Chapter 1

The bells of the High Keep had not stopped tolling since dawn, and by the time the sun leaned toward afternoon they had become not a sound but a condition of the air, a low bronze pressure behind the eyes of everyone in the castle. They rang for a king who would never hear them again, and they rang for a girl who had no idea what to do now that she was the only one left to listen. The sound worked its way into the stone, into the timber, into the bone, so that even in the quietest corner of the keep a person could feel the dead monarch being announced to a world that had already stopped caring.

Princess Aurelia stood at the foot of the great catafalque and felt the weight of her own silk gown like a sentence handed down by a judge who would not be appealed. She was three-and-twenty years old, and the candlelight found her plainly: a tall slim woman with the soft narrow waist of a court-bred girl and a fuller, womanly bust that the grey silk could not quite hide, her brown hair fallen from its pins in a loose corona around a face that was more honest than a queen’s ought to be. Her eyes were blue — a clear northern blue, the color of the river before the thaw — and they widened now with a grief she did not know how to wear. The silver stag of her house was embroidered at her breast, and below it the body that would, within a month, belong to half the realm.

The cloth of her gown was the color of mourning — ash grey, stitched at the hem with the silver stag of her house, each tiny beast worked in thread that caught what little light fell from the high windows — but it did nothing to hide what everyone in the hall already knew. She had spent her life learning embroidery, the court dances of three neighboring realms, and the proper tilt of her chin when addressed by a man of rank. She had spent not one single hour learning how to rule, not one, and the absence of that learning sat on her now like the gown, heavy and cold.

The king — her father, though in the last years he had behaved more like a sleeping animal than a father, a great furred thing that ate and grunted and occasionally remembered she existed — lay waxen and still beneath the embroidered cloth. Candles wept around him in tall glass cones, and the wax pooled on the stone like the realm’s own melted fortunes. The courtiers gathered in the nave around her wept with the polished, economical grief of people who had already begun counting what they stood to lose. A few of them, she noted with a detachment that surprised her, were weeping into handkerchiefs embroidered with their own sigils, as if even grief were a matter of branding.

At her right shoulder, Uncle Cedric cleared his throat. He was the late king’s brother, a man built like a shut door, broad and unyielding, with a beard gone mostly silver and eyes that had never once looked at her with anything softer than assessment. Where her father had been a wall that leaned, Cedric was a wall that stood. The council had named him Regent until such time as the new monarch “found her footing.” Aurelia suspected her footing would be found for her, and not gently, and the suspicion sat in her stomach like a stone dropped into a well.

“Come,” Cedric said, and his voice was the kind of quiet that fills a room, the quiet of a man who expects to be obeyed and has never in his life been disappointed. “The lords are assembled. They will want to see you swear.”

She followed him up the long aisle between the ranked banners, her slippers whispering on the cold stone. The lords of the realm were gathered in a half-circle before the throne dais — the same throne her father had occupied, and his father before him, and a hundred ancestors whose portraits watched from the high wall with expressions of permanent disapproval, as if painted specifically to witness this moment and find it wanting. Aurelia kept her chin up. It was the only lesson that had ever stuck, the only armor she owned.

“My lords,” Cedric boomed, and the weeping trailed off into attentive silence, the way a rising tide of authority can flatten a shoreline of noise. “The king is dead. Long may his daughter reign. Princess Aurelia, step forward and swear the oaths of succession.”

She stepped forward. The oath was long and old, full of words like fealty and realm and sacred trust, words that had meant something to the men who wrote them and meant almost nothing to the girl who now spoke them. She had read it once, years ago, and remembered almost none of it. A scroll was placed in her hands by the seneschal, a thin old man with eyes like a haddock, and she read the words as best she could, her voice small in the vast hall, the stag embroidery at her breast rising and falling with each uncertain breath, the silver thread catching the candlelight in a way that seemed almost to mock her with its brightness.

When she finished, there was a moment — a breath held by every person present, a held note in the music of the room — and then old Lord Harrowbent nodded, and the others followed, and it was done. She was queen. The bells kept tolling. Somewhere a dog barked, a small profane interruption in the solemnity. The world had ended and begun again, and the only thing that had changed was that Aurelia now had a heavier crown to lose.

Cedric dismissed the lords with a gesture, a flick of the hand that spoke of long habit in command, and they flowed out in a rustle of robes, leaving only a skeleton staff to guard the corpse and the two of them standing beneath the stag banner, the great embroidered beast looming over them like a parent who had opinions.

“Well,” Cedric said. He looked at her the way a mason looks at a wall that needs straightening, measuring the lean, calculating the cost. “That was the easy part, girl.”

“I am queen,” Aurelia said, and tried to put some iron in it. It came out thin, a girl’s voice pretending at a woman’s authority, the way a child puts on a helm too large for the head.

“You are a child wearing your father’s jewelry,” he said, not unkindly, which was somehow worse than cruelty would have been. “And this realm is a pot ready to boil over. The northern thanes are massing at the river passes. The treasury is empty — emptier than empty, there is a hole in the bottom of it you could drive a wagon through. The commons in three cities are muttering about whether a woman has any right to the throne at all. And the lords who just swore to you would sell you for a fief and a warm bed.”

“I know,” she said, which was a lie. She had not known the thanes were massing. She had not known about the hole in the treasury. She had not known the cities doubted her. She had known only that her father was dead and the bells would not stop, and that, it turned out, was the smallest part of what she did not know.