In the Wake of the Ruined

Book 0: The Siren Mage

by Kalie Cassidy

Genres: Dark Fantasy; Fairy Tales, Folk Tales, Legends & Mythology

Synopsis

A powerful Siren must face the monster threatening her home, even if it means risking everything—including the king she’s grown to love—in this dark and romantic follow-up to In the Veins of the Drowning.

The realm has a new queen… and a new monster.

Imogen can no longer hide. She has claimed her ancestral crown, and now the corrupted bond she shares with the ancient deity Eusia is stronger than ever. Though she is determined to sever it, doing so is no easy feat. The threat of war looms. Shifting alliances, a hunger for magic, and her feelings for Theodore, King of Varya, attempt to thwart her at every turn. 

Meanwhile, Theodore is battling the strain of his own crown and commitments. When Imogen suddenly appears on his ship, every dutiful resolution he’s ever made threatens to snap. As they draw nearer to ending Eusia, lurking dangers and their perilous desire for one another prove more insurmountable than they could have imagined. Will the chaos, ruin, and death that Imogen was prophesied to usher into the realm be the end of all things, or the beginning? 

Release date: July 7, 2026

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 320

Sample

I crawled out of the sea like some graceless water creature, unused to the air and hard sand.

In one fist I gripped Nemea’s sword. On the opposite arm, looped around it like an overlarge shackle, was his crown. I’d been delirious with pain and exhaustion, floating over the sea’s surface and through the remnants of the battle, slipping in and out of consciousness for the whole of the night. There had been no distinguishing between dream and reality, as bits of soldiers’ bodies bobbed on the water beside me. Ship flotsam mingled with the blood-laced foam.

It had been a strain to keep my power focused, as the spell I’d performed had reduced me to almost nothing. The taste of it still sat on my tongue, and an incessant hunger for more pulsed through me with each thump of my sore heart. My senses had been swallowed by the fierce pain in my middle, and yet I’d managed to force the sea to ferry me across its surface.

All the while, I’d clung to the sword and crown like the dented pieces of metal were what kept me afloat. They were imbued now, anointed with Nemea’s blood. When I touched them, I remembered that I had slain a monster.

I remembered that I could do it again.

My body scraped against the shore. Shaking, and on all fours, I paused at the edge of the waves and looked up at the dune.

The white sand rolled gently, creased by the wind, and I realized the sea had spat me out onto the very beach where Halla had performed her offering to Eusia. Where I had choked on the draught that had severed my bond from Theodore. I could make out the stairs that led to the flower garden, where the pain had brought me to my knees and blotted out my vision. The pale walls and turrets of Genevreer Palace loomed beyond in an endless, mocking sprawl.

I lay slowly onto my side and let out a sob at the flare of pain in my stomach. I could hardly stand, let alone reach the palace, traverse its halls.

“Your house is too big, Theo,” I mumbled to myself, sounding half dead.

Perhaps I was.

The moldering, sea-filled hole in my middle throbbed like a heartbeat, carrying pain from my tender scalp to my wet toes. It pounded in my lips, in my fingers, and all I wanted was to sleep on the warm sand. I closed my heavy eyes, only to have my thoughts flicker and distort like images from a violent fever-dream. I saw the empress on her swaying ship, and Eusia in her little pool of dark water, and Halla, warm and safe with Theodore in the palace above me. I imagined Agatha’s halo of dark curls, her wide, shining brown eyes, and there was fear in them.

A thin whimper filled my throat. Agatha, who never seemed to fear or fumble. Who was made of steely resolve. Agatha, who had given me years and years of stalwart care and friendship. Who’d done so much to ensure I would never be alone or afraid.

“Get up.” The words were sharp air through my teeth. “Get up, get up, get up.”

Pain licked at my nerves like wildfire, but I pushed myself back up onto all fours. I knew, even as I dragged myself, and my damn sword and crown, over the sand, that I wouldn’t be welcomed back on palace grounds. I’d threatened the safety of the Varian kingdom in more ways than one. I’d gleefully choked Chancellor Eftan in farewell. But I was too weak to enact my plan alone, and there was only one person in the realm who cared for Agatha the way that I did, and he was in that palace.

The sun beat hot against my back, yet my skin stippled with a deep penetrating cold, regardless. I reached the base of the garden stairs. Though my arms shook, I lifted Nemea’s sword and brought it down against the weathered treads with a loud clang. I did it again. And again. Tears slid down my cheeks, over my pinched lips, but finally a gold-armored soldier appeared at the top landing.

