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Finally, I put the lute down and shifted to smoothing the wound. Don’t pucker, I prayed. Please don’t pucker.

And with one last smoothing touch, I released my last note, and it was done.

The king immediately sat up, and I scrambled to curtsy. From his energy level, no one would have known that he had just had a gaping hole in his chest mere moments earlier. He didn’t check his wound, didn’t seem to care about it at all. Maybe after two hundred years of flesh wounds, they hardly mattered anymore.

“Kat, look at the princess,” the king said to the queen, but gestured to the woman she’d called Elizabeth. “It hasn’t even been twenty-four hours, and do you see how quickly she came to witness our demise?”

“I came to look after you, Father,” Elizabeth said, patiently.

“Don’t be ridiculous. Go to your room until your knight is ready for you.”

The king’s daughter exchanged a look with Katarine before quickly leaving the room. I curtsied as she passed me, awkward and in awe and … embarrassed for her. I’d been standing in the presence of a princess and didn’t even know it, because her father treated her as if she didn’t belong.

It reminded me of how my aunt and uncle treated me.

Unnecessary. Inconvenient. Beneath notice.

I yearned to tell her things would get better, but she was older than me, and unless she married some foreign prince, I don’t think she was escaping the palace anytime soon.

“Will you not go easy on her?” Kat said, frowning. “She’s loyal to you, as we all are.”

He scoffed. “She’s been studying to steal our throne since she was a little girl.”

“Not yours, sire,” Kat said, quickly. “Someone must take over as queen, eventually.”

“Nonsense, you aren’t yet forty,” the king replied, shoving away the blanket to bring his legs over the side of the bed, resting his bare feet on the ornate rug beneath him. “And we’ll be cold in our grave before we ever allow her as your replacement.”

I had to swallow back a gasp. His hate for his own daughter was shocking. I wondered if he felt the same way about me, because though he spoke to the queen, his attention had already moved to take me in, his slightly peeved expression dropping away to something even less welcoming. “Now. What have you brought us?”

I’d never heard the royal “we” used before, though I’d heard that the king addressed himself this way. I’d always thought it was meant to signify the God King acting in partnership with God himself, and yet it didn’t feel quite right. Instead, it was … unsettling. As if he spoke for himself and another entity entirely, one I wasn’t quite sure was wholly benevolent. A man and his monster.

I had never expected to be introduced to such a legendary figure in such a mundane place. I don’t know why I’d imagined a golden crown, radiant as a halo. A robe that stretched for days. A throne made of jewels. Of course, even before Kat had dropped the truth in my lap, I’d always known he wasn’t an actual god—after all, there was no God but the Almighty. Still, I’d always felt that meeting a figure like him, a hero to the people, would be akin to feeling God’s presence. Peaceful and joyous. Safe. Holy.

But the king, who had been on this earth for centuries, reminded me instead of a treacherous mountain. Beautiful and ancient, with a primordial anger hidden deep within. Like a dragon, biding its time.

It unnerved me. Frightened me.

Of all the things I expected on meeting Deus Rex, it was never this. Not a beast that may consume me on a whim.

“She’s a child,” he said, his voice and expression joyless as he looked me over. “What are we supposed to do with that?”

I felt mortified, wishing with every fiber of my being that I could simply sink into the shadows. Instead I did my duty and curtsied.

“Bloody hell.” His nose crinkled in distaste. “Don’t do that again.”

If only I was as graceful as Ann. “Forgive me, sire,” I said quickly.

“At last, she speaks.” The king scowled at Kat. “Is this a joke?”

“She’s young,” said Kat, placing a reassuring hand on my shoulder, “and can be refined quickly. I know she doesn’t seem like much now.”

The king raised a brow. “She certainly does not.”

My stomach rolled over. I’d only just arrived, and the man I’d be working intimately with daily hated me at first sight. But he didn’t even seem to like his own daughter, so perhaps this reception was the most I could hope for.

“She will be ready for her appearance at court, I assure you,” the queen said. “And Beric selected her. For the purposes of a knight, his recommendation means more than mine.”

From his pause, it seemed he agreed with her. “Has he returned?”