The deafening Wyvern Bell tolls.

  Glass continues to pour for the ceiling as two massive wyverns, their bodies silhouetted by the moonlight beyond, tear at the glass panels. Their roars boom across the chaos of the ballroom and shake the walls.

  All heads angle up.

  “But it’s night,” I hear someone gasp.

  We came, echoes in my head with that odd, beastly lilt.

  They came for me. Somehow I know this, wholly and completely. “But why?” I whisper, still standing on the blood-splattered dais.

  The High Guard—Ray—remains beside me, arm looped around my waist, his sword suspended in his hand as he, too, stares up. His eyes widen with an expression I’ve never seen before. It’s almost awe. Almost as if…

  A huge chunk of metal rips off, exposing the night sky. A glistening scarlet snout dips inside the ballroom. Its golden eyes fix upon me. For you, Gold One.

  Ray bristles beside me, and his head snaps down to look at me, incredulous. Almost as if… he hears it, too.

  More and more guards pour into the ballroom and, with the repeated toll of the Wyvern Bell, they bring javelins and arrows.

  I jerk forward. I no sooner want to see the wyverns slaughtered as I’d been able to watch Maurus torture lizards when we were kids.

  Don’t die for me. I want to scream it at the beasts.

  The wyvern on the roof stills. Its head tilts.

  I catch my breath. I stare up at it, will it to hear me. There’s a likeness between me and them. These beasts the First King Varught tricked and slaughtered. He used their bones to make a wicked weapon. These beasts Kheovaria, herself, had grown to love, had wanted to protect. These beasts which have had every opportunity to abduct me, time and time again, and yet have allowed me to escape. Allowed me to refuse.

  Prince Emory stumbles to his feet and rips the Wyvernblade from the sheath still attached to his father’s corpse. With his face blotchy red and streaked with glistening tears, Emory storms across the dais and stabs the tip of that horrific black blade into the air. It wavers, as if that soulless, cruel blade weighs too heavy for its new King.

  “Get in here, you devil!” Emory shouts. “Come in here, you Skies-damned piece of rot! I will gut you!”

  The High Guard swears and reaches for Emory’s sword arm, but Emory tears away. The High Guard shouts instructions to the guards, then hoists me up off the dais and turns me away.

  Spears, javelins, arrows fly.

  I squeeze my eyes shut and try again. Go! Go now! Leave this place.

  The wyvern lets out a piercing roar and draws back from the hole it made. As you command, Gold One.

  The whole palace shudders one last time as the wyvern pushes off the roof and takes flight, leaving behind it nothing but a jagged hole to the black night. The beat of wings sound and recede.

  Emory screams and curses for them to come back.

  And I’m carried away from it all by my childhood best friend turned scarred, ruthless warrior to this cruel kingdom.

  The High Guard—Ray—carries me through a series of doors and passages, the Prince and Queen ushered along beside us by a fleet of guards. Chaos slips by in a blur. My body feels like it belongs to someone else.

  Eventually, he puts me in a chair in a room of some kind. Maybe a study. There are books and several chairs and a lot of guards.

  Whatever kept me going before now slips away. My cheek throbs from where the prisoner struck me. Ray’s tried twice to speak to me, his face close to mine. Though I can see his mouth move, I can’t make sense of the sounds. He keeps repeating something to me, but I just… can’t.

  All I see, burned into the backs of my eyes, is Abel, standing at the back of the room. He knew. He planned this. I know it by the pity in his eyes. By the way he’d stood there, waiting for the Prince to propose. Waited for the moment when every eye, every focus, was upon the Prince and I. The perfect moment. A ball, everyone tipsy, excited, oblivious.

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  He looked me in the eyes last night and lied to me.

  Farnell is probably one of those bodies strewn across the ballroom floor.

  I’ve been the perfect gilded pawn.

  “Emory, sit up,” the Queen barks.

  I jerk. I didn’t even realize we’re all still in the same room.

  Prince Emory sits slumped in another armchair, next to a bookshelf a few yards from mine. He clutches the Wyvernblade in his hands—night sky hilt and golden sheath. His face is white like the marble of the floors, his eyes glassy and red-rimmed, cheeks still wet with tears. “They killed him,” he says, his voice hoarse and raspy.

  My skin crawls. I ought to feel some kind of compassion for this man’s loss, but all I feel is dread. I belong to him now.

  Like being struck by a sudden gust of wind, the wrenching, painful ache of my own loss consumes me. It twists, tearing at my insides. Sucks the air from my lungs, crushes any desire to breathe. It’s over. It’s all over. My future. My dreams. My hopes.

  “Yes, and now you need to stand up like a man and deal with it,” the Queen says, her voice like a whip.

