Page 1 of The Crown’s Temptation

Part One

CHAPTER 1

Six Thirty-Four

RATHMOR PALACE

The Great Hall

"Ihope you don't mind," Avaneer says, eyes drifting to the clock behind me. "Your husband won't be on time for dinner."

The words were spoken at six thirty-one. It is now six thirty-four and I have replayed this moment enough times in the seconds since he said it to know exactly where I am. The Great Hall. The candles I arranged myself, the kind that belong to an occasion rather than an obligation. The table laid out exactly as I asked. The harpist in the far corner who has not moved since I noticed the gray at his fingertips, the quiet of someone who stopped belonging to the living before he ever sat down in that chair.

Sevrin pinned through the chest across the table from me, his goblet rolling slowly toward the edge.

Avaneer, leaning against the table with my wine in his hand, looking at me the way someone looks at a problem they find mildly entertaining.

Six thirty-four.

I have been cataloguing this room the way Petunis taught me. A queen does not freeze. She lets her enemies decide she has.

The window explodes inward.

Glass and cold air hit the room at once and I throw my arm up against it, the force of it rolling through the hall in a single violent surge. Something enormous fills the frame, black wings beating hard enough to send the candles guttering in their holders, and then it has Sevrin, the blade still in his chest, and it is gone before I can fully track the movement, back through the broken frame and into the dark, the sound of its wings fading before the glass has finished settling across the floor.

I stand there.

Avaneer glances at the broken window with mild interest. He sets my wine down on the table and straightens his coat.

"Morraks," he says pleasantly. "Loyal creatures," he adds with a sigh. "Feeders themselves are rather like a plague. Remarkably hard to kill." He tilts his head, something almost apologetic moving through his expression. "Hopefully I was thorough. I did try very hard to aim for the heart."

He turns back to me with the ease of someone who has all the time in the world.

"The bond," he says, almost offhandedly. "Teorin lied about it. To almost everyone, in fact." A small smile. "Some of the people who knew the truth proved no more honest than he was." He shrugged. "I only found out the truth myself recently. I had no choice but to act, of course."

I look at the broken window frame. The night beyond it is empty. Whatever is out there, whatever is waiting in the dark with black wings and someone else's king in its arms, I cannot reach it from here.

Then Avaneer moves.

I throw out my hand.

Light bursts from my palm and catches him in the chest. He crashes backward into a table hard enough to splinter wood across the floor and goes still.

I wait.

He stays down.

I miss the harpist entirely. He drops the instrument and comes at me with a blade. I stare at him for half a second. Of all the ways I had imagined this evening ending, court musician had not made the list.

The blade reaches my throat. Light answers before I do. Gold fills the room. The harpist hits the wall and slides to the floor and the silence that follows is absolute.

I look at his hands. The gray at the fingertips. The stillness that does not belong to anything living. His face had been terrified in the way people look when failure means something worse than death.

Footsteps in the corridor. Fast. Light. Familiar.

The door opens.

Edrin.