Page 47 of Fate of the Sun King

“What was she like? My grandmother?”

Rhiannon smiles. “Oh, the stories I could tell you,” she says with a wistful smile.

“Would you?”

“Of course. Why don’t we send for some dinner, and I’ll share everything I remember?”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

QUEEN AMARA

QUEENDOM OF HEART: THE FIRST AGE OF OURANOS

“A toast,” Queen Amara said, raising her glass. “To gathering in the face of adversity and finding common ground.”

She studied each skeptical face seated around the table, most of them well beyond her years and experience—a fact they brought up every chance they got. When her parents had passed suddenly, the crown had fallen to her. Not a single one of these nobles, most of them her father’s former friends and advisors, felt she was ready.

Amara thought they were probably right, but she was doing her best to pretend otherwise. Occasionally, she succeeded. Only two outcomes would make this lot happy: for her to step down or for her to marry one of these windbags and hand the reins to him. Amara would die before she did either of those things. Her father had tried to prepare her for this, and this was her birthright.

Reluctantly, they raised their glasses as she lifted hers higher, making a show of drinking heartily. It was the last of Heart’s ruby wine stores, though no one around this table knew it yet. The vineyards on the outskirts of the queendom had been some of the first areas to succumb to the Sleepness.

Amara then took her seat and gestured for the food to arrive. The castle staff had been reduced to a skeleton crew as more and more succumbed to the mysterious illness every month.

“Tell us then,” said one of her father’s former advisors, a particularly uppity man with a pointy nose, beady eyes, and a chin as weak as milk. “What do you have in mind for the Sleepness? It’s come to my attention that the last so-called witch you hired not only failed in her task but also fell to the plague herself?”

Amara pressed her lips together, hating that every word he said was true. She’d practically emptied the queendom’s coffers to convince the witch to sail across the Lourwin Sea on a claim she understood the disease ailing Amara’s queendom. It had started happening months ago. At first, it was a random incident here and there, but then it progressed at an increasingly alarming rate.

Amara had done her best to contain the news, hoping to stave off a mass panic, but she knew it was like a balloon filling with water, almost on the verge of popping. She’d done an adequate job spinning propaganda: the Sleepness mostly affected the lower classes, who lived side by side in less than hygienic conditions.

It meant no one around this table had paid as much attention to the Sleepness as they should have. If Amara had been gifted with anything in this life, it was a silver tongue that could sell ice to the Aurora King. But even her skills had their limits, and word was getting out about the poorer neighborhoods that had nearly been wiped out.

No one was dead, at least not that anyone could discern, though they might as well be for all the difference it made. Instead, they were simply falling asleep right where they were sitting or sometimes standing, in the middle of whatever they were doing, and just wouldn’t wake up. Hence the apt, though slightly unoriginal name.

No matter what anyone did, the victims remained impassive, but their hearts beat, and their breath stirred, and Amara hoped that meant it was possible to revive them.

But the longer this went on, the worse things seemed.

“Yes,” she replied to his question about the first spellcaster she’d hired, trying to quell her rising irritation. They loved putting her in her place. It had become a game to them. While they sat here attending to their ridiculous amusements and clinging to petty grudges, their home was falling apart, and none of them seemed to care. But soon the Sleepness would find them, and then they’d be forced to start acting. “That was unfortunate.”

She didn’t know what else to say. She’d gambled and lost. Anyone could have done the same thing. The advisor gave her a look, his eyebrows raising as though she were the greatest fool to have ever lived, and he would have known better. She resisted the urge to pick up her glass of wine and toss it in his face.

“I understand things didn’t go quite as planned that time,” she ventured carefully.

She had a specific reason for bringing them here today, and she’d need to govern her temper if she was to convince them of her increasingly desperate plans. “But I have a new lead. A sorcerer. They say he’s the best and has broken curses from here and across the widest seas.”

Before she even stopped speaking, a collective groan circled around the table.

“You can’t really be serious,” one of the advisors said. “Not another charlatan!”

Amara squeezed her napkin under the table so hard she felt the fibers giving way in her grip.

“I know I said this last time, but I have a good feeling about this one,” she said, hating how needy and pleading she sounded. She had to make them see.

“I say let it take them all,” someone said with a smug grin before he planted his elbow on the table and drained his glass. “Who needs them?” He belched, and she wrinkled her nose.

“If they’re all gone, then who will bring your wine?” another noble countered, and Amara could have kissed him. Except he always smelled like onions, so it would be only a theoretical kiss.

“Right,” Amara said. “So I need your help.”