He squinted down at me. “Oi! You all right?”

In answer, the sword clattered from my hold. I collapsed fully against the wood. “I need Commander Mela.” The words were hardly loud enough to reach him.

His boots thudded his descent. Once on the tread that my head rested upon, he squatted to inspect me, then reared back with recognition—with fear. “Ahh, shit.”

“I won’t hurt you.” My voice rasped, ugly and thin.

The soldier reached out and plucked Nemea’s sword from where it had fallen. Then he slipped the crown from its place around my limp arm. My resistance was delayed—a weak jerk, a curl of my lip.

A grave note colored his voice. “Right, but I won’t be takin’ you at your word.” He coughed in discomfort. “Sorry, Your Majesty.”

There came the rattling of a chain. Rough fingers gripped my forearm. The biting cold of metal enveloped my wrist and squeezed and squeezed.

The sun shone behind him, and I squinted, trying to see him better. I’d not expected to be welcomed, but a nick of surprise cut through me anyway. There was no ignoring its sting, nor the question that accompanied it: Had Theodore ordered this?

I opened my mouth to ask, but the guard rose and started back up the stairs with my sword and crown in his fist. An incoherent protest shook up my throat. My arms wobbled as I tried to push myself up, to crawl to the next stair, but pain filled my stomach in a shocking burst. My limbs gave out. I laid my cheek once more on the warm, smooth tread, and slowly, the afternoon light dimmed to black.

I woke to the sound of footsteps. Boots, and clanging armor, and murmuring voices. My senses rushed with the cutting sunrays, with the warm air perfumed with the scent of Theodore’s flowering vines. My body ached against the stairs I lay upon, and my wrists were heavy with the manacles that the guard had locked around them.

“Lachlan,” I said on a jagged, searching sob. My head sat in a fog. My vision was bleary. “I need to see Commander Mela. Please. Not the king. I need Lach—”

Something bit into my shoulder. I squinted up at a handful of armored soldiers, swords drawn and poised on me. One of them spoke, though I was too beset to decipher which. “We’re ordered to run you through without trial if you use your power.”

My heart struck my ribs. “Who ordered tha—”

“She’s supposed to go straight to the prison tower, isn’t she?” asked another soldier, cutting me off.

“No. Please. I need… I need to tell Lachlan about his wife.”

“Commander Mela doesn’t have a wife.”

My mind, my tongue, could not find and form words quickly enough. Chain rattling, I tried to twist, to sit myself up straighter, but a guard pinned me still with a boot to my hip bone.

A piercing screech tore up my throat. Some of them jolted and swore at the sound. I couldn’t comprehend how that pressure alone was enough to ignite a blaze of agony through the whole of my body. Panic carved through me. I was weaker, tremulous, when all I’d previously known was a body that had felt sturdy and capable.

You will only find relief in your king. The words Eusia had spoken to me scraped through my head, a provocation and a warning made one. Only the king will do.

The guard yanked his boot from me, more from fear, I guessed, than remorse or pity. Perhaps he thought whatever vile thing coursed through me might seep from my skin and crawl into him. Then the group of soldiers was straightening, clearing their throats, making themselves look well disciplined and alert, as descending footsteps sounded above me.

“Found her at the base of the stairs,” one of the guards said. “Do we carry ahead as usual? Not sure if royalty is treated differently from commoners in something like this, Commander.”

I lifted my head just as Lachlan lowered himself to a knee beside me. Our gazes locked.

His mossy eyes were cold, his mouth sitting at an unfriendly slant. He looked empty, worn. “In Varya, queen, commoner, and Goddess alike,” he said, voice bereft of its usual mischief, “are all equal when it comes to the law.”

Fucking bastard. I let out an angry breath and fought to raise my manacled wrists. “Unchain me.”

Lachlan ignored my plea completely. “You look like a living corpse, Imogen.”

“Lach.” His name came out as a squeak. “What are you doing?”

“My job.” He stood and loomed. “You’ve been proscribed.”

I didn’t know that word or its implication. I shook my head, frantically scanning the half-dozen swords that were still trained on me.

Lachlan spoke to me, slow and clear. “You’ve been condemned and banned from Varya for your crimes of entrapment, treason, endangerment, and murder…”

“Who did I entrap—”

“The king.”

“That’s not—Lachlan, you were there. You know the truth.”

His lips twitched. “Help her stand,” he said to the two guards nearest me.

