WARNING: The excerpt below contains spoilers for Heiress to a Court of Nothing
“Kneel.”
I would be so easy to kill.
Nearly half a century old—delicate, despicable, vulnerable, weaponless—Queen of a court of emptiness, I am a weakling, a nothing.
Fragile.
My face has been hollowed out by the years like a skeletal landscape, my cobweb-white hair floating out in fine, translucent wisps.
But our cur of a king has stripped me of escape like a man tearing off an offensive glove.
The assassin kneeling behind me now, though, could end me before my king would know. My vanity mirror reflects the killer’s cloaked form, his face partly illuminated under his hood: his lips as fat as toads, his nose just short of bulbous, his eyes as flat as water.
Not the most attractive assassin I’ve hired over the years, but he could still strangle me with sweet and callous atrocity.
Yes. Do it. Provocation romps along the rim of my smile. End me.
Triumph so beautifully chokes me, for his potent fury feuds with the restraint in his leather-gloved hands—so close!—until the daunted rat drops his gaze to my monarch’s crest on the hand mirror among the combs of my vanity, and—
All of his barbed wishes rot behind his sneer. A hiss slithers between his teeth. “Whose life today, Queen?”
Coward! Consigning me to another day in this never-ending scream. These endless shrieks.
Unless… I could request a different target tonight.
Him. My hated jailor-king.
But requesting his death would only prove a profligate squandering of gold, because not even an assassin can kill the unkillable, and that royal swine is unkillable.
For now.
I shove my part in that aside. “Her.”
The mercenary angles his head, loosing a lethal curiosity. “I’ve heard that none return alive. That she’s—”
“—as mortal as you and I,” I cut him off, toying with a ruby-red ribbon on my vanity as candle-glow gilds my bony knuckles. “And her protector has been banished, meaning she must draw her own blade now to defend herself. You will have an easier job than your predecessors.”
“But the court wizard and the healer remain by her side.”
“I weary,” I clip out, “of your cravenness.”
He stills, the fiery blaze in his eyes scarcely banked, and then he rises as smoothly as blood. “Consider it done, my queen.”
He genuflects and strides fluidly from my bedchamber, his dark cloak unfurling around his boots like dead skin. At the door, he stoops to retrieve the dagger and two swords deposited earlier at my threshold, then he recedes like an unimportant fact.
I stand from my vanity and begin to swish after him to shut the door.
“Oh, you naughty, naughty queen.”
I halt, rooted in place, the hair on the nape of my neck prickling.
The familiar whisper insinuates itself far too close to my ear: “Dispatching another wicked soul after your goodling child.”
I swivel. “Villain!” My lips peel back from my teeth. “Intruder, show yourself!” Helplessly, my glare stabs every corner, every movement, but only shades and shadows congregate around my etched wardrobes, around the brass mountings on the stone wall, and amid the silken ripples of my canopied bed. “I tire of these unwelcome visits.”
His goad laughs on the air. “But no one else visits you.”
“Oh, how I weep.”
He swishes close again, a shift of air, but before my strike uncoils, he shifts away. “Don’t you know, my queen, that this assassin will die trying to kill her just like all the others?”
I whirl again, my dressing gown tangling in my pathetically stick-like legs. “Do you have something to do with that, snake?”
“Would you bargain for my morals if I did?”
I curl my lip. “Do you have morals?”
His snicker takes a jaunty skip through the air, behind me now. “Did you like losing yours?”
Again, I spin. “Do you enjoy these games?”
“Do you want a game, my queen? Let’s play chase! How flattered I would be if you misspent all your gold, or better yet, spent yourself, hunting me through our crooked lanes.”
“That is a sad ambition.”
“But I would make a delicious prisoner. The most delicious you’ve never had. Lavish me with your pursuit.” His unseen fingertip emblazons its touch upon my lips.
My clawed fingers snatch at empty space. They close on my own flesh, my nails nearly gouging my palm.
His voice retreats toward my open window. “If only I let myself be caught, you would be my favorite captor.”
A rush of air hurls apart my gauzy draperies, baring my bedchamber—and me—to the frosty, starlit air. The crescent moon pales my hair to milky-white threads.
The phantom’s laughter vanishes into the firmament, after which a single opalescent feather drifts to the stone sill, iridescently gorgeous in the moonbeams. Like a vestige snipped off an unwary bird.
Then it dissipates, dispensed into lustrous silver motes, which the envious night whisks away.
Who is he?
A mage who can cloak himself from human sight, that is clear, but the First Demesne is not a city of enchanters like the Seventh; only two known ones reside here, and both have lived here in the castle for years; neither can be this mad visitor.
Then who?
Moreover, why single out me to skewer with his trite and uninspiring prods? Other women in their unlocked chambers would part their mouths and spread their legs for his foul, invisible tongue. They would unbind their corsets in fulsome unrestraint for the thrill of this unseen lover. Welcoming, receptive, inviting.
Yet he plagues me, an antagonistic queen crafted of gaunt corners. My soul is nothing but a gallery with a thousand hanging carvings of cynicism—and one hanging body of a dream.
