All Chapters of CROWN OF GLASS AND ASH : Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

Chapter 11: The Long Fever LyraThe heat did not come all at once.It crept in during the early hours, a slow, vicious tide that started behind my sternum and spread outward until every inch of skin felt too tight and too sensitive. By the time the first light touched the high windows of my chambers, I was already soaked in sweat, bindings damp, breath coming short. The stronger dose the physician had given me after the spar was failing faster than anything that had come before. I crawled to the small cabinet, hands shaking, and forced two emergency pills down with tepid water. They barely touched it.I locked the door myself.Ice packs. That was all I had left that felt like control. I wrapped them in thin cloth and pressed them against the back of my neck, under my arms, across my lower stomach where the worst of the restless ache lived. The cold bit hard and still was not enough. My body wanted something it could not have. Something the suppressants had stolen for years and we

Chapter 11: The Long Fever LyraThe heat did not come all at once.It crept in during the early hours, a slow, vicious tide that started behind my sternum and spread outward until every inch of skin felt too tight and too sensitive. By the time the first light touched the high windows of my chambers, I was already soaked in sweat, bindings damp, breath coming short. The stronger dose the physician had given me after the spar was failing faster than anything that had come before. I crawled to the small cabinet, hands shaking, and forced two emergency pills down with tepid water. They barely touched it.I locked the door myself.Ice packs. That was all I had left that felt like control. I wrapped them in thin cloth and pressed them against the back of my neck, under my arms, across my lower stomach where the worst of the restless ache lived. The cold bit hard and still was not enough. My body wanted something it could not have. Something the suppressants had stolen for years and we

Chapter 13 Eyes Like Ice LYRAKaelan's study always smells like cold wax and older paper, and he keeps it too warm for the season, which I've decided is deliberate. Heat makes people careless, makes them shift in their chairs, makes their collars stick to their necks. He makes me uncomfortable before he's said a single word.I sit very straight. I let my hands tremble, just slightly, resting them in my lap where he can see them do it."There was a tip," he says, not looking up from the ledger he's pretending to read. "Anonymous. Someone accessed the succession archive registry three weeks ago without logging their name.""That's terrible," I say. "Is anything missing?""That's what I'm determining."He finally looks at me, and it's like being pinned under ice , not cold exactly, colder than cold, an ice that has already decided what it thinks of you and is only waiting for you to confirm it. Kaelan has never once looked at me with any warmth, not even at his actual allies, but

Chapter 15 :A Promise from the Outback LYRAThe message comes wrapped in a bolt of undyed wool, delivered by a merchant who has no idea what he's carrying, a cipher I built from a children's counting rhyme, because the best hiding places are the ones no one thinks to search.I read it three times before I let myself believe it.The syndicate is prepared to move against the throne, should protection be guaranteed. Terms to follow. Awaiting your word.I sit with it for a long while before I do anything else. Outside my window, the palace goes on the way it always does, a bell somewhere marking an hour I've stopped keeping track of, laughter from a courtyard two floors down, the ordinary machinery of people who have no idea how close the ground under their feet has come to shifting.A mining syndicate out in the outback territories, sitting on ore deposits that fund half the crown's war chest without the crown ever having to dirty its own hands digging for them, and they're telling me

Chapter 17:The Seam That Slipped LYRAThe seamstress is kind, which makes it worse.Her name is Old Meret, and she's fitted half the court for the better part of thirty years, and her hands move over the heavy military uniform with the brisk, impersonal efficiency of someone who has pinned a thousand garments to a thousand bodies and stopped noticing any of them individually a long time ago.Until she notices mine.It happens fast, the kind of fast that only exists in memory afterwards, stretched out and slowed down by dread, though in the moment it's over almost before I register it's begun. She's adjusting the heavy ceremonial jacket, pulling it tight across my shoulders to mark the seams, and the motion tugs the fabric beneath, and my binding wraps, worn snug every hour of every day for so long I've stopped feeling the ache of them, shift half an inch. Just half an inch. Just long enough.I see it happen in her face before I fully understand what's happened in mine.Her hand