  Emory makes an attempt at straightening in his chair. His knuckles blanch on the Wyvernblade’s sheath. “I’ll kill them.”

  “Yes, you will,” Queen Ophelia says and smooths her hands over the shoulders of his coat. She grips his silk cravat.

  He slowly rises to his mother’s pull. “I’ll burn the forests down. And Pachuate, too. Father was lenient. No more. Pachuate, the woods, those blasted rebels, the wyverns, those bastards will rue the day they crossed me. I will be master of this region. I will take it all. Burn it all.”

  My fist closes around the fan’s hidden blade in my pocket. How I long to plunge it into his eye. My country and the thousands of peasants that make up my people cannot afford an irrational, explosive leader marching them to war and slaughter.

  The Queen’s lips press together. “Now, let’s not get carried away. You will do what’s—”

  “I am King.” Emory rips himself back from the Queen’s fingers. “I decide everything now.”

  She draws in a breath. “We’ll discuss this in the months leading up to your coronation.”

  “Months?” he snarls. “We cannot wait months. Rahiid, I want my army ready to ride by sunup.”

  Ophelia’s eyes narrow. “Emory, darling. We mustn’t make rash decisions overnight. This—”

  “I don’t give a damn! Father is dead. They will pay for it in blood! I’ll bathe the forests’s ashes in their blood. Rahiid, assemble my army. Now!”

  Even as my insides squirm and crawl, I know what I have to do. Know it like I know the twisting, tearing sensation in my chest. That tiny flame deep within me—the one that refuses to be snuffed out, the tiny part of me that will not be extinguished—roars to life.

  I can endure anything, after all.

  A lightness blooms within me. Strength and power surges through my limbs. I know this pathetic man. I know what power I can have over him, if I only dare to take it. If I only dare to wield it like the weapon it is. What only I can do.

  Aubrey Gallant. Daughter of William Gallant the warrior, the rebel, my father.

  I can speak to wyverns. They heard me. They obeyed me.

  I am not weak. I am not helpless. I don’t know what in Skies I am, but at the very least, I am my father’s daughter.

  I will create my own power.

  I’ll turn Emory into my sword.

  I release my grip on Abel’s fan, pull my hand from my pocket, and rise to standing.

  Composure. Commitment. Conviction.

  I cross to where Emory still argues with the Queen. I curve my face into just the right smile. Sad, with a touch of pride and awe. I put a hand on his chest.

  He startles and looks down at it, then at me, like he, too, just remembered I exist.

  “My Prince,” I say and I make my words beautiful. I make them perfect. “I am devastated for your loss. I’m appalled this vicious act of murder has touched your family. The King was a great man. I can see that you will be, too. You were so brave tonight. All these months, I’ve tried to see what a man you are—what a King you could be. You have fought for me. You refused to take no for an answer. A woman can’t ask for more in a man.”

  The knit of his brows falls away. His eyes widen, his lips part.

  I use my words, my body. The angle of my face. The curve of my mouth. A hand to his cheek. If I can direct his anger, I can control it, too. And my people are saved a war.

  And so I speak, “We will enter into a new era. The era of the glorious King Emory. You won’t declare war on Pachuate. Not yet. You will declare war on the rebels. But you’ll be smart about it—you cannot simply burn the forests, we’ll need them for the coming war against Pachuate. Instead, you’ll gather your intelligence. You will study your enemy, prepare your troops properly to ensure a vicious and definitive extermination. Your father failed to take them seriously, but you will not make that same mistake. You will be greater. You will be the greatest King that Kheovaria has ever seen.”

  He sucks in a little breath, his eyes fixed on me and perhaps he’s truly seeing me for the first time. Or at least exactly what I want him to see. I, on the other hand, truly see everything. I see the quiver of his chin, the red rims of his eyes, the way his shaking fingers clutch the Wyvernblade’s sheath. I see his fear, his insecurity, his pain. I know those things. They are malleable. Like clay, I can shape him.

  After all, I was taught by the best.

  I peel one of Emory’s hands from the sheath, fold his fingers around mine, and stare into those pretty blue eyes I will one day plunge a knife into. “My Prince, my King, I accept your claim of me. Will you still have me?”

  His face breaks into a smile. “Of course.” He pulls me into his arms and, over his shoulder, I meet the Queen’s gaze.

  She raises her brows and a tiny, almost indiscernible smile touches her lips as she gives me a tilt of her head.

  The red-hot burn scalding my insides is a comfort. Red like the blood coating the ballroom, my hands, my dress. Red like the Prince’s tailcoat.

  This kingdom’s monarchy deserves to burn.

  I will set it ablaze.