Nobody in that arena had a word for what they were watching.Twenty thousand people had come to see two grandmasters throw five hundred years of art at each other.What they were looking at instead was an old man on his side in the sand with his arm over his face, and a young man crouched on top of him, working.“He can’t cast,” somebody in the fourth row kept saying, to nobody. “That’s Yorick. That’s the third-ranked magician alive. Why can’t he cast?”Up in the commentary box, a man who had called this tournament for nineteen years had stopped speaking entirely.…Alex hit him once more and Yorick stopped trying to get his hands up.The referee came over the rail at a dead run, robes hiked up in both fists, and two stewards came after him, and all three of them arrived at once and none of them touched Alexander.“Enough. Enough — hold!” The referee got between them, breathing hard, and put one hand out at Alex without quite making contact. “The bout is concluded.”He turned to the a

“Today. It ends today. All my misery!”Her name was Clarissa Havenworth, and she stood in the rain on the gravel of a prince’s forecourt with a rolled paper in one hand and her father’s name in her mouth.“I have said it for four years and nobody listens. I will not marry this idiot. I don’t care what was signed before either of us was born.”She turned and called over her shoulder, and her voice went soft and sweet in a way it had not been a second earlier.“Honey. Be a darling and get me his thumbprint.”…The man who came across the gravel took his time about it.Good coat. Good boots. The kind of young man who has never once been told no by anybody whose opinion he valued, and he was already smiling before he got there.He took a small knife out of his pocket and opened it with his thumbnail.Then he looked past Alexander, at the young woman kneeling in the wet beside him with both arms around his shoulders.“Get the nanny out of the way.”…Two of Clarissa’s people pulled Felicia

"Not now."Alexander muttered the restraint to himself, hovering just two feet behind the man's chair. A single strike would have settled it. Simple.Yet killing one solved nothing—he wanted them all. Precision required patience; he had to separate the sheep from the wolves before the slaughter. No emotional slips. No gray areas. He would strike only when the targets were indisputably marked.He lowered his arm, letting it rest against his thigh...He crossed the rug without a sound and sat where he had been sitting two hours earlier, cross-legged, primer in one hand, smooth grey stone in the other.And he began knocking the stone against the cover again. Slow. Even. Exactly the rhythm a broken seven-year-old had kept for fourteen years.Behind him, Jericho went on talking.He talked the way a man empties a bucket he has been carrying too long — about the coal accounts, about a horse he had sold and written off as dead, about a girl in the village and what it had cost him to make tha

"Please stop!"Felicia got her body across him on the floor and took the next boot on her hip and did not move off."If he dies, every single one of you in this room dies with him! Do you understand what he is? Do you understand whose son that is?"That was what stopped it.Not her crying. Not the blood. The word son.Because a prince is still a prince even when he cannot hold a spoon, and there is a difference between kicking one and having killed one, and five men found that difference somewhere around the fourth second of standing there breathing....One of them spat on the floor beside Alexander's head."For a loser like him," he said, "dead's better than alive. Everyone knows it. His own family knows it."Then Vincent came through the middle of them.He had his napkin still hanging off two fingers, and he put his boot into the side of Alexander's head one more time, unhurried, the way a man kicks a door that has been sticking."You have to learn to fear me," Vincent said. "Do yo

Alexander stepped back behind Felicia.He did it the way the old Alexander would have done it — shoulders up, chin down, one hand bunched in the back of her coat like a child in a crowd.She felt the tug and spread her arms without thinking, a nineteen-year-old woman in a travelling coat trying to hide a grown man from twenty rifles.The Second Queen watched them and almost laughed.Behind Felicia's shoulder, Alexander's lips barely moved....The voice did not come from him.It came from everywhere at once, and from an inch inside every ear in the front of that hall — the Queen's, and each of the twenty men in armour — low and dry and very old."I warned this house not to let anyone enter."Twenty visors turned at the same moment."And since you have come anyway," the voice said, "you can die here."...The line of knights broke step.Not much. Half a pace. But these were palace men, picked and drilled, and half a pace from palace men is the same as a scream from anybody else."What