As they hauled me up, another cry shredded my throat. Lachlan scowled, and I searched for any sign of concern in his flattened gaze. My chest hollowed out when I didn’t find it.

“We have testimony that you ordered the murder of the captain of the Hercule, that you stowed away and endangered a Varian warship in the midst of battle.”

A plummeting sensation took me as I remembered that captain’s death. The deep gurgling wound in his gut, the putrid lures that I’d cast into his killers. Lures I hadn’t been able to control.

I leaned into the soldiers to keep myself upright. “I didn’t. I sank Serafi ships—I helped you win that battle.” I groaned through my clamped teeth. “I killed Nemea. His crown is mine.”

Lachlan’s eyes rounded at my confession, but he said not a word.

“Who proscribed me?” I finally whispered, unable to keep the tremor of hurt from my voice. “Was it Theo? Or did you and Eftan force his hand?”

His throat moved as he swallowed. The moment stretched, thin and taut as a lute string. When he finally answered me, it was with an empty voice. “The king and his council are one and the same.”

Something cracked in my chest and all I could do was hold his unfeeling gaze, hoping to dredge up some shame or remorse in him. Quickly, he flicked his eyes toward the top of the stairs, and the guards turned me roughly. I spun like a cloth doll, loose and lolling, as they hauled me up to the flower garden. Each jostle drew a whimper until finally they released me at the top of the stairs, where I fell to the soft grass in a tremoring heap.

Slowly, as the guards all filed in and Lachlan came to stand before me, I sat myself back on my haunches. I went still, quiet. For a desperate moment, I thought to search for my power beneath my heavy shroud of pain. To send out a slew of lures at once and see myself unchained.

The tinny scrape of a dagger torn from its sheath stopped me.

Lachlan shook his head. “I see your wheels turning.” He stooped to pick up the chain that hung between my cuffs. “Use your power”—he pointed the dagger directly at me—“and I’ll have no choice but to use this.”

I locked my gaze onto its silver point. “You wouldn’t have the chance.” Then I studied the resolute look in his dark-rimmed eyes. There was no scheming in that look, no covert meaning in his threat. It set me off-balance, how we had gone from a warm, if awkward, farewell just yesterday to this.

“Two of my guards are Siren-bound, Imogen,” Lachlan said. “They’ll kill you before you can beg. And I’ve told you before, I have no desire to see you dead.”

I’d known Lachlan’s fears over how I might set Varya toward ruin from the first. He’d threatened and scolded me and made his dislike clear. Our discord had sat between us like a reared-back weapon, but I’d never once thought he would bring it crashing down so violently.

He lifted his brows in unhappy irony and gave my chain a tug. “Rise, Your Majesty.”

Not long ago, the Mage Seer had given my guidance: Take what you want. I wanted to curse and gnash. I wanted to scream and be heeded and see all these guards on their knees. But I also wished, more than all else, to live.

I stood with my clamped teeth bared.

The garden around us swayed in a soft breeze as Lachlan led me by the chain—my crown and sword in his other fist—with two of his guards trailing. Slowly, painfully, we wove through riotous beds of orange and yellow and pink blooms. We passed the glittering fountain that cradled three proud Siren statues in its center. With each step my throat grew thicker.

I’d returned to this place with the purpose of ending a threat, but as I moved closer to the palace, glowing pure white in the afternoon sun, I remembered that I was the danger cutting through the grounds. I was the terror encroaching.

When we crossed under a sun-dappled tunnel of vines, its blooms yawning and plentiful, I stumbled over my own leaden feet. My pain thrummed. Sparks flew through my vision. I closed my eyes, trying to focus on the warm rays of light and how they kissed my cheekbones, but it made me think of Theodore.

As intemperate and corrupted as I was, I could never risk his safety, even for Agatha. A dark and terrifying desire began to flood me at the very thought of him. It came on like a fever, heat storming through my veins. My mouth watered with a hunger that needed sating. I yearned for his blood, for his flesh between my teeth. For his soft lips against mine.

I stopped hard in my tracks. Terror clogged my throat. I could hardly delineate between my own care and desire and the way Eusia wanted to consume him.

Lachlan turned, brow knitted as he glared at me over his pauldron.

“Don’t…” I whispered, struggling to keep my eyes from welling. “Don’t let me near him.”

Unlike Theodore, Lachlan’s face was readily sculpted by his emotions. Sympathy softened his stern brow, but on its heels came a flash of suspicion. There was a question he wanted answered, a wariness he needed soothed. I held his glare and tried to will his trust, ignoring entirely whether I deserved it.

