Page 1 of The Crowned Queen

Prologue

He was being followed.

Kai turned another corner at random, wandering down the deserted street. Curfew had long come and gone, the thin moonlight barely enough to illuminate the cracked cobblestones. No aetherlamps here—the fae weren’t important enough to spare the magic for something as mundane as lighting some narrow side street.

He’d first noticed his tail two nights ago—a flicker of movement, a shadow that vanished whenever he turned toward it—but whoever it was, they’d never gotten close enough for him to tell them he didn’t mean any harm, that he was there to help.

Hopefully, this would be the night that changed. Otherwise, he’d be forced to go back to his ordinary life and try to think of another way to track down the resistance.

Ordinary life—the thought was almost enough to make Kai laugh out loud. Three weeks ago, he hadn’t had a care in the world. He had a prestigious research posting, a comfortable apartment in Kingswalk, and a standing invitation to Garrick Shaw’s table.

And of course, he’d had Jaxon. His best friend since they were old enough to toddle behind their fathers as they built a new world—a world where their sons would stand at the top instead of the bottom.

Looking back, Kai wasn’t quite sure when he’d stopped believing in that world. Maybe it had started during his training as a runesmith, when he’d observed and performed his first inscriptions on screaming, sobbing fae. Or maybe it had been the day he’d walked into Jaxon’s office at the Aetherium to find one of his fae students righting her skirts, her face streaked with tears.

Jaxon had laughed, like it was all some sort of joke. Want a turn? he’d asked, grinning with the satisfaction of a cat that had trapped a poor mouse in its claws.

Kai couldn’t even remember what he had said. He’d probably laughed and awkwardly changed the subject, desperate to go straight back to pretending he didn’t see what kind of a person his father’s world was shaping him into. But he’d stopped being able to deny the truth on that cart in Eluneth, Araya’s accusing silver eyes flashing from his face to the stolen child in his arms.

Are you really going to do it? she’d demanded. Are you really going to put a ly’ithra rune on a baby?

He’d known these things happened, of course. All his father’s research showed that inscribing the ly’ithra rune young was best—less chance of anything falling through the cracks that way—but to actually be presented with the evidence of what that meant for the fae...

Kai wasn’t sure he’d gotten a proper night’s sleep since.

He turned another corner, stumbling to a halt. The alley ended in a crumbling wall, its base buried in refuse. Another dead end. Another wasted night⁠—

“You’ve run out of road, Kai Sterling.”

Kai jumped, only the cold kiss of a blade against the side of his throat keeping him from whipping around.

“Funny,” he said, his voice higher than it should have been. “I was just thinking the same thing.”

“Three nights,” a female voice murmured, her warm breath stirring the air by his ear. “Wandering the streets, asking questions you shouldn’t be.” The blade dug into his skin a little harder. “We don’t like the sons of Arcanum officials sniffing around, Sterling.”

So she knew who he was. It wasn’t exactly a surprise—after all, he’d been making himself conspicuous on purpose. But his plan had been a lot more palatable in theory than it was now that he had a knife to his throat.

“I’m not here for the Arcanum,” he said carefully. “I want to help the resistance.”

“There is no resistance,” she said.

“There is,” Kai insisted. “You help fae escape the New Dominion. Get them across the Shadowed Sea to Eluneth—to the free fae. I just need to find my friend⁠—”

The knife dug into his skin, choking the rest of the words in his throat. For a long moment she said nothing, pressing the knife so hard against his neck that Kai wondered if she was going to open his throat right here and save herself the trouble of figuring out what to do with him. That would be something his father would struggle to explain. How did the son of the magister that created the ly’ithra rune end up bleeding out in a Farhallow gutter⁠—

“Turn around,” she said. “Slowly.”

Kai held his hands out and turned, breathing a sigh of relief as the knife dropped away from his throat. He couldn’t see anything of the fae female who had stopped him, her slight form buried in a dark cloak far too heavy for the spring night.

“I just need to talk to someone who can get a message to the fae working with Prince Loren,” he said. “I know he’s here somewhere. I want to help him.”

“No one has seen Prince Loren since the Ascendancy.” The stranger cocked her head, peering out at him from the shadow of her hood. “You expect me to believe you have?”

“I swear I have.” Kai willed her to believe him. “He’s been a prisoner for over twenty years. He escaped, but Jaxon Shaw took his mate. He’s convinced Prince Loren will come after her.”

The stranger laughed, the sound filling the alley like the ring of tinkling bells. To Kai’s shock, she pushed back her hood, revealing a face that was all angles from a lifetime of malnutrition. Her pale gold hair was pulled back from her face in a braided crown that revealed the clipped tips of her ears. He hadn’t expected her to be so young—it was hard to tell with fae sometimes, but she couldn’t have been older than him.

“Jaxon Shaw—your best friend and the son of High Magister Garrick Shaw?” She arched a delicate eyebrow, her fae-blue eyes gleaming in the dark. “You aren’t doing yourself any favors, Kai Sterling.”