Prologue
PROLOGUE
KONSTANTIN
I blow the doors to my quarters wide with a draft conjured from my palms, then wrench the Glacin crown off my bound locks and lob it at the desk in my study, almost clocking my youngest sibling in his pretty blond head.
The ice-blue diamonds, set into the platinum monstrosity I seldom wear, glint in the shards of sunlight pouring from the domed skylight.
Ilya leans over and sticks his finger on my crown to stop it from rolling off. “Just say the words, and I’ll take it off your hands, brother.”
I don’t react, my mind still stuck on the news of the derailed train wagon and the human lives it snuffed out. Despite my advisors’ reassurances that it could’ve been worse, sixteen humans had still perished.
Sixteen innocent humans.
Sixteen lost souls.
Sixteen bereft families.
I dispatched coin and handwritten apologies to their homes, but no amount of gold and words would bring back the lost.
Ilya cants his head, his waist-long locks springing out from behind his peaked ear. “The words are: I abdicate .”
My general, Salom, snorts as he enters my quarters and closes the doors behind him.
“If I cared not for you, Ilyusha”—I sink into my desk chair, my fine wool suit feeling more like body armor than the most luxurious fabric spun in Glace—“I’d take you up on your offer in a heartbeat.”
My half-brother glances between Salom and me twice before asking, “What’s happened now?”
“Another derailment,” Salom informs him, sparing me from having to utter the words.
Ilya’s easy smile slips. “How many dead this time?”
“Sixteen.” I unbutton my jacket, hoping it might alleviate the pressure on my lungs. It doesn’t.
Unlike my governors, Ilya doesn’t utter a feckless reassurance of how much worse it could’ve been. How much worse it used to be under our father’s rule. After all, the Great Dig had a recorded death toll in the thousands.
Where most deaths occurred during our railway’s construction, over a hundred people have perished in the last months, regardless of how much gold I pour into finding solutions to developing sturdier tracks and revised wheel flanges.
“Volkov had a wagon design,” I remind Salom.
The sleigh maker had traveled across the kingdom to present his candidature to my father. Atsa had barely glanced at it, awarding the contract to his father-in-law, Governor Dimitri Patchenkov.
A grimace deepens the bend in Salom’s crooked nose. “The Volkovs are felons and thugs.”
“Perhaps, but their sleighs are the finest in the kingdom, aren’t they? Let’s commission one train. Keep it off the books, though. I’d prefer Dimitri not hearing about it.” I give my brother a pointed look, since he admires his maternal grandfather and spends much time with him.
Ilya mimics zipping up his lips.
“Would you mind if I commission a Nebban engineer before we speak to the Volkovs?” Salom asks. “I’d truly prefer not getting into bed with that family.”
Ilya waggles his brows. “I hear his oldest son is quite the looker.”
There’s little Ilya enjoys more than sexual innuendos, especially at Salom’s expense.
My general shoots him a withering stare that merely makes Ilya cackle. “Do you need anything else before I take my leave, Kostya?”
“The royal trolley readied to travel north. I want to visit the victims’ families.”
“I’ll advise the guards to be on standby.”
“Inform Aodhan as well,” I say.
Although I hadn’t originally been a fan of the Crow Lorcan deployed to Glace over two decades ago, not only had Aodhan proven himself loyal and serviceable, but he’d also become family.
First, to five-year old Ilya, whom he’d fly over the land and play with for hours—something that no one had been in the mood for after my father’s assassination. Then to the rest of us when?—
“Fine.” Salom’s voice cuts into my thoughts. “But do not dismiss the guards this time.”
My general—the man who raised me from boy, to prince, to king—had given me the silent treatment when I’d returned from my trip out east without the entourage he’d tasked with my security. His paltry mood had lasted days.
“The kingdom’s too unstable, Kostya,” he adds.
Even after my vow to keep the soldiers around, Salom’s mouth remains a slash of white in his square jaw.
“There’s something more than a train derailment, isn’t there?” Ilya asks, far too skilled at picking up on my mood.
“An explosive device was found at a school in West Sheva. The one that just agreed to let shifter children join. Our soldiers managed to dismantle it, but if it had gone off…” I scrape my nail along a sculpted ridge in my armrest. “Gods, what few shifters braved moving to Glace will end up flocking away.”
“You know what you need?” Ilya crosses his legs. “A stronger alliance with shifters. Marry a Crow or a Serpent. Ideally, one of the princesses. Their fathers would surely send troops to safeguard them, which would deter even the most intrepid antimorph.”
I balk at my brother’s suggestion. “Aside from the fact that I’ve no desire to marry, shifters have mates.”
“Not all of them.”
“I’m not using marriage to solve Glace’s tribulations!”
Ilya lets out a long-suffering sigh. “Suit yourself. But it was a brilliant idea, wasn’t it, Salom?”
Unease gleams in my general’s amber stare. “I don’t know that Glacins would be ready for a shifter queen.”
“I’m better off revoking my edict…” I grumble.
“No.” My brother no longer smiles. “You’d let your detractors win. Don’t let them win.”
“My train, Salom! Get my train ready,” I growl.
“Immediately.” He dips his head in a stunted bow.
As he stalks out of my chambers, someone stalks in. Someone I’m in no mood to see at the moment. Then again, I’m rarely in the mood to see my stepmother, Milana. She isn’t a bad person; she’s just overbearing and intent on matchmaking me with her sister.
“Heading off on a trip again?” The sound of her voice amplifies my already high tension.
Though my stepmother spends the greater part of her time at her parents’ manor overlooking Voshna Moor, she travels regularly back to the palace to visit her children—and to ensure she isn’t forgotten about at court.
“Good evening, Milana. How can I help you?”
