Bone Palace, The - Amanda Downum Page 0,105

formal, then offered a hand to clasp. Savedra had never seen Nikos embrace his father in all the years she’d known them.

Ashlin bowed as well, with a soldier’s crispness. Mathiros’s eyes glittered as he took her hand. Despite all the tensions of the marriage and the quarrels among the Alexioi, the king had always been fond of his warrior daughter-in-law. It made the treason she and Savedra had committed all the more dangerous.

When the king had greeted his heirs he raised his seneschal from his knees and gave the man an affectionate slap on the shoulder. Then he raised a hand to the crowd, and the courtiers clambered gratefully off the frozen stones. As she stood, Savedra saw Lord Orfion through the crowd, deep in the shadow of the far wall. His face was impassive as ever, but she caught the tired slump of his shoulders as he turned away.

The council that followed the king’s return was a farce.

No, Kiril corrected himself ruefully. The meeting was a necessity, to learn the state of the kingdom before tomorrow’s open court. It was to Mathiros’s credit that he had summoned his councilors after no more delay than a bath and a meal. It was his own presence in the council chamber that was farcical.

The long room was the same as ever—paneled and polished, the rich carpets faded by decades of feet. Fires burned in hearths on either side, their warmth and glow warring with the grey chill that seeped relentlessly through the half-moon mullioned window at the far end. Chairs creaked as counselors leaned toward or away from the heat; paper rasped and crinkled as they sorted through stacks of briefs and notes. An intimately familiar scene, one he’d sat through countless times. Now it was merely salt in the wound of his betrayal, and he was the only one who felt the sting.

Facing Mathiros was more painful than watching Phaedra in her stolen flesh. Love betrayed might give rise to hate and bitterness, but the original love could never be entirely erased. Even now he saw in the king echoes of the boy he had sworn to serve, the man he’d followed and supported unflinchingly.

He saw echoes of the old king, too, more than he wanted to. Strong was what people had most often called Nikolaos Alexios. Cold and hard were next, the closest one could come to the truth while still being politic. Cruel was a better word still, or perhaps merely uncaring. Nikolaos had taken no joy in harming those around him, but neither had he ever taken their feelings into account.

Kiril was twenty-one when he first met Mathiros, a promising young mage with no family to speak of, clever and quietly ambitious. The sort of agent the old spymaster had looked for—the sort Kiril looked for now. The prince had been ten, already grown scarred and hard in his father’s shadow, but not yet dead inside. He turned toward Kiril like a sapling toward the sun.

Kiril had thought to shape the boy into a better king than his father, a better man—for the most part, he succeeded. Mathiros learned a little wisdom and more restraint, smoothed the harsh edges of his temper and acquired a modicum of diplomacy. The country had warmed to their forthright warrior prince, and welcomed—or at least tolerated—a warrior king while expansionist emperors held Assar’s Lion Throne. Phaedra’s death had nearly cost them everything, but they overcame even that. And when Mathiros found Lychandra, Kiril had almost thought that everything would turn out for the best.

Instead she was, inadvertently, the thing that destroyed them.

Adrastos and the priestess Sophia Petreos were deep in argument over the refugee problem and how it might be solved. Mathiros listened—or feigned listening—nodding and grunting at appropriate intervals, but Kiril doubted his mind was on any of the matters at hand. He hadn’t seen the king so tired in years, cheeks sunken beneath his beard and his eyes branded with sleepless circles. Blunt fingers moved restlessly against the table, the papers before him, the arm of his chair. Mathiros didn’t startle, but his eyes flickered whenever the shadow of a bird flitted past the window.

Looking closer, Kiril saw the sorcery laid on him, faint as a whisper. Phaedra’s arm was long—or her wings swift. Scarcely visible, but he was still glad he was the only mage in the council. His would-be successor—a young man with talent and a surfeit of ambition who Mathiros had chosen over Isyllt—was still in Ashke