The Lycan King's White Wolf
another said, and there was something in the way he said it, not quite fear, not quite fondness, some uneasy mixture of both, that made me actually listen.
I heard fragments after that, stitched together across the hours the way you stitch together a stranger's life from gossip you were never meant to overhear. King Lucian Varek. Sovereign of some northern dominion I'd never had reason to learn the name of, ruling from a palace called the Iron Crown. They called him the Blood King, and not, from the tone of it, as an exaggeration meant for children. He had crushed some noble uprising when he was barely more than a boy by their reckoning, and executed his own uncle for treason with, depending