl nodded.
“Take everyone you can. Stay away from the mirrors.”
Elara did not know why she added that. Perhaps because, in the polished copper pan behind the girl, violet light moved where there should have been darkness.
The girl set down the bucket. “What happened?”
There was no way to say it and keep walking. Elara made herself do both.
“The king is dead.”
They reached the buttery together. A cook pressed a heel of bread into Elara’s hand without understanding why she was shaking. She wanted to hold on to that kindness, to tell them who had done it, to call the household to witness. Then the bells began, and from the courtyard came the sound of men kneeling.
She climbed to a ventilation grate above the yard.
Malrec stood on the balcony wearing her father’s crown. Its central stone burned violet. The guards who had taught her to ride bowed their heads. Beside the fountain, Captain Varric raised his sword.
“Princess Elara has murdered the king,” Malrec announced. “She fled when confronted. Whoever returns her will be rewarded.”
The bread crumbled in her fist.
She knew those faces. One guard had a daughter her age. Another had carried her home after she broke her ankle at twelve. None looked up toward the grate. None said it could not be true.
A voice behind her whispered her name. The kitchen girl held out a short paring knife.
“For the drain latch,” she said.
Elara took it. “What is your name?”
“Mara.”
“Go now, Mara.”
She waited until the girl disappeared, then worked the knife beneath the old latch. The blade slipped and cut her palm. She did not feel it until the grate gave way.
Below lay the narrow waste channel that passed under the outer wall. Above, Malrec raised his eyes directly toward her.
His smile was small and private.
Elara dropped into the channel. Filthy water soaked the hem of her gown. She crawled toward the cold air beyond the wall, the knife clenched between her teeth, while behind her the kingdom accepted a lie in the voice of a familiar man.
When she emerged beneath the alder trees, the upper windows of the castle were burning.
She turned once. A shadow crossed the great balcony. She could not tell whether her father still lay beneath the throne.
Then a hunting horn sounded, and grief had to learn to run.
