All Chapters of The King's Second Heart : Chapter 61

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