CHAPTER FIVE — THE QUEEN WHO WAS NEVER CROWNED

POV: SERAPHINE

I saw it.

I was standing in the shadow of the eastern pillar, where I always stood. Close enough to advise him. Far enough that no one noticed me watching. I had done it for eight years, and in eight years, no one ever had.

I watched him drag her chair across the stone, watched him catch her chin.

I watched him turn back to the council with his face set like a man who had not just done something he could not take back.

Then the meal ended, and he rose, and I saw his hand beneath the table.

Her fingers, his fingers curled together like they had been doing it for years.

I stayed where I was until the hall emptied. Then I walked back to my chambers and closed the door and stood with my back against it for a long time, listening to my own breathing.

Eight years.

I had come to this palace at twenty, a sorceress from a dying kingdom with nothing but my magic and my name. I had knelt in front of his throne and offered him both. He had taken the magic and had never asked for the name.

In eight years I had held the corruption in his beast at bay, bled for it and had gone three days without sleep for it, twice. I had stood in his chamber at four in the morning with blood running from my nose and my hands shaking so badly I could not hold the bowl, and he had thanked me the way a man thanked a soldier.

Once, four winters ago, when the corruption had nearly taken him, I had collapsed on the floor beside his bed. He had knelt down and taken my hand. He had held it for an hour while I shook and bled, and he had said nothing at all, and when it was over, he had stood up and walked away.

I had told myself that meant something.

I had told myself that a man who did not hold hands did not hold hands for nothing.

I sat down at my desk and lit a candle with a snap of my fingers, because I could not trust my hands to work a flint.

The truth was simple and I had known it for years, and I had spent eight years refusing to look at it directly.

He had never looked at me the way he looked at her.

Not once in eight years.

Not when I saved his life, not when I gave up my homeland's future to keep his beast stable. Not when I stood beside him in council and told him, quietly, in front of men who would have laughed at me if I had been wrong, that the eastern wards would fail within the year, and he had listened, and he had believed me, and he had still not looked at me like that.

And now a healer from a border settlement with mud on her boots and no title and no bloodline had walked into his palace three days ago and done it in an afternoon.

I sat there for a long moment with my hands flat on the desk then I reached for the oldest of my books.

The book was bound in black leather and had no title on the spine. It had belonged to my grandmother, and to her grandmother before her, and it had been carried out of my homeland in a chest that also held my mother's bones.

I turned to the page I had memorized years ago. The spell there was not dark magic, whatever the council would have said if they had ever found it. It was a reading spell. 

A spell for seeing what was hidden. It had been written for midwives, originally, to check whether a child in the womb carried the family gift. It had been used for centuries before the kingdoms had decided that certain bloodlines should not be allowed to know what they were.

It would not hurt her.

It would simply strip the concealment off whatever she was hiding and show it to anyone looking.

I read the page twice then I closed the book and carried it to the center of the room and cleared the rug aside.

I drew the circle in chalk. It took me the better part of an hour, and my knees ached when I finished, and I did not care. I set thirteen candles around the edge, one for each kingdom, and lit them with a word.

Then I knelt inside the circle, pressed both palms flat to the floor, and closed my eyes.

I needed a thread. Something that connected me to her. Something she had touched, or worn, or breathed on.

The dress, I thought.

I had handled the measurements myself. I had told the seamstress I wanted to be certain of the fit, and the seamstress had not questioned me, because no one ever questioned the king's sorceress.

I had touched the fabric of that dress before it ever reached her hands.

I reached for that thread now. The memory of it, the feel of it against my fingers, the trace of everything it had touched since.

The circle warmed.

I began to speak.

The words were old. Older than the kingdom I was born in. Older than the covenant that held the thirteen kingdoms together, if the histories were true. They tasted like iron in my mouth, and the candles around me burned straight and still, and the chalk lines glowed faintly gold.

I felt her.

Not her body, not her mind, just her. A presence at the other end of the thread, warm and alive and closer than I had expected.

And beneath that presence, something enormous.

I stopped breathing.

There was a weight inside her that was the only way I could describe it. A weight like a door, and behind the door, something that had been sleeping for a very long time.

I pressed harder, spoke the second half of the words, the candles flared and then it opened.

Not all the way, just enough. Just the narrowest crack of light, white and old and nothing like any magic I had ever touched in eight years of holding a beast's corruption in my hands.

I knew it instantly.

The Thirteenth Ember.

It was real, was inside her and it was not dormant, not the way the histories claimed. It was waking up.

Somewhere across the palace, I heard her scream.

I broke the circle with both hands, and the light died, and the candles went out all at once.

I sat on the floor in the dark for a long time, breathing hard, my palms stinging.

She was the heir, was the last one and every kingdom in the world was going to come for her the moment they learned it.

Rhazek would never let them have her.

Rhazek would burn his own throne to keep her.

I stood up slowly and looked down at the ruined circle at my feet.

Then I went to the window and looked out across the courtyard, where the east wing was, where she was, and I watched the light in her window and I made a decision.

If she was going to take everything I had spent eight years building, then I was going to find out exactly what she was worth.

And then I was going to use it.