PROLOGUE
The cold, gray depths of the Eastern Sea threaten to swallow the girl whole. The rip current tugs relentlessly on her flailing limbs, every breath pulling more and more of the salty water into her too full lungs.
The Dark God of Death encroaches.
Leathery skin in blackest night flits across her peripheral—a glimpse of the creature of myth sent to collect her. Fire erupts from within as the sea beast grazes its serpentine body across the girl’s spine, forever marring her porcelain skin.
Something long-slumbering awakens in her veins, power not in or of this world. Snippets of fate flash before her as the creature spurs her onto the shore.
Onyx hair.
Crimson blood.
A burning throne.
A name the soul knows but the mind cannot understand.
Shadowy death.
Blood-tinged water pours from her mouth in violent coughs as oxygen tries to fill her lungs again. Vines spring up from the dunes with each slide of the girl’s frail hands as she crawls across the beach. Shadows wash away the blinding light ofday as the sun vanishes from the heights of the noonday sky—an illuminated crescent on the sand the only evidence of its continued existence.
Time halts with the eclipse as reality shatters into two.
There is what was before and there is what will be. A child entered the sea, but something ancient and powerful emerged from the watery depths.
Touched by a god and destined to rule.
CHAPTER 1
The King is dead.
The single sentence hastily scrawled on a strip of rolled parchment lays on the center of the council room table. Its jagged edges echo the urgency in which the message was written. Torn from the blank margins of a larger document, ink smeared from the rain.
It was well past midnight when the messenger collapsed on the front steps, the missive gripped tightly in his curled fist. The occupants of the manor were fast asleep—everyone except the night watchmen and me.
I watched from my window as the guards dragged the man’s soaked body inside, setting off the chain of events that has taken up the past sixteen hours of my life.
The King of Corinth never married, never sired an heir before a mysterious illness took the life of a man we were all made to believe was divinely blessed. The second king in less than three decades to succumb to the same fate, and yet these men still have the audacity to believe our nation is beloved by a pantheon of gods who could not care less about us.
“Without an heir to the throne, the constitution demands an Ascension Vote. It’s the Governor’s responsibility to attend,” Lord Yarrow declares for the fourth time.
“And yet we’ve already established that my father cannot make the journey,” I say, snapping the shaft of what remains of the last quill in my pile.
The dark wood table is littered with the mangled white barbs of the feather, one plucked from its stem each time I forced myself to stay quiet when one of the Governor’s councilors said something ignorant.
“The capital city is too far and his heart isn’t strong enough. It’s my duty as the heir to the Emerald Region to attend in his place.”
The Lord of Treasury flares his nostrils in restraint. He has never believed me fit for the title my father bestowed upon me. The first and only female who has ever held the title of heir in any of Corinth’s five jeweled regions—and I’ve been rebuked ever since my father acknowledged me as such.
When my mother died and left him without a male successor, the men that now sit around this table judging me with unforgiving eyes urged him to do what his predecessors and peers do—appoint a noble lord to the role until he remarried and sired a boy.
“Lady Ivy has a point,” Lord Bartlett sighs. “If Governor Fellows’ health was good enough to travel, he’d be with us now. His condition worsens by the day. He’d never survive the two week journey.”
A muffled prayer ripples through the room from the lips of the Emerald Council, each offering a whispered plea for my father’s health to gods who won’t answer their prayers.
They never fucking do.
“Why should we send a petulant girl in his place?” Yarrow demands, crumbling what restraint I have left with his venomous question.
