CHAPTERFORTY-THREE
OLDEN SONGS
Idismissed the story as an old wife’s tale designed to keep scared children in line when I first heard it, but that name. Those eyes. That power. I’d know it anywhere.
My father lived six hundredyears, and in all his time, he fathered many children. The tale sang that before my elder brother Vyron, there was a boy called Givon who dared defy the king’s wishes, so the king, his own father, cursed him to age, cursed him to die, and never rule the land that belonged to him by right.
And here he is, my brother, a man older than I ever will be, forty seasons from the grave at most.
It is strange to see what I’d look like if I were to age. I’m glad such decay isn’t in the cards for me.
“Givon, this is madness,” the duke pleads. “The crown cannot go to you, even if you kill the king. Your father ensured that.”
The crown of Ravelyn is a sentient thing, enchanted by my ancestors to avoid situations like this: only the natural successor of the previous king can take it.
If my father truly had Givon struck from the line of succession, no amount of bloodshed can earn him the reins of the kingdom. At my death, the next in line would be the Rhodeses, the Adlers, and the Greystones, not him.
“I don’t care if I never rule,” my brother fumes. “So long as this boy doesn’t destroy our kingdom like his father attempted to. You saw what he did! He namedherhis concubine. He had proud, great lines, but insults it and gave her the secrets of our founder’s maze!”
These are excuses, and weak ones at that. I pay them little mind.
My eyes fall on Harl Greystone next. “And I suppose you wish to claim the crown after he kills me.”
My regent snarls. “You’re just like your father. You defiled my wife for your entertainment. After yesterday, no one knows where you are. They’ll think the rebels killed you.”
“A good plan,” I admit.
It only has one flaw. They’re relying on their hostages to stay my hand, believing I won’t strike and risk harming Helyn.
Before yesterday, they might have been right.
I have only one weakness in the room, and while her name is Stovrj, it isn’t Helyn.
I’ll kill her mother if I have to, though.
"You had my family killed.” It’s not a question. “Ourfamily, I suppose,” I amend. I look at Harl, and then Otto Nettlestein. “And you helped him.”
“The king was a beast,” Otto mutters, glancing at his feet. “We didn’t order the children or the ladies to suffer, Your Highness. We never would have.”
No, they wouldn’t.
My gaze returns to my elder brother. “That order came from you.”
He was banished as a boy, stripped of his birthright, and whatever trials he lived through turned him into this acrimonious beast.
“You shouldn’t have survived,” my brother repeats.
But once I did, Valina’s protection and the protests from his accomplices forced him to stay his hand. Until now. This rebellion was too good an opportunity to pass up. They can dispose of me and call it a common crime.
Almost perfect…
“But I did. While your men murdered your father, his wives, innocent women, and all of your siblings. When the pain got too much, I froze, in fear and torment. You know, I still heard all of it—our six-year-old younger sister’s screams as they raped her. The stench has never left me.” I let wrath surround me, infuse my spirit. “And when they burned our corpses and danced around the pyre, I lay still. I think it took me five days to emerge. A whole season passed before I could say a word. Do you know how I get to sleep at night, while the screams and the smells hunt my dreams?” I tilt my head. “I think of vengeance.”
I’m ready.
The only thing staying my hand is Helyn’s poor, trembling mother.
I glance at the redheaded beauty seated next to her treacherous friend, willing her to understand me.