He cannot seem to keep himself away. I’ve even woken a few times in the night to the dying susurration of the curtains on a little sigh that was not mine, as if he’d come to visit, found me asleep, and vaulted off my sill again, rousing me only with his departure back out of existence.
Enough. Dwelling on nobodies does not befit a queen.
Bestirring myself, I march to my bedchamber door, still ajar from the departing assassin. I touch my fingertips to shut it and—
—blink, instead, at the most powerful man in the known world, standing outside my bedchamber.
My heart clenches.
He clasps his lace-cuffed wrists behind his waist, the lace unfolding in an elegant fall across his sturdy fingers. Brass buttons wink in a line up his high collar. His mauve coat, glittery and veined with green and gold, flares out below his hips. Coal-dark breeches end below his knees, where white hose encase his muscular calves. On his black high-heels, silver buckles engraved with his crest vie for attention.
A man crowned with extravagant power but otherwise featureless. Behind his ears, mud-brown hair curls with indolent gloss and silvery gray, and beneath those perfected curls, his low-lidded eyes study me. His scrutiny, deceptively mild behind his trimmed beard, gropes out every detail of my sour mood, like fingers probing an empty vessel for edible remnants.
An awful taste puckers my mouth. “Husband.”
He inclines his head down the corridor, in the direction the assassin retreated. “Another?”
“Will you stop him?”
“Have I ever stopped them?”
“A monarch can change his mind whenever he wishes.”
“Can I?” He slides his attention down my body, the piqued gleam in his eyes the only aspect about him not bland. “Is this not exhausting?”
Existing with you?I think. Or existing at all?
I shrug. “Everything is exhausting now.”
“Is it? Then perhaps we should liven things up.” He sidles near, his manner moderate as always, but nothing at all lazy lurks behind those flat eyes. “Kneel.”
My spine snaps tighter than a cord. A hiss escapes between my teeth.
A hard smile shapes his lips. “No taste for that?”
For obeisance—to him? My grimace grits out, coiled and hideous.
Another step as hard as his smile brings him closer. “I wonder,” he murmurs, “what would… urge you to kneel.” His fingers gently cup my wrist, and I tamp down a sordid response.
I refuse to kneel to anything, not to fear, not to fate—and definitely not to him.
In truth, though, no matter how I refuse, no woman chained to such power can stray far. At a tug on her chain, she must bow like a supplicant before the power on the throne; she must spread herself submissively on her marriage bed, as I had all the years he required it.
And if my king chose to use force now, no one in the seven cities would stop him. If he chose to chain me to my bed instead of simply chaining me to life, no one would stop him.
Even if I fled, were I so imprudent, none of the Seven Demesnes would harbor me, not when he rules the other cities through his six brother kings. I would be draggled back through mud and muck, an errant weed, his errant queen, whom he would plant back in the center of his poison garden.
Another step toward me, though, brings him up short. His brows shooting together, he glances down.
He unsheathes a tiny dagger from his coat pocket.
I weasel free of his one-handed grip and swish back, proffering him a mirthless smile. “Is your own spell biting you, my magnate?” My mouth gnashes into a grin. “Is it not letting you bring your piddly blade into my room?”
He looks up. The knife clatters to the stone corridor.
He sweeps into my room, weaponless and wordless.
I startle backward like a skittish rabbit and maneuver out of his grasp. “Tell me why,” I spit out. “Why did you have your wizard cast this spell today to block all weaponry from being brought into my chamber?”
He catches my wrist and reels me in, sliding his palms up my upper arms. “Why?”
“Yes.” I claw my fingers but dare not strike—although I tremble to—oh, how I tremble. I suck in a breath and inhale the buttery scent of the remnants of whatever rich fare he fed upon earlier. And his presence, his power fills my vision. It glints in the golden crown upon his head, in the threads of his attire, in the rings on his forceful hands.
Pinning me in place with his formidable grip, he brings his mouth right to my ear. His beard brushes across my neck. “My queen is… unprotected—unarmed. A small spell for your life,” he scrapes out, “is a small price to pay.”
To keep alive a barren woman you never bed? I want to smack the words into his face, but pride pins them back down with sharp needles. “Undo it.”
“No.”
His offhand refusal makes me grit my teeth. My life is a toy in his hands, one he is not yet done playing with, yet he never plays with me at all. Estranged. In other beds. Playing his games of ‘fetch my cock’ with other women while I am nothing but an old bitch lamed at his heels, still on his leash. My life an afterthought to his reign.
Why does he deny me an escape from this life? A knife, a sword. Or if only his wizard’s spell allowed me to step off a windowsill. For me, there is an invisible barrier, although any other raggedy beast can leap out as it wills, while I can scrabble no farther than a rat with its tail clamped in a cat’s jaws.
Or if the wizard’s spell permitted me to shatter my mirror, I would take up the most promising shard. I would impale my life. My king wouldn’t notice; he wouldn’t care. So—
“Why?” I grate out.
“Why?” He slides his mouth across my hair—a mockery of affection!—down, down across my chin, until his lips hover just over my throat. There, he laughs, low and crafty, digging a reaction I don’t want all through me. “I’ll leave you to wonder that, my queen.”
With that, he’s gone.
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Sonya Lano 