Chapter 1
Nim had done something dangerously foolish. She stared down at the ring on her finger, unassuming as it was, a thin silver band nothing like the grandeur that surrounded her. But it was a token of vows far more significant.
The ring had been a sacrifice by Nim’s mother years before. And it was the symbol of a bond that would tie her to the seneschal of Inara, head of law and order in the fight against the dark society that had nearly ruined Nim, a man she was so drawn to she could barely trust herself.
Fates save her, but she didn’t know how she’d ended up there. For as long as she could remember, her only goal was to gain freedom. Warrick had done that for her. Warrick had broken her contract, saved her from the Trust, and helped her bind the man who’d been responsible for her torment.
And not only had she agreed to marry a seneschal, but Nim was about to be brought before his father, the king, to approve it. She felt as if she might be sick—she wasn’t certain when she’d abandoned all her rules of self-preservation. Nim had gotten into perilous situations before, but she was currently feeling especially witless and wooden-headed.
“Lady Weston,” a footman said from the doorway, “His Majesty will see you now.”
Nim stood to follow the footman. Warrick had not been invited to attend their meeting, though she’d spent the night before wrapped in his arms. She’d been exhausted from a physical struggle that had left her bruised and battered and from plain lack of sleep. And so he’d only held her, pressing his body to hers to provide her comfort and what had been the safest she’d felt since she was a girl.
The man who had hurt her, Calum, was bound and imprisoned. He would never touch her again.
And Warrick had wanted her to stay. To help her. To protect her.
But morning had dawned, and with it came truths she’d managed to push aside in the rush of relief at surviving her brush with the Trust. Warrick was seneschal, and the kingdom was managed by his hand. Too soon, he’d dressed in the robes of his station, a silver coronet upon his head, and he’d left her not with the sweet murmurings of the night before but with a warning. He did not want her to speak a word of her father’s bargain with the head of the Trust to the king, to reveal that Nim was bound by magic to decide the fate of the heir of Inara. “If he thinks it has any sway in my fate”—Warrick had shaken his head—“he won’t allow you to remain alive.”
The truth of his statement had hit her in a sensation like being doused in icy water, and the surety that came with his emotions was sharp and clear. It was not that Warrick had forgotten she could sense intimations from him, only that he’d left himself open for her to feel how very true they were. To know.
The king would see her hanged before he risked his only heir, even if that heir was only half Inaran. The head of the Trust had assured that King Stewart had been unable to produce another heir, and the alternative to Warrick as heir was unthinkable—someone who belonged wholly to the Trust.
Nim walked through a pair of massive double doors held open by two precisely dressed guards and into a chamber that felt impossibly large and empty—not of the finery that filled the entirely of the castle, but of any single other soul, even the king’s guards. The doors shut behind her, the finality of the sound echoing through the chamber, and Nim strode forward, a woman summoned.
King Stewart sat in a finely carved chair, a man much changed from when Nim was a girl. His blond hair had gone silvery, his face somewhat thin beneath a beard long enough for braids.
He did not seem in an entirely pleasant sort of mood, if his scowl was any indication. It was no surprise, Nim thought, after what he’d suffered. The man had likely been in nothing but foul spirits for years. Even if he was not physically tormented at the hands of the Trust like so many others, what he had endured had been its own form of torture.
Nim imagined it had been different before, when he still believed he had a chance to best the Trust. The king had openly loathed magic for as long as she could remember, but Nim had since learned that his battle with the Trust went back from before she had been born. She imagined his hatred of them had hardened to iron, if it had ever been a more malleable thing, hammered out over decades, thrust into the fire only to be plunged into the quench pit again and again.
The head of the Trust had done that. A dark and powerful queen.
Warrick’s mother.
“Lady Nimona,” the king said, though Nim had fallen from good society when her father was taken by the Trust.
She dipped before him anyway. She might no longer have been a lady, but she still stood before a king. “Your Majesty.”
His gaze roamed over her, and Nim let herself do the same to him. As a boy, Warrick had watched the man—his father, though the secret had been kept to only his closest advisers—as he was foiled in every attempt to produce a lawful heir. A son, unlike Warrick, who was not tied to magic or the Trust. The procession of women Stewart had arranged marriages with were rumored to have gone mad from invisible torments or been stricken by unnameable disease, all while the head of the Trust had lingered in her catacombs beneath the city, laughing at him for believing he might someday succeed.
Stewart hadn’t given