جميع فصول : الفصل -الفصل 90

Timothee's POV"I spent my whole life training for this moment," I said, "and I didn't find out until two days ago that the training was built on a lie. My father erased my brother to make sure I never had to share this role with anyone. I don't know how to make peace with that, and I don't think I'm supposed to pretend I have."My voice shook slightly on the word brother, the first time I'd said it out loud in front of a room this large, and I let it shake rather than trying to smooth it into something more composed. There wasn't a version of composed that would have been honest.I looked at the council, at faces I'd known my whole life, people who'd watched me grow up in rooms just like this one, expecting me to inherit a throne without ever once mentioning there might have been someone else with a better claim."I believe I could rule well," I continued. "I've studied this kingdom's laws, its history, its people, for as long as I can remember. But I don't think that's the same ques

Mercy's POVThe council deliberated for the rest of the morning, sequestered in a side chamber while the rest of us waited in a silence that stretched long enough to feel like its own kind of verdict.Kaelen paced. Azrael sat perfectly still near the window, watching the courtyard below with an expression I still couldn't fully read, even after everything we'd survived together. Timothee and Corin sat a careful distance apart, not quite talking, not quite avoiding each other either, both of them clearly aware that whatever came out of that side chamber would define the rest of both their lives.I found myself watching the door to that side chamber the way you watch a pot you're certain is about to boil over, unable to look away even though staring wasn't going to make the water move any faster. Somewhere around the second hour, a servant brought in food none of us really wanted, and we picked at it mechanically, more out of needing something to do with our hands than any real appetite

Timothee's POVThe first sign of trouble came three days later, in the form of a rider who'd pushed his horse hard enough that the animal was visibly trembling by the time it reached the palace gates.I'd started to let myself believe, in those three quiet days, that the worst of it was actually behind us. The coronation planning had settled into something almost mundane, endless discussions about ceremony and protocol that felt like the first genuinely boring problems either of us had faced in weeks. I should have known better than to trust the quiet.Corin and I were reviewing drafts of the succession framework with two of the council's senior scholars when a guard interrupted, apologetic but insistent, saying the message couldn't wait for a more convenient hour."There's unrest along the western border," the rider reported, still catching his breath. "Villages near the old wolf territories, close to where you found your brother. Word of the succession crisis reached them before any

Mercy's POVWe stayed three days while the elders deliberated, camped near the settlement in tents Rosalind's people had insisted on providing, an act of hospitality that felt significant given how little reason they had to extend it.The nights out there were colder than I remembered from our first visit, or maybe I just noticed it more now that we weren't running from anything, nothing left to distract from the simple discomfort of sleeping on hard ground under a sky that felt enormous this far from the capital's lights. I found myself grateful for it anyway, the quiet of it, the chance to just exist for a few days without the next crisis breathing down our necks.Kaelen spent most of that time talking with the settlement's record keeper, an intense young man who'd apparently been documenting every broken promise the crown had made to the western territories for the better part of a decade, hoping someone in power would eventually care enough to listen. I watched Kaelen fill an enti

Timothee's POVThey kept my father in a cell beneath the east wing, the same wing that had housed the vault, the same wing whose records he'd tried to burn rather than let anyone read them. I hadn't visited him there. I wasn't sure I was ready to, and nobody had pushed me to be.I'd thought about it more than once in the weeks since his capture, standing outside my own chamber door at odd hours, half convinced I should go down and demand answers face to face instead of waiting for a trial to extract them formally. I never made it past the thinking. Some part of me was afraid of what I'd feel standing in front of him again, whether it would be rage or grief or some tangled combination of both that I wasn't ready to sort through in front of an audience of guards.The trial chamber was smaller than the council room, more intimate in a way that felt deliberate, like whoever designed this part of the palace centuries ago had understood that justice needed a different kind of space than pol