The words fall like bricks.
For one breathless second, all I feel is panic. Rian was attacked? It wasn’t long ago that I explained to Kendan Valvere that Rian had an old back injury that required sedation and a healer’s touch the first of every month.
Is he alive?
I might as well have held the killing blade myself.
The guilt rises fast—but just as quick, it crashes. Why should I feel guilty for aiding the coup? Rian may have laughed with me once, touched me like I mattered—but underneath it all, he’s still the same bastard who earned the name Lord of Liars.
You don’t get a title like that by being kind.
“Their attempt failed,” Maximan explains, and gods help me, I feel a wild surge of relief before my better senses kick in. Maximan gestures to the half-rotten cadaver wheezing at the end of the chains. “In the skirmish, Rian killed the Grand Cleric, then was able to escape. No one knows his current location. At present, the Kingdom of Astagnon is without a ruler. The throne stands empty. I don’t have to explain what danger that puts Astagnonians in.”
Basten paces, his face pale, his stance tense as a bowstring.
It’s a lot to process for me, too, but one question lodges in my mind like an arrow. “Wait—if Rian is a fugitive, how could he order a Deathraiser to resurrect the body and send it here as a message?”
“You misunderstand, Lady Sabine,” Maximan says gravely. “Riandidn’t send the cleric. Lord Kendan was the one who had the Grand Cleric’s body raised in an attempt to hold the throne, at least temporarily. After Rian, Beneveto had the greatest claim to the throne out of anyone in Astagnon. We thought he’d be more-or-less comatose. Easily manipulated, like a child’s doll. None of us expected…” he motions to the corpse, “…thiswould be the result. Consider him evidence, from Lord Kendan. Of the coup. And how dire our situation is.”
The air seems to go still around me. I lightly drag my fingers over the godkissed mark on my breastbone, thinking of the poor Deathraiser who was forced to create this undead abomination.
“Kendan needs someone on the throne,” I say, finally understanding. “Someone alive.”
At my side, Basten stiffens.
Until this moment, I don’t think he fully grasped what this entire horror show was about. That, for the first time since we set foot in Volkany, this isn’t about me.
It’s abouthim.
Maximan lowers himself to a knee, his old bones cracking, and dips his head to Basten. The royal soldiers follow suit behind him, and the ones holding the chains bow their heads.
I know it must kill Maximan to have to bend the knee to Basten—the scofflaw he knew as Wolf—but Maximan is nothing if not loyal to the crown.
“Lord Basten,” Maximan says. “I’ve been commanded to bring you back to Astagnon to assume the throne. Immediately. At any cost.”
Chapter 8
Basten
Drahallen Hall’s great room reeks of last night’s feast, though all signs of merriment have long been swept away. Everyone else has planted their asses in their seats—Immortal Vale at the place of honor, Iyre, Artain, Samaur, Woudix lined up beside him, Sabine opposite. Maximan sits, too—we had no choice but to tell him about the woken fae, and he still looks shellshocked.
Ican’t sit. My boots scuff the stone as I prowl behind them, shoulder tight, jaw grinding. Because the one thing in this room that rattles me isn’t the gods.
It’s that empty chair facing Vale. A throne, just like his. A king’s place. Waiting. Daring me to claim it.
It took half a day to summon the rest of the fae here, from whatever bullshit they were up to, as well as the most influential human leaders, who stand around the edges.
Captain Tatarin, head of Volkany’s mage army. Captain Vallois, the elderly yet graceful female leader of the archers. Captain Perrin, a block of a man who oversees the infantry. And the stoic Captain Huntill of the cavalry.
“Lord Basten, if you continue to avoid sitting in your seat, we’ll never get on with the day.” Artain circles his long fingers methodically on his wine goblet’s base like setting a snare.
Sabine nudges my heavy chair out an inch with her foot.
It still grates my nerves to take a throne—let’s face it, I’m not anyone’s first choice for leadership material—but when she sets those soft eyes on me, beckoning with a pat on the chair’s armrests, my coiled muscles slacken.
I sink down, growling my unease.
“Now,” Vale starts, ignoring my grumbles, hunching forward over an unrolled map of the Near World. “Maximan says that King Rian was last seen?—”
