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“I already have agents prepared to pounce on the king. They might have killed him already. Word of it may already be on the way to Hanish.”
“No, no…I know that,” Rialus said. He almost felt like smiling, knowing that in all likelihood he had thrown himself just the lifeline he needed. “I do not mean the king. The line of Akaran does not begin and end with Leodan.”
CHAPTER
Cori
She did, however, harbor a secret that none of those close to her would have guessed at. Though by nature a jovial person with an affinity for fine clothes, gossip, and youthful romantic musings, she bore an awareness of death with her. It was a cloud that hung in the back of her mind, always near, there to threaten when she raised her eyes to take in larger things. Her mother had died when she was ten. Since then the curse of mortality had never been far from her mind. Aleera Akaran had faded from life as the spring gave way to summer. She was eaten from the inside by an illness that began as a backache and became an insatiable leech sucking the life from her.
Cori
All of this converging on the young girl struck her with the realization that the world held more frightening things in reality than it did in her darkest imaginings. Where in this picture was the all-powerful mother who always knew her daughter’s mind before she spoke it, who laughed at Cori
As painful as this was, it was compounded by the fact that she saw herself in each portion of her mother’s dying body. Her mother had given her the shape of her face, the character of her lips, the pattern of lines across her forehead. They had the same hands: the same rate of taper and length, the same character to the knuckles, the same thin fingernails, the same off-kilter slant to the small finger. The girl of ten had held between her palms an aged, decaying, fading grip on herself, like some strange conflation of the past with the present or the present with the future.
Though she often schemed the days away with youthful optimism, part of her was nagged by the fear that she would not live out the year. Or if she did it would be only so that she would first gain everything, then lose it all, then die. She had felt this way when she was ten, and then eleven and twelve and so on, but still the feeling was as strong as ever. The fact that she balanced these morbid thoughts with an otherwise effervescent nature was as confusing to her as it would have been to those who viewed her from the outside. She hid her darker musings as best she could, both alarmed by and ashamed of them. She often reminded herself that every living being faced death; few of them were offered a life of such rich potential as she. And perhaps she was wrong. Maybe she would live a long and joyful existence; maybe she would even find a way to live forever, ageless and untouched by illness.
On the morning that she was to greet a delegation from the nation of Aushenia, Cori
Despite her maid’s warning that the day would be chilly she wore only a thin shift beneath her dress. She could put up with cold, she said; she could not stomach looking frumpy. As her single concession to the weather she decided to wear a new item just sent to her from Candovia, a white fur band worn around the neck and fastened snug with clasps. She thought the scarf achieved a sort of elegance. She hoped so, for she was not as adept at dressing for chilly weather as she was at dealing with the three seasons of warmth Acacia offered.
Cori
The prince was dressed simply. Cori
Igguldan’s features were famously Aushenian: his hair like straw dipped in auburn dye, his eyes intensely blue, as if they were flecked glass beads lit from behind. Cori