Reign of Ruin

He is dead.

The words that would change my life. Obliterate it.

They’re barely spoken though. Barely said out loud as though merely uttering them would set off a bomb that would fracture the very walls around us.

I stare at the man who said it. For a moment, for brief second I want to claw his eyes out, cut out his tongue. Silence him forever. But I know it makes no difference.

He is dead.

And my life will never be the same.

I hear a wail, a cry that seems to rip right through me and for a moment I think it’s my own voice but I see a woman, someone I barely know and it’s from her that the cry has come.

I narrow my eyes, looking at the rest of them, the people that shouldn’t be here. That have no right to intrude on my despair.

Some look back, some avoid my gaze. A few cry out just as the woman has and I glare at them. Daring them to make another sound.

“Your Highness.”

Someone mutters to me. I look up to the hard face of my father’s Commander. The man that has been by his side through every battle.

“What is it?” I say quietly.

He murmurs something that I don’t catch, though in truth I know what he wants. The banners have to be dropped. The bells need to ring. We have to signal to our people that their King is dead.

“Do what you must.” I mutter. Turning away.

I have to get out of this room. Get away from these people too. I make for the door but someone blocks my way.

“Your Highness.” Ambassador Dara says.

“Get out of my way.” It’s an order but he has the audacity to ignore it. He’s challenging me already. Like he’s daring me to act.

“Surely now you will entertain him…”

“Now? While my father’s body is still warm and his last breath has barely passed his lips?” I snap.

“While you still have a choice.” He replies.

My anger flares. My eyes flash with fury and for a moment I want nothing more than to grab the dagger he keeps at his waist, to drive it through this man’s throat and watch as his blood splutters out.

“You dare presume to speak to me like that?” I say.

“If you care for your kingdom’s future then you should stop with these games.”

“If you care for your head then should hold your tongue.”

He smirks. “To harm me would be an act of war Princess.”

“Except I am not a Princess. I am a Queen now. And you would do well to remember it.” I snap, walking away before I really do do something I might regret.

As I storm down the hallway I can feel eyes following me. People are curtsying too. The throne room lies ahead but that’s not where I’m headed. I make a right, cutting into the private residence of the castle only it’s not private right now. It’s swarming with people, doctors, soldiers, faces I don’t recognise. I make my way up a great flight of stairs and turn down what would normally be an empty space. Everyone turns when they see me, dropping to their knees.

“Your Highness.” Someone mutters.

“Your Highness...”

“Your Highness...” It follows me like a wind at my back. Chilling my bones, turning me slowly numb with each new utterance.

As I push open the door to my father’s rooms I feel it. The presence of death. My father’s power has gone. His aura dissipated. There is nothing here in this room but just the sound of my own breathing, catching in my throat.

“Fuck.” The word comes out as a hiss. A curse. Though I’m not meaning too.

I stare at his body. He’s laid out, arms by his side, covers over him, looking as though he could simply be napping.

“Fuck.” I say it louder. Normally he would berate me for such words. That a Princess would cuss like that. That a Princess would behave like that. But it was him who taught me to fight, him who brought me up to be strong, hard headed, not to simply pander to men because I was his heir. His sole heir. I couldn’t be like other women, I couldn’t behave the way they were expected to. I needed to prove myself to everyone at Court, that I could rule, that I could be a Queen in my own right.

Only now the moment is here, now, years far too soon and I’m not prepared, not even close to it.

“Raegan.” She whispers my name and I look at her for the first time. Nalynn, my father’s wife. Technically my stepmother though we are the same age.

“How is this possible?” She asks. Only I don’t know the answer because a week ago my father was healthy. A week ago you would have thought he’d live forever.

“It was poison.” Zalar says and I jump at his voice. I hadn’t heard him enter the room. I’d been to lost in my own despair. Allowing it to consume me without a thought to stop it.

“How do you know?” I ask as he bows to me.

“The purpling of the lips. The burst blood vessels in his eyes. His body was starved of oxygen. The poison suffocated him from the inside.”

