Chapter 3
*Lies.* All of it, cowardly, self-soothing lies to keep the realm from clawing out its own eyes in terror.
The tremor died away, leaving the horses below shivering in the dark, their coats slick with cold sweat.
I leaned back on my heels, breathing hard, the mist from my lips clouding the silver face of the astrolabe. My hands were trembling, but not from the cold.
Galen was dying.
Not in the way old men die, in warm featherbeds with priests mumbling over their chests. The vitality being measured by the silver dial was draining out of him in great, catastrophic gouts, pulled down through the roots of Oakhallow, sucked dry by whatever unspeakable thing slept beneath the stone.
His mortal candle had three days left. Four, at the absolute most, before the ash consumed the wick entirely.
If he died now, with the realm cursing his name, with the songs in every tavern portraying him as a thieving usurper, the balance would shatter. The fury of the common folk, their poisoned prayers, their collective desire to see him fall—it was all weighing down on the fragile, brittle shell of his defense.
A king who dies hated cannot hold the earth. That was the core law of the sovereign lattice. The magic of this realm did not flow from bloodlines alone; it flowed from the belief of the millions who walked above its bones.
I closed my fists around the chalk until it snapped into powder inside my palms.
“You arrogant, stubborn bastard,” I whispered into the freezing dark of the loft, my throat tight with a pain that felt entirely like fire and nothing at all like tears. “Did you think you could take it all upon your shoulders and leave me to play the beggar girl on the road?”
He had wanted me safe. He had cast me out into the mud so I would live to grow old, so I would hate him enough to stay away, so his ghost would be the only thing condemned to the pit while I breathed the clean air of the provinces.
He had believed I would never understand. He had believed I was just a girl who loved her music and her gardens, too fragile to bear the monstrous truth of our inheritance.
He had forgotten who taught him to read the ancient runic script in the first place.
I scooped up the silver astrolabe and slipped it back into the pouch over my heart, the cold metal biting against my skin like a brand. I wiped the slate dust from my skirts, strapped my lute across my back in its oiled canvas sheath, and stood up straight beneath the low, sagging rafters.
The high winter coronation festival would begin in Oakhallow in three days. The heralds had already ridden through the lower towns, announcing that King Galen would grant an imperial audience to mark the completion of his third year. Minstrels, acrobats, and fools from every corner of the realm were traveling along the high road toward the capital, seeking royal coin.
They would have their minstrel.
I reached for the wooden ladder. My fingers didn't shake anymore. The soft, spoiled princess who had wept into the velvet cushions of an exile's carriage was dead, her bones buried beneath three years of gravel, stale beer, and bitter pride.
In her place stood the Queen of Wraithmark, armed with an army of three coppers at a time, carrying a debt that could only be paid in the high court of the dead.
I had given the commoners their song.
Now, I was going to give Galen his answer.
The North Road to Oakhallow did not welcome travelers; it endured them.
Ice clung to the ruts like jagged teeth, snapping wagon axles and laming mules. A low, slate-gray sky pressed against the spine of the Dragonmouth Mountains, spitting sleet that turned wool to sodden lead. I walked with my head down, my lute strapped tight beneath my oilcloth mantle, blending into a straggling caravan of jugglers, fire-eaters, and third-rate players.
They called themselves the Starlight Guild, though there was precious little light among them. Master Corvus, a fat puppeteer whose breath smelled perpetually of pickled onions, eyed my instrument case every three miles with the dull greed of a crow.
“You’ve got decent hands, lass,” he grunted on our second day out, as the mules struggled through the slush of Dead Man’s Pass. “Too clean for a wanderer. You run off from a weaver’s shop?”
“A scullery,” I lied easily, keeping my voice pitched to a gravelly, provincial drawl. “Burned the lard, broke the pots, took the lute before the cook could fetch the bailiff.”
Corvus laughed, a phlegmy rattle in his chest. “Good on you. A beating heals; three years scrubbing iron turns a girl’s soul into suet. But keep your tongue between your teeth when we hit the Great Gate. Galen’s guards aren’t like the old Queen’s boys. The old ones took a copper and looked the other way. Galen’s iron-cloaks will search your hair for sedition.”
“I have no songs that bite,” I said mildly.
“See that you don’t,” Corvus warned, spitting into the snow. “The lords in the capital want laughter, sweet wine, and dancing bears. They want to forget the ground’s shaking beneath their slippers.”
He didn't notice the tremor that rippled through the frozen mud at that very moment, but I did.
It surged up through the soles of my worn boots—a brief, sickening lurch, like a beast turning in a shallow grave. The lead mule brayed in terror, ears flattened, but the drivers lashed it forward with curses. To them, it was just the winter frost cracking the granite.
To me, it was the sound of a heartbeat faltering.
We crested the ridge at sundown, and there she sat: Oakhallow.
The capital rose from the river plain like a fist of blackened stone. Once, in the days of my father, the city had gleamed like polished pearl. The white marble of the Outer Ring used to catch the dawn, throwing light across thirty miles of orchard and vineyard. Now, the high walls were encrusted with rime and soot. Rising above the rooftops, piercing the belly of the low winter clouds, stood the Obsidian Spire.
My chest constricted, so sharp and tight I nearly lost my footing on the slush.
The Spire was where the kings of Wraithmark had slept, governed, and died for six centuries. But it was no longer crowned with the silver banner of the Swan Dynasty. A single, pennant-less spear of raw iron stood atop the highest battlement, silhouetted against the bleeding purple of the twilight.
*You stayed there,* I thought, staring at the darkened parapets. *Three years, Galen. You never left.*
The line at the Iron Gate stretched half a league. Merchants cursed over frozen kegs of ale; silk-sellers from the south huddled inside fur-lined carriages, shouting at guards who moved with mechanical, merciless precision.
Every wagon was probed with iron rods. Every sack of meal was slit and resealed.
When our turn came under the portcullis, the air smelled of wet horseflesh, burning pine pitch, and cold steel. A sergeant of the High Vanguard stepped forward, his blackened plate armor etched with the sharp geometric runes of Galen’s personal guard.
