BloodBound Crown
"Alone. This morning."
The word *alone* was doing particular work in that sentence.
"When?" Kael said.
"Now, Your Highness."
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The King's private library was a room Kael had been inside fewer than a dozen times in his life.
It was not the Royal Library, which was a public institution. This was different—smaller, personal, occupying a corner of the King's wing that most of the palace's residents didn't know existed. The books were old. Not decoratively old, the way the formal reception rooms used antique volumes as aesthetic objects, but *actually* old, the kind of old that meant they had been used and were still being used, their spines worn and their pages marked.