The Kingless Crown

Prologue

Prologue

Shadows bounced along the dampened walls as Gretchen Dereham hurried down the stairs to the crypts of Wulfsgate Keep. The air was cooler down here and her breath unfurled in small clouds as she descended in haste, torch clutched in hand, one eye cast over her shoulder with every panicked step. Every sound was an enemy yet to be discovered. The dark fingers dancing into shapes on the stone never let her forget what was at stake.

Sweat dripping into her eyes obscured her vision. The whoosh of flame moving across the air nearly caused her to drop the torch as she spiraled downward, into the darkness.

Spies weren’t her problem anymore. She’d seen to that, casting subtle, but final, punishment in the direction of anyone who even dared suggest they might know her deepest, darkest secret. And Holden was no threat. He never ventured down into the Dereham family tombs. He didn’t possess a sentimental view of the past. He was also not fond of the dark, or anything resembling the unknown.

Gretchen thrived in the dark. It was the opposite to all she’d known growing up in the trees of Whitechurch, and the antithesis to what she was most afraid of; that strange world of her past that suffocated her in all its promise. But this darkness came with the shroud of a truth she’d shared with no one, and never could. A hell she’d brought upon herself, but couldn’t seem to stop seeking with every step.

Her harried breaths were the only sounds greeting her at the bottom. Mossy patches bursting through cracks in the stone dripped murky condensation on her plaited hair. She’d always wondered where the water in the mausoleum of the Derehams came from, but feared more the idea that there was no satisfying answer. That coming here was akin to going elsewhere, or even Beyond.

Another rush of urgent sound as her flame passed left to right, painting light across the dusty, cobwebbed tombs of her husband’s ancestors. They were all here, even Holden’s brother, who’d been the true heir of Wulfsgate. It was a most macabre tradition to Gretchen, who had watched all deaths in the Easterlands pass forth to the Guardians in the form of flame and ash.

Ash. She turned as she exhaled, and he was there.

His eyes were always first to greet her. They were his namesake, a color she knew only from the embers of a fire long spent. Pale, searching. She remembered being ensnared by these eyes even as a girl, when as children the two of them swung from the branches of the great trees of Whitechurch. They bound her entirely by the time he kissed her for the first time, by the weeping well.

“Sparrow,” he whispered, taking her at once in his arms. It was the worst of names, but it was the best, because he’d given it to her before they’d ever whispered of love. He called her as such because, he claimed, she flitted through their years together, beckoning him to follow. That wasn’t quite her recollection of things. They both remembered the past through different eyes.

Gretchen allowed his comfort with careful distance. She sought him out, night after night, while understanding that each night could be their last night should his presence be discovered. Twenty years she’d been meeting him like this. Seventeen of those years meeting him on these terms.

Always, she held her torch to the side, where only half his face was revealed to her, and half of hers to him. The half of her that was his belonged to the half of him he could still give.

“Holden has agreed,” Gretchen said, voice low despite her relative confidence that they were alone. “He’s going to send Lisbet to the king.”

Even in dim light, Ash’s deep lines were clear to her as he furrowed his brow. “That doesn’t sound like Holden.”

“It sounds exactly like Holden,” Gretchen shot back. “What else could I have expected from a man who claims family first, but relents at the first sign of danger?” The venom for her husband, laced with a love even Ash wouldn’t understand, interspersed her words in a way that scared her. In a flash, she imagined herself taking Holden’s life, hands clutched around his neck, while he slept. She shook it off, forcing a replacement in her mind of how safe she felt riding the rise and fall of his chest. Nothing in her life had ever been simple.

“I don’t think that’s fair,” Ash said, ever her diplomat. Thoughtful, like her second son, Drystan. He always looked for the center of a situation and attempted to bring her there. “Holden must feel as if he has no other choice. The lords of the other Reaches are complying. To not fall in line would invite war. You know this king would fight all of you before allowing a slight to his delicate pride. He wouldn’t trouble himself with whether he could win.”

“War brings resolution to matters of great need. And is now, when the king demands the daughters of the Four Reaches in his bed, not a matter of need? How is complying a more preferable outcome than the sacrifice of children we nursed at our breasts and raised in love?”

Ash brushed the back of his soft hand across her brow, pushing stray hairs away again. “Sparrow, my dearest, you and I have never seen war. We can’t make such a comparison.”

Gretchen scoffed, recoiling from his touch in punishment. But he’d done what she knew he would, attempt to instill reason in a kiln of chaos. Is that not why she sought him out? To reassure her? To give her heart permission to do what it refused?

“Eoghan is a cruel man,” Gretchen argued. She settled her torch in a nearby sconce. “He isn’t the king his grandfather was.”

“I’ve not forgotten,” Ash said softly. “Nor am I ever in absence of the reminder that the king’s father ripped you from my arms.”

Gretchen slipped her hands around his waist and tilted her chin. “Am I not now in your arms?”

Ash’s kiss cured everything, for the moment. No, it wasn’t the truth she’d come here for, but this, a softness she’d not only given up when the dead king forced her to marry the Dereham heir, but one she’d surrendered from her own constitution. Gretchen was one woman below and another above. Only one was of use to her, but this… this comfort…

She allowed Ash to love her atop the crypt of Holden’s father, Hadden, and when it was over, she whispered in his ear the demand of a promise.

“If things shouldn’t end as we expect, and I cannot hand over my daughter like an animal to a man who will crush her beneath his cruelty, then it is you I will look to, Ash. You who will look after all my children while I pick up a sword and do what my husband cannot.”

Ash regarded her in the flickering darkness of the musty crypts for some time before he answered.

“I’ve always looked after your children, Sparrow. And will do so as long as the magic holds.”

If there was an unspoken rule between them, it was to never mention the magic. To give voice to it was to remind her of a truth so terrible she couldn’t resist the pull back to the moment her entire world crumbled beneath her. Even when she slept, she was tortured with the image of her lifeless love, her Ash, dead against the stones of her chamber after taking one of her own poisons. After she’d persuaded him to do that very thing, in a moment of terrible rage.

She lost many months beyond this, until she met the Enchanter who could restore her Ash to her.

Not to life. Never that. Dead was dead. But it was a return, nonetheless.

“You have to go,” Ash said, as he always did. “You have to return to the living.”

“Sometimes I don’t know how,” she whispered. Her eyes blurred with tears. “And what use am I to the living, if I cannot even save my own daughter? If my eldest son left me?”

Ash pressed his lips to the top of her head. “When the time comes, you will know what to do. Not Holden. You, Gretchen. Just as you did when you whispered life back into what remained of me.”

Several paces from this tender moment crouched another figure. It wasn’t the first time Drystan had followed his mother to the crypts, but he’d never come so close to her subterfuge. He strained to see in the darkness; somehow the tickle of torchlight was harder than the pitch blackness of night. Her voice carried, her inflections indicating an ongoing conversation with another, but he heard only her.

As Drystan edged closer, he saw her arms reach out to embrace the air. Her head caved to the side as she sought comfort from something that didn’t exist.

His heart surged so hard he thought for sure she could hear the thrumming echoing off the walls.

“My love,” Drystan heard her say, to no one, to nothing, and that was enough to make him wish he’d left his curiosity at the top of the stairs.