EMMALINE
“You are hereby sentenced to banishment. Effective immediately.”
The words won’t stop.
They cycle through me on a loop — quiet, then loud, then quiet again — like something my mind keeps picking up and putting down, unable to decide what to do with them. Unable to make them real and unable to make them stop.
The crowd erupts around me all at once. Gasps and shouts and voices climbing over each other, the noise building into something enormous, and I stand at the center of it like a stone in moving water — fixed, unmoved, completely shattered.
Faces blur. Mouths move. Eyes find me with satisfaction, with pity, with the particular hunger of people watching something fall apart from a safe distance.
I see only one face.
Alexander sits on his throne exactly as he sat before the
