PROLOGUE
KONSTANTIN
Iblow the doors to my quarters wide with a draft conjured from my palms, then wrench the Glacin crown off my bound locks and lob it at the desk in my study, almost clocking my youngest sibling in his pretty blond head.
The ice-blue diamonds, set into the platinum monstrosity I seldom wear, glint in the shards of sunlight pouring from the domed skylight.
Ilya leans over and sticks his finger on my crown to stop it from rolling off. “Just say the words, and I’ll take it off your hands, brother.”
I don’t react, my mind still stuck on the news of the derailed train wagon and the human lives it snuffed out. Despite my advisors’ reassurances that it could’ve been worse, sixteen humans had still perished.
Sixteen innocent humans.
Sixteen lost souls.
Sixteen bereft families.
I dispatched coin and handwritten apologies to their homes, but no amount of gold and words would bring back the lost.
Ilya cants his head, his waist-long locks springing out from behind his peaked ear. “The words are:I abdicate.”
My general, Salom, snorts as he enters my quarters and closes the doors behind him.
“If I cared not for you, Ilyusha”—I sink into my desk chair, my fine wool suit feeling more like body armor than the most luxurious fabric spun in Glace—“I’d take you up on your offer in a heartbeat.”
My half-brother glances between Salom and me twice before asking, “What’s happened now?”
“Another derailment,” Salom informs him, sparing me from having to utter the words.
Ilya’s easy smile slips. “How many dead this time?”
“Sixteen.” I unbutton my jacket, hoping it might alleviate the pressure on my lungs. It doesn’t.
Unlike my governors, Ilya doesn’t utter a feckless reassurance of how much worse it could’ve been. How much worse it used to be under our father’s rule. After all, the Great Dig had a recorded death toll in the thousands.
Where most deaths occurred during our railway’s construction, over a hundred people have perished in the last months, regardless of how much gold I pour into finding solutions to developing sturdier tracks and revised wheel flanges.
“Volkov had a wagon design,” I remind Salom.
The sleigh maker had traveled across the kingdom to present his candidature to my father. Atsa had barely glanced at it, awarding the contract to his father-in-law, Governor Dimitri Patchenkov.
A grimace deepens the bend in Salom’s crooked nose. “The Volkovs are felons and thugs.”
“Perhaps, but their sleighs are the finest in the kingdom, aren’t they? Let’s commissiononetrain. Keep it off thebooks, though. I’d prefer Dimitri not hearing about it.” I give my brother a pointed look, since he admires his maternal grandfather and spends much time with him.
Ilya mimics zipping up his lips.
“Would you mind if I commission a Nebban engineer before we speak to the Volkovs?” Salom asks. “I’d truly prefer not getting into bed with that family.”
Ilya waggles his brows. “I hear his oldest son is quite the looker.”
There’s little Ilya enjoys more than sexual innuendos, especially at Salom’s expense.
My general shoots him a withering stare that merely makes Ilya cackle. “Do you need anything else before I take my leave, Kostya?”
“The royal trolley readied to travel north. I want to visit the victims’ families.”
“I’ll advise the guards to be on standby.”
