Page 1 of The Sun He Buried

PROLOGUE

Two hours I’ve been at this dinner, and I’ve spent most of them working out how much of a war it’d start if I just got up and walked out. Not much of one. I could survive it. Baldr couldn’t—he’d be cleaning up the mess for a year and he’d make sure I heard about every day of it—so I stay in the damn chair.

Gods, I hate these.

The human lord on my left has spent the evening trying to turn his fear into respect. He keeps smiling. His face hurts. I know because every time his mouth pulls tighter, irritation slips through the fear and hits the inside of my mask.

Across from him, a Skorvær woman wants his trade road and wishes his wife would choke on a fish bone. The wife knows about the trade road. She also knows about the woman. The two of them have been passing the salt with great courtesy.

Three seats down, a young prince is drunk enough to believe nobody can tell. He’s raised his cup to the treaty six times. He means it less with each one.

The mask lowers all of them to a bearable roar. Fear, want, resentment, false warmth. Fifty-odd people pushing one thing into their faces while carrying another underneath. They smile. They bow. They call this peace.

Baldr enjoys it.

He’s at the head of the long table listening to an old human king explain grain tariffs. Actually listening. The king knows it too. His nerves settle every time Baldr asks a question, and by the third one the man’s forgotten he spent the first course afraid of being eaten.

Baldr catches a servant by the elbow when she stumbles behind his chair. He steadies the wine with his other hand, says one quiet thing I don’t hear, and sends her away laughing.

Real laughter.

Damn him.

He glances down the table and finds me watching. Same face. Same pale-green left eye. The rest of him has spent our entire lives proving how little that means.

He lifts his cup.

I don’t lift mine.

His amusement reaches me from thirty feet away, easy and clean. He drinks anyway.

The doors open before I can decide whether throwing my cup at him would improve the evening.

Conversation stops. People recover quickly and pretend it didn’t.

She chose white.

That’s the first thing I notice, which annoys me. The second is that she looks at Baldr before she looks at me.

She pauses inside the doors with a pale cloak folded over one arm and white linen skimming the floor. Curiosity comes from the humans. Recognition from the Skorvær. Three people know she once belonged to my court. Two of them know she once belonged in my bed.

She lets them look.

The old performance is still good. A little nerves in her fingers. A breath held too high. Relief warming her face when Baldr stands to greet her.

Her satisfaction is the only honest part.

There you are.

Baldr comes around the table. He doesn’t look at me. I can feel how badly he wants to.

“You came.” He takes the cloak from her arm.

“You invited me.”

Her voice hasn’t changed. Soft, low, with enough roughness in it to make every sentence sound honest. I used to enjoy that voice. Then I learned what she did with it.

Her eyes find mine over Baldr’s shoulder.