Chapter 1

Lady Shiena of Jenni, head of the ruling Council of the nation of Tran Kor, was in pain. Body and soul. Lying back on her childbirth bed, she looked up in disgust at her husband. She flicked a hand at the handsome Ce'al sculptor with the hang dog look and then motioned for her two eldest daughters to approach her. Before they could, the healer brought the swaddled babe over to show the sleeping male child. Shiena's lip curled in disgust and waved the shocked healer away. Her daughters approached, their faces blank, looking down upon their disheveled matriarch. Her sweat-soaked hair was now so dark a green it was almost black and her yellow-green eyes were stricken with a pain deeper than child birth could account for. Her normally smoothly pine green skin was mottled with browns and yellows from her exertions and her eyes rimmed with black from crying.

Shiena took a deep breath and slowly released it, tucking a strand of soaked hair behind her elegantly pointed ear. "This will be my seventh son!" she rasped, her voice nearly gone with the difficult birth. "The Gods have cursed me! Ten children in fifteen years and only three daughters!"

"But mother, think of the alliances those males have garnered," Shayla, the younger of the two eldest daughters, ventured with strained hopefulness. "You sit where grandmother sat, at the head of the Council because of those alliances and despite your young age!"