He gave a brisk nod, and then his gaze cut to the soldiers behind me. “You’re dismissed. I have her from here.”

“Sir, we’ll take her,” one of them objected. “You’re not safe with her alone.”

Not safe. How strange to have lived so long ruled by my own fears, only to become the source of it for others.

“You’ve been given your orders,” he said, and started back down the path, toward the palace. A high whimper split my lips at the sudden movement.

Good. Now we would be free to speak. I could try to pull him to my side.

The guards lingered behind us for a moment, and I studied the rigid line of Lachlan’s shoulders, the determined yet vacant way he moved now, as if a vital piece of him had been carved away and it was only sheer force of will that animated him. It was so unlike him. Even in his anger he’d been effusive, glinting with mischief.

“Lach, wait,” I said, as we reached the empty palace terrace. I tried to slow my steps, but he kept our pace, pressing onward toward the glass door. “Gods damn it, you asshole. It’s about Agatha.”

His strides hitched. I’d found the crack in his armor, and I knew how tender the flesh was beneath. My words were a well-honed blade. “I know where she is.”

But they didn’t pierce. Lachlan carried on, doggedly as before, and led me through the door.

“Did you hear me?” We were in the Garden Room, crossing over its gleaming floor, past its bloom-painted walls. “Lachlan, are you actually going—”

“Quiet.” He dragged me toward the entry hall, but I thought I’d heard worry in his command.

“We’re running out of time.” My voice was loud and shaking. “The empress might have—”

Lachlan stopped and whirled, eyes horrifically wide. “The empress—”

I nodded, taking in his stricken face. His neck strained, eyes widening even further as he fought to compose himself. With a warning glance, he tucked us into the shadows of the eastern stairs before we could be noticed. A few soldiers milled about the entry hall, minding their posts. Some servants cleared away decorations.

Awareness prickled over my skin, and I finally studied the details of the space. When I’d left—just yesterday—the hall was being set for a wedding. Flowering vines had been woven through the black marble banisters, where they’d looped around the statues of the Great Gods. Obelian sigils had hung beside Varian ones, a mingling of deep blues and greens.

Now all of it was half undone. Before the statue of Ligea, who stood beneath the western stairs, two maids worked together to fold a deep-green-and-gold banner, making crisp creases. They tucked it neatly into a basket at their feet.

“What happened?” I asked in a wobbling hush. “Did he call it off?”

Lachlan’s look hardened with confusion, a wariness filling his gaze before he eyed the paneled wall at the base of the western stairs. “Let’s keep moving.”

I dug in my heels. “Did he call it off?”

“Please, be quiet, Imogen.” He scanned the room once more and whispered, “No.”

“Then what…”

“Not here.” He started us toward the far wall and the narrow door hidden there. Each step had me feeling like I might drop, but he took my arm when my knees started to give. Hinges squealed, and I hobbled into a small, dark room. An armory. There was a small hearth, a handful of lit lamps in their holders. Maces, and flails, and battle-axes hung on the pitted stone walls. An old table and chairs took up the center of the space.

Lachlan bolted the door. His even mask fell away, replaced by dire intensity. “Where did the empress take her?”

“To Anthemoessa.” An awful cold crackled through me. “Where Eusia is.”

He leaned against the wall as the color drained from his cheeks. His skin looked suddenly waxen as he sorted through battering thoughts.

“Tell me what’s happened with the wedding.” I spoke too strongly, making pain flare deep in my middle. “Yesterday, when I left—”

Lachlan gave his head a sharp shake. “Yesterday?” The word broke in his throat. He shook his head again. “It’s been two days, Imogen. Two fucking days since you left.”

I sucked in a breath. Held it. I couldn’t wrap my mind around it—that I’d spent two whole days on the water, fighting toward land in a spell-sick stupor, clinging to a meager, inactionable plan, while Agatha sailed nearer and nearer to danger. By now she might have reached it.

“How far is Anthemoessa?” My voice was small and frantic.

“Just over three days.” Wood scraped as he pulled the nearest chair from the table and collapsed into it. He clutched his short hair in his fingers. “But it’s impossible to get to.”

I gaped at him, trying to transmute my pain, and shock, and anger into something violent enough to sustain me. “Stand up, you ass.” His head snapped to me, wet eyes to mine. “You have pined for her for a lifetime and now you collapse? When she needs you most?”

He glowered. “What can we do? You’ve been proscribed—”

“No thanks to you.”

