“Nomination?” He didn’t ask for the job?
“Yeah, you can’t run for office in this world. Someone has to nominate you and someone else must second it. If it’s seconded, you’re stuck with running,” Alexander said ruefully.
“Okay, I can see that. The best leaders are unwilling and all that jazz. But why you?”
“I’m the natural born leader of the Dannan.” He said it without any conceit. It was simply a fact of life.
“What does that mean? Natural born?” Doryu asked, working on his third piece of chicken.
“He’s the king,” Roan said flatly.
“The king.Theking?” I asked.
They both nodded. I looked across the table at Doryu. His eyes were as wide as mine.
The remainder of dinner fell a bit flat. I didn’t know if I was breaking some royal decree or rule every time I moved. The only example of royalty I’d ever known was the human British monarchy, and you couldn’t blink around them without breaking a rule of decorum.
Finally, we were finishing up dessert. I took a tiny sip of my dessert wine, pinky up, looking forward to the moment that I could escape the tension in the room and go down to the village. I’d been exploring the shops and wanted to start talking to owners about a job. I had my nest egg from Riley, but it wouldn’t go far.
Alexander’s eyes were on me. I could feel it. I surreptitiously looked to the side, where he sat at the head of the table. When he saw me looking, he slammed his hand down on the table, and I promptly dropped my glass.
“This is why I didn’t want to tell you!”
“Tell me what?”
“Don’t play dumb. You’re intelligent. I didn’t want to tell you I’m the king of the Dannan.” He wiped his mouth again, downed his wine, threw the napkin on his plate with a flourish, and stood. “If you’ll excuse me.” With that, he stormed from the room, dramatic exit complete.
I looked around the table. Everyone looked back at me with wide eyes. “That was awkward.”
Roan laughed. “He’ll be okay. He’s sensitive about being king. He wasn’t supposed to be, but life has a way ofsurprisingus all in the end.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, unable to contain my curiosity.
“His father was king for over a thousand years. He spent the first century and a half of his life believing he’d never have to take on the responsibility. He has six older siblings.”
“Well, why did he have to?” Doryu asked.
“Process of elimination. His oldest brother was born when his father was still considered a child, and was almost as old as his father. He died three or four hundred years ago of a rare Dannan disease that still outbreaks occasionally. There’s no known cure and the survival rate is only around thirty percent.”
“That’s horrible.”
“It’s part of the reason he pushes so hard to convince the council to allow scientific research.”
I nodded. It made perfect sense. “The other five?”
“Three were sisters, and women still aren’t allowed to rule.”
My eyebrows flew up. “Excuse me?”
“I didn’t say I agreed with it. We’re changing things, but it’s slow going.”
Apparently the Unseen world was a good century behind the human one in terms of rights. “Okay, so the other two brothers?”
“One ran away, not heard of in three or four decades. It happens sometimes. We get tired of this life and go off the grid. Technically it’s illegal to do that, but since he’s royalty, he’d get a slap on the wrist, much like your Riley’s first husband would have if that shapeshifter hadn’t killed him.”
He drank the last sip of his wine and put his napkin on the table. “And he has a brother born two years before he was, Cormac. He went mad and tried to kill the entire family at dinner when we were only about twenty. It’s what eventually led to my family and his splitting apart. His family believed mine had a spell put on Cormac.”
“Did they?” I asked. It was a valid question considering the insanity of the stories I was being told.