“How long? How long did he suffer for?” Nalynn asks. Her voice comes out frail, like a stammer.

Zalar winces. “Hours at the end.” He admits. “He would have been unable to move. Unable to speak.”

“He was entombed in his own body?” I say and he nods.

As I shut my eyes and look away from him a sickening thought comes to my mind. That this was all part of a bigger plan. A bigger scheme. To destabilise this country. To force my hand.

“The Privy Council is planning the funeral.” Zalar murmurs.

“They work fast.” I snap before realising the irony in my statement. If my father was poisoned then it was undoubtedly at one of their hands. Their doing.

I should call the guards, have them all interrogated, find the culprit and punish them but I know that option is not available to me. My rule hangs by a thread, a grain of sand and if I do anything that tips the scales I will be lost and this entire Kingdom with it.

So instead I do nothing. I look like the model Queen, the perfect dutiful woman they all want me to be and all the while I’m simmering with rage, struggling to keep my cool and not let it undulate out into the air around me.

***

Today should be a day of celebration. Our harvest were good, our food stores are full to the brim, though a long winter looms ahead we are more than prepared for it.

Every year we would hold a feast. Celebrate with our people. But today we don’t. Today, on my father’s birthday we are instead burying him. Encasing his body in a tomb, a great carving of stone and precious jewels.

As I stare at it I fight back the tears because a ruler does not cry. A ruler is strong. Defiant. And I have to be doubly so.

Nalynn is the Chief Mourner. She alone is allowed to show her emotions, to show the world how we really feel. But as her tears stream down her face I feel it, the single tear escaping my own and I quickly brush my face on my shoulder, wiping it away before anyone can see.

The crown on my head feels so heavy that as I do it I fear it might slip, that it might fall to the ground and smash and I daren’t think what the implications of that would be.

I can feel eyes on me. Thousands of them. My courtiers, my people. They’re sizing me up. Trying to decide if I’m actually going to be capable of ruling them or whether I might just plunder this kingdom into ruin.

We are not a small nation. We are not insignificant. And we are rich. Dangerously rich. My father was a clever man, a lucky man too in many ways. He grew this kingdom from a relative minority into something of worth. Something to be proud of. His only failure was me. A girl. A female heir. Although others would say his failure was his refusal to have me betrothed, sold off, married to the nearest eligible man.

And now we are both bearing the fruit of that failure. He, cold in his casket, and me a dead Queen walking or as good as.

When the service is done, when my father is finally laid to rest I stand and leave the mausoleum. All my family are here. Every relative of mine buried in this mass of stone. And now there is only me left. The last of my line. If I fail, if I cannot rule as a Queen, our entire dynasty will fall with me.

In the Great Hall a feast has been laid. The food is not to be eaten. It’s there to appease the Gods. To ensure they are happy with just my father’s soul and do not decide to take anymore. It’s superstitious bullshit in my mind but traditions have to be observed. I cannot rock the boat, stir the waters, act in any way that might set off alarm bells.

I can see them still, watching me. Whispering. Everyone in this room feels like my enemy right now though in truth I doubt that’s the case.

A few courtiers come up to me. They murmur their condolences and I accept them in a measured, calm way. The way a King would. The way my father taught me.

Nalynn is still crying. She’s here in this room and all I can hear now are her wails. In a way I envy her. That’s she free to cry, to show everyone how heartbroken she is. Free to be herself. Free to not care what anyone thinks. For a second my jealousy spikes because I wish I was her. I wish we could trade places and I could now be a nobody, a person of no consequence.

I want to rage, I want to turn over every table, to smash the plates to smithereens. Curse each and every one of these people before me but I can’t. I can’t do a thing.

I can see them, a group of my Privy Councillors. Koroth is amongst them. Koroth is my biggest critic, my greatest adversary.

“What other choice do we have?” The words carry over despite their hushed voices. Their conspiring even now, all six of them.

I narrow my eyes. Silently pouring a drink and listen as best I can.

