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The Throne Room Dream
publish date:
2026-08-12 16:51:05The garden walk had cost her more than she had let anyone see.
Elowen had smiled in the colonnade. She had laughed — truly laughed, for the first time in years — at the story about the rude old gardener, and the laughing had lifted something in her chest that had not been lifted in a long time. She had taken the king's arm and walked beside him on the south walk and met Lord Eamon and a man called Marrec Thorne whose smile had been warm and whose bow had been courteous, and
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He looked at them for a long moment.The candlelight fell on the four cream-coloured envelopes and on Marrec Thorne's hands on the dark surface of the writing desk, and the small grey signet ring on his left hand gleamed, and the warm thoughtful face of the most trusted councillor in the kingdom of Velmoria was not a warm thoughtful face tonight. Tonight, in the locked study at the third hour after midnight, the face was the face it had been only once before — twenty years ago, in a different locked room, on the night Marrec Thorne had made the arrangements for a young Crown Prince to be killed on the western road.He had twenty years of practice in the art of murders that did not look like murders.The first one had been Castien.*Far to the west, at the same hour, Selene sat at her own writing desk in her own locked chamber at Ironbough and composed a message.&nb
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In the east wing of a fine stone townhouse at the upper edge of the capital, Lord Marrec Thorne sat down at his writing desk at the third hour after midnight.The house was quiet. The servants had been dismissed for the evening. The fire in the study had been built up and banked, and the room was warm, and the only light came from two tall beeswax candles on the desk and the low orange glow from the hearth. The heavy oak door of the study was locked. The key was in Marrec's pocket.He had locked the study door for the first time in fifteen years on the evening he had returned from the palace gardens, after two minutes of courteous conversation with a young woman on the king's arm whose grey-green eyes had looked at him and whose grey-green eyes had not been grey-green at all but pale grey — the pale grey of a dead prince who had been looking back at Marrec Thorne out of a stranger's face.That had been three days ago.In
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The man in the portrait was the man from her dream.The man in the portrait was the king on the grey stone throne in the great hall. The man in the portrait was the father on the stone terrace who had watched two boys playing in a sunlit courtyard. The man in the portrait was King Arden the Steady, ninth king of the line of Velmoria, who had died eighteen months after his eldest son Castien had been murdered on the western road, and whose kind tired face with the pale grey eyes had been the last face Elowen had seen in the throne room dream before she had woken up.She had never seen this portrait before today.She had never been in the old north wing before today. She had never walked the long gallery of the kings of the line before today. She had never stood in front of this heavy carved frame with its small brass plate and its careful artist's rendering of the ninth king's pale grey eyes and his kind tired face.
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"Walk me somewhere new today, Ysolde."It was the morning after the second dream and Elowen had slept badly and she did not want to walk the corridors of the king's wing again. She had walked the corridors of the king's wing every day for ten days now and she knew every stone of them — the small carved niche where a forgotten vase of dried flowers had been sitting since before she arrived, the tall window at the turn of the stair that gave a narrow view of the western mountains, the portrait of a former queen whose name Elowen had not yet been told. She wanted to see something she had not seen.Ysolde's face brightened."There is the long gallery in the old north wing, my lady. I have been meaning to take you there. It has the portraits of the kings of the line, ten generations on one wall. The household women call it the King's Walk. It is a fair distance but you are strong enough for it now if we go slowly.""Yes. The K
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