THE HOLLOW THRONE OF ASHVEIN

CHAPTER 3: THE GRAVEKEEPER'S SON

Zephyr's father had been the gravekeeper of the old cemetery on the eastern ridge for thirty years, a position passed down through three generations before him, and Zephyr had grown up among headstones the way other children grew up among toys. It had given him a particular relationship with the dead. He did not fear them. He had simply never expected one of them to vanish overnight from inside a sacred relic guarded by half the Ashvein military.

He spent the day retracing the only thread he had. His mother.

She had died when he was twelve, found in their home with no wound, no struggle, nothing to explain her death except the same symbol he had seen burned into the dais last night, carved that time into the floorboards beneath her body. The council of the time had ruled it a heart failure. Zephyr had never believed that, not for a single day since, but he had been a child with no power and no proof, and grief had eventually taught him to stop asking questions no one wanted to answer.

He returned to that house now for the first time in years.

It stood empty at the edge of the gravekeeper's grounds, shutters gray with weather, the garden his mother once kept long since gone wild. He let himself in through the back door, the lock broken from disuse rather than force, and stood for a long moment in the front room where he had found her body all those years ago.

The floorboards had been replaced since then. He had insisted on it himself, unable to look at the place where the symbol had been burned. But something had drawn him back tonight, some instinct he didn't trust enough to name, and he found himself on his knees, prying up the new boards to check what lay beneath.

A small cavity had been carved into the foundation stone below. Inside it, wrapped in oilcloth gone brittle with age, sat a leather journal.

His mother's handwriting filled the first pages, familiar even after all these years, looping and careful in a way his own writing had never managed to imitate. He read by candlelight until his eyes burned, learning more about his mother in a single hour than he had in the previous decade. She had not been merely a gravekeeper's wife. She had been investigating something, something connected to a pack whose name appeared again and again in the margins, underlined hard enough to tear the page in places.

Hollowmere.

He had never heard the name before in his life, and that fact alone unsettled him more than anything else in the journal's pages.

He was three quarters through it when he heard the floor creak behind him.

He turned too late. A figure in dark traveling clothes, face obscured by a hood, struck him hard across the temple before he could call out. He hit the floor in a haze of ringing pain, vision swimming, and through the fog he watched gloved hands snatch the journal from where it had fallen beside him.

He forced himself upright, lunging, but the intruder was already gone, slipping out through the same broken door Zephyr had used himself, vanishing into the dark like they had never been there at all.

He searched the house for any trace of who had come for his mother's secrets, and found only one thing left behind. Burned into the floorboard exactly where the journal had lain, still warm to the touch, the same symbol that had marked his mother's death and the death of two royal heirs.

A circle, split by three jagged claws.

Someone had wanted him to see it.