“You would see her married to him?”

Koroth shrugs. “A woman cannot rule.”

“But King Iver..?”

“He is a strong leader. He’s what this country needs right now. What we all need.” Someone other than Koroth says it and that throws me. That more people are backing this plan.

“What of other suitors, other Kings? King Bora is looking for a wife, as is King Temen and King Atreus…” Zalar says.

“King Iver is the stronger.” Lord Isix states.

“What if he treats her the same way he did his last wife?” Zalar snaps back.

“Or the one before that?” Someone else says.

“His first wife died of natural causes.” Koroth says almost flippantly.

“Starved to death is not natural causes.” Rison states.

“There is no evidence that’s what happened.” Another retorts.

“No evidence it didn’t.”

“It doesn’t matter. The Princess will marry him.” It’s not Koroth that says it. Not him who is apparently, in this moment, making decisions about my life.

“Queen. She’s a Queen now. Our Queen.”

Koroth rolls his eyes. “As long as she gives us a male heir it doesn’t really matter what she is.”

I gulp trying to calm myself. My father has been dead barely more than a week and already almost all of them are plotting against me. I want to scream at them, to lock them all in the dungeons and have them executed for treason but we all know it’s them that holds the power right now. Half my guards are bought, half my courtiers would side with them. I may be a Queen but right now I have little power. I’m as good as a puppet, a show Queen they’re all pretending to serve while my Privy Council holds the real power.

As I walk away I feel his eyes on my and I look back at him before I can think not to. He smirks. Just a little. Just enough to tell me he knows I’ve heard. He knows I know.

I am so fucked.

And suddenly he’s there, beside me. Breathing the same air, sucking the life from it.

“Uncle.” I say quietly. Keeping my voice steady. Keeping myself calm.

“Raegan.” He says.

“Queen Raegan.” I correct him and that smirk turns into a sneer.

“The Privy Council are meeting in the morning.”

“Are they indeed?” I say arching my brow at him. “I thought the Privy Council met at the command of their ruler.”

“They do.” He says with a glint that tells me everything I need to know. That he’s commanding them. That he’s taking control even as I stand here with a crown on my head.

“We have matters that need to be discussed.”

“Yes we do.” I say meeting his look head on.

He never counted on me being this. Defiant. He thought I would be like my mother. No doubt it was the greatest moment in his life the day she caught the eye of the King. Just a lowly courtier. Not even from a significant family. And then bam, she was suddenly Queen Consort. The King’s new wife. My father adored her, loved her from the moment he first laid eyes on her though she herself did not love him in return; a secret she told me on her deathbed. My father knew of course, he’d known from the start but he was a King, he could marry who he wanted and he wanted her. She, always the obliging person did as my uncle bid and married him without hesitation. Though her heart belonged to another, a man I don’t know, and a fact my father would apparently turn a blind eye to. He loved my mother so much he was willing to ignore her adultery, willing to let her meet in secret, to conceal it too, though I only found out the full extent of their affair after my mother was dead.

Perhaps that’s why my father put off my own betrothal, refused to have me married off to a man I didn’t love because as much as he loved my mother he could see each day how much it pained her, how much his love slowly destroyed her.

But my uncle flourished. His family flourished. He became the most influential man of the Court. He sat on my father’s Privy Council, he wielded his influence like a sword. I think my father must have believed he would serve me as faithfully when in truth the only man Koroth serves is himself. I know he is behind this rebellion, he holds the entire Council in his palm and though I am his niece, he is the one pushing me off my throne because he knows if I chose to marry someone other than his intended then I might just rip everything he has built over the last god knows how long right out from under him.

And he can’t have that. He won’t have that.

I will be his sacrificial lamb. And he will happily lead me out to slaughter, marry me to a man almost twice my age with two previous wives dead in the ground and if the rumours are true, both by his own hand.

The thought turns my stomach. It makes me feel physically sick and as I stand here knowing over half the people around me would willingly throw me to this monster all I can’t think of is running.

Of disappearing.

Of escape.