Silk swishes as she sashays nearer. “I’m here to discuss the Jubilee.”
Fuck…I’d forgotten about that.
“The invitations have gone out, as of this morning. I suspect that everyone will attend, so I wanted to go over sleeping arrangements with you. I was thinking about having the royals…”
My door sweeps open once more, and in pops Izolda. Yes, pops . There exists no better verb to describe my sweet, effervescent half-sister. Where Ksenia—her twin—shares my somber disposition, Izolda and Ilya are our polar opposites.
“Are you even listening to me, Kostya?” Milana chides me.
I look away from the young, grinning blonde standing next to the older, scowling one. It’s incredible how little my father’s genes seeped into my half-siblings. It’s as though he depleted his severe traits and bleak coloring on Alyona and me.
“Forgive me, Milana, but I’m afraid I’ve neither the time nor the brainpower to dwell on the Jubilee at the moment.” The one I didn’t care to host in the first place .
I don’t add that last part out loud, aware that my lack of enthusiasm would draw a pout across my sister’s mouth. After all, she came up with the idea of celebrating my reign after reading about such a revel in one of her books.
“You’re in luck, Matsi.” Ilya stands and grins at his mother. “Konstantin has just appointed me Master of Jubilesque Accommodations.”
Izolda snort-grins, while the corners of my mouth flick up a fraction.
Milana, on the other hand, doesn’t look amused. “This revel isn’t some debaucherous gathering, Ilyusha.”
My kid brother’s smile only widens. “Perhaps it should be. Make love, not war, and all that.”
Milana’s scowl deepens. “The influence of that Crow?—”
“ That Crow is my mate, Matsi,” Izolda snaps. “Think all the worst thoughts you want, but let them not trespass from your lips, for while Aodhan and I love living here, we will leave if you persist in vilifying him.”
Milana sets her mouth, which gives her rigid cheekbones an even more austere angle.
Since humoring her will be the most expedient method to hasten her departure, I cross my legs and say, “You wanted to discuss accommodations, Milana. How can I help with that?”
“Which rooms should we give your fellow monarchs and their children? Do we set them up in the West Wing with our more illustrious guests, or would you prefer they stay in one of the suites in this wing?”
“Put the monarchs in the East Wing.”
“And their children?” Milana asks.
“West Wing. I don’t care to be kept awake by loud tots.”
“ Tots ?” Izolda’s lips draw so high that their corners prop up her freckled cheeks like easels. “Isla and Naeva are in their mid-twenties.”
“Even more reason to dock them in the wing farthest from me. Twenty-year olds are so…” At my brother’s cocked eyebrow, I swap the pejorative adjective warming my tongue for a word that won’t offend my youngest sibling—even though he turned thirty a scant month ago. “… lively . You know how attached I am to my peace and quiet.”
“Oh, we know, you curmudgeon.” Ilya smirks, then shoves his chair back and stands, smoothing his palms down his thighs. “Personally, I loathe peace and quiet, so I volunteer to host the princesses in my bedchamber.”
“Oh my gods, Ilyusha. You’re incorrigible.” Izolda rolls her eyes so hard that her blue irises vanish.
Milana doesn’t bother with an eyeroll since she knows my brother is only jesting. While I’ve no doubt he’d enjoy entertaining the female shifters, he’s well versed in politics and decorum, and knows the princesses aren’t fair game for a tryst.
“Actually, Ilyusha”—Izolda grins—“I’d love nothing more than to hear you suggest hosting Naeva and Isla to their respective fathers.”
My intrepid brother laughs.
“I hear the girls are close, so perhaps they’d be willing to share a room?” one-track minded Milana rambles. “That way you could put them in the East Wing as well. I’m certain their fathers would appreciate having their daughters nearby.”
“They’re both single by the way,” Izolda lobs in.
“Stand down from your matchmaking endeavor, sister.” Ilya gathers his hair in a topknot. “I tried; I failed. Our brother has zero interest in marriage.”
I lean back in my chair, my vertebrae clicking from the strain of the day, and rub the snowflake talisman under my shirt—a coronation present from Meriam and the Cauldron.
“A king shouldn’t rule alone,” Milana proclaims. “It was one of the first things your father told me.”
The mention of my father casts a shadow over the ambient mood. He and I may have had our differences, but he was a loving parent and an attentive husband, a foundational pillar in Glace and in my world.
Izolda pats her mother’s arm. “Kostya will change his tune the day he meets the one . Speaking of…”
When her smile expands, I know that my private suite’s door is about to flap open once more. One would think I resided in a brothel instead of the heaviest-guarded wing of a castle.
The mental bond shifters share with their mates is truly something else. Something alluring to some and alarming to others. I fall firmly in the bracket of ‘others,’ because I cannot imagine having my mind flayed open for another to poke through.
“A school? They targeted children?” My sister’s joy wilts as Aodhan approaches, wincing.
“Sorry.” The Crow, usually so quick to make light of the most somber events—a trait that drove my sister up the wall at the beginning of his stay in Glace—appears more dismal than I do this evening.
“Nothing happened, Izzy.” Aodhan gives her hand a gentle squeeze.
Before the bleakness can fester, Ilya slings his arms around Izolda and Milana’s shoulders and shepherds them toward the door. “Kostya’s Grand Jubilee isn’t going to organize itself, ladies.”
The instant they’re gone, I mutter to Aodhan, “Guard your mind better.”
He sighs, running a hand through the dark-brown hair he keeps cropped close to his scalp. “You try having someone in your head.”
Gods forbid.
I graze my necklace with the edge of my thumb, praying the ornament cast in the Cauldron can preserve me from more than just the effect of salt and iron…for if I cannot safeguard my people, then how can I possibly protect a mate?