“It wasn’t me. The council put it to a vote at Eftan’s insistence,” he said. “Everyone in the palace knows who you are. They know you’re to be imprisoned until trial. Admitting to regicide, like you just did in the garden, won’t help you either.”

“Tell Theodore to pardon me.”

He shook his head. “He’s not here.”

A new pain tangled in my chest. I took a small step back like I could escape what he would tell me next.

“The wedding has been moved to Theo’s ship.” Lachlan spoke in starts and stops, like it took effort to form the words. “After that battle, after you went missing, Theo snapped… he altered all the wedding contracts. They set off for the docks a couple hours ago. They’re headed to Obelia so Halla can have a proper wedding celebration with her own people.”

I had to play the words over again in my head, had to fight to keep my stumbling heart intact. I needed Halla. I needed to get to Agatha and Eusia. I shoved the insatiable want I felt for Theodore as far down as I could.

For a long moment, our gazes held. I could nearly feel the charged air between us slowly turn our sorrow and terror into an unmapped, awful idea.

“Lachlan.” Despite how it ratcheted my hideous pain, I forced a deep breath. I clung to the table’s edge to keep myself upright. “We need to get to that ship.”

I was the first to arrive on the ship. I’d slipped from the palace before Halla and my council and courtiers, then into the stables. I made my guards ride ten lengths behind so I might have at least the illusion of solitude.

Now my stateroom door was locked, the curtain drawn over the Siren in the stained-glass window, and I carefully unfolded one of the books I’d stolen from the hermitess. Its oil paper and linen wrappings unfurled over the table, offering up its flaking, silvered title.

A New Age of Terrible Magic

After being forced to read The Greatest Leucosians in my school years, I’d determined to avoid the Great God Jesop’s works altogether. They were painfully dry, overlong, and oddly self-aggrandizing, and now I’d filched a slew of them and had not stopped reading since I’d learned that Imogen had left. I pressed my fists into the table, on either side of the book, and glared at it.

At the cracked brown leather and yellowing paper. I’d torn strips of parchment and tucked them between the pages that seemed like they might be of some use. I’d marked the particularly vile and horrific passages too.

Terrible magic.

The title stuck with me like a deep-set thorn. For it was just that: terrible. Everything I’d read in these pages—every spell and its result, every caster and recipient of its power—had been weakened or marred or mutilated by it.

I pinched the bridge of my nose, fighting to banish the image of Imogen during the severing ritual, hardly breathing, black blood dripping from her eyes like tar. I flipped open the cover, which crackled in protest, and turned the pages to where I’d left off.

There is much to discuss regarding the cost of spell work. I have learned that the eyes will go white: the cost of expanding one’s sight. The scalp will burn from the root and release its hair: the cost of transcending time. If flesh is not consumed—the smallest bit will apparently do—the body of the Mage will begin to eat its own. We see this in the story of the First Mage, where she managed to replenish her badly depleted body by consuming the body of another.

Breaths rough, I lifted the book. I paced toward the wall of windows aft of the ship, and then, as if pulled to it, I looked to the water below me. Dark today, and furious. The wind coaxed its surface into a frantic dance. It urged a curling mist over its peaks, and I found myself waiting there, breathless, like she might appear out of its chaos. Fully wrought. Merciless, and lovely, and whole.

I gripped the damned book tighter and read on.

A Mage will tell you that the only way to ease magic’s impact is through balance. Flesh replaces flesh. Blood replaces blood. Only a caster can undo their own spell. Though one cannot help but wonder what sort of influence the Gods’ power might have over magic. For there is only so much otherworldly sway in this archipelago, and I, with my immortal age and advanced reasoning, have come to believe that a Mage’s magic and a God’s power are two edges of the same perfectly balanced sword.

I lowered the book slowly, feeling unmoored and entirely out of my depth. I ripped a piece of parchment from my desk, tucked it into the page, and closed it. “Fucking Gods.”

Through the ship’s window, Panos Port looked like a painting bathed in afternoon sun. The docks were a tangle of spires and ropes before the roll of Varya’s resplendent green hills.

The cold knot in my chest thawed slightly as I studied the white clusters of thatched-roof houses threading through the undulating landscape. I could picture the people there—the smell of their food, the pride they took in their thriving gardens, their determination and their joy. I held the image of them tightly, because they’d become the only pleasant thing tethering me to my duty.

A knock rattled the stateroom door. “Your Majesty.” Eftan’s voice was clipped with loosely held anger. “Open this door.”

I firmed my jaw as I folded the book back into its wrappings and tucked it into the satchel where the rest of the books I’d stolen were safely stored. Another knock, this time with his fist. Before I answered, I poured myself a glass of wine and hid every emotion, every piece of me, that might reveal the depth of my torment.

I swung the door open on silent hinges. “Good afternoon, Chancellor.”

Eftan stood there, broad and glowering, in his gold-threaded suit. In one heavy hand he held a burlap sack. In the other he clutched the leather folder I’d had delivered to him before I’d left the palace. He raised it up between us, forcing my gaze to it.

“Did some reading in the carriage, I see.”

Eftan flushed and pushed past me, striding toward the table. “You can’t have done this.”

My feet were rooted, my chest tightening in preparation for a row. The folder gave a crack as he threw it down on the gleaming wood. He ripped it open and spread the marriage contracts over the table, exposing every one of them like guilty secrets begging to be brought into the light.

His finger stabbed a black block of ink in the margin—one of the amendments I’d made. “You have never been this reckless… this…” Eftan stared up into my eyes with pleading fury.

He looked old. He always had, even when I had been a boy, but now he looked weary too. Dragged down. His dark liquid eyes drooped, the cunning in them somewhat banked by exhaustion. What little hair he still had stood on end, like he’d dragged his anxious hands through it the whole ride to the port.

He all but fell into the chair beside him. “You fool.”

I slammed my goblet to the table, sloshing the wine. “Careful.” When I spoke again, it was with perfect control, with a practiced voice that was unfeeling, but sharply edged. Just as he had taught me. Anything less would have him in a fit over my recklessness. “I’ve done my duty. I’ve given the princess precisely what she asked for, and before all else, I have kept my kingdom safe.”

He gaped at me. “Your duty?” Eftan lifted one of the contracts and squinted to read from the right margin. “‘In addition to the marriage ceremony, the princess will be escorted to Obelia, with the king in her company, so that she might have a traditional Obelian reception in her home, among her own people.’” He looked up to me with marked suspicion. “You mean to tell me the princess willingly gave up everything she’d been promised—a crown, a shrine to worship at, all those protections—in exchange for a party in her dear mummy’s palace? The poor girl suffers seasickness, for the love of the bloody Gods! And you expect me to believe she wanted to marry in a pitiful ceremony on a ship.”

“This is what she requested, Eftan, only the Gods know why,” I said, simply. It wasn’t a lie. I swallowed past a sudden block in my throat. “There is a second point we are in the midst of negotiating. Those terms will be decided upon shortly.”

Eftan’s fist slammed to the table. “Damn your negotiations—this is a half marriage! If you do not bind yourself, if your blood does not mix, the princess will not be Varya’s legal and rightful queen.”

“I’m aware.” I kept very still. “You’ll do well to remember that I am king. And despite the way you vie for control, you and the council have no power over me unless I compromise the kingdom’s safety.”

The look he gave was lancing. It was the sort of look that dove beneath my well-crafted facade. But over all these years, I had grown more protective layers than I think Eftan—or I—realized. I’d crafted them so expertly that a part of me was still in shock over the way Imogen had managed to breach them so thoroughly.

He gave an impressed, if angry, chuckle. “Well done, I must say. You’ve decided that these amendments will be your little act of rebellion, haven’t you? Your way of keeping an opening in your life for the woman that you’ve come to love.” His look hardened. “I’ll warn you, though, no matter how you try to make a space for her, she will never fit.”

Nerves shot through my stomach, but I mastered myself. “These amendments,” I said, “are how I will keep my kingdom safe from an alliance with Obelia that I cannot fully trust, now that I know who they worship. The princess is content. There will be no war. So I cannot parse your objection.”

His face stretched with incredulity. “You will not fool me into believing that you did this for the kingdom!”

“Everything I do is for the Godsdamned kingdom, and you are toeing treason to suggest otherwise, Chancellor.” That made him still. “What was it you always said to my father, Eftan? There is no devotion so rapturous as the devotion between a king and his crown.”

Eftan’s mouth flattened as he cast his gaze down. As if in apology, he swiped a caress over one of the contracts. “I said it to your father often, and little good it did.” Disappointment lowered his voice. “It’s a shame to see that you have jumped from your bright and promising path to follow his instead.”

And this was our impasse: Eftan’s belief that I had fallen into the very same compromising position that my father had with his lover, and that because of Imogen and how I’d grieved for her, I was no longer fit to rule.

After she’d taken the severing draught, I’d spent every waking moment at her side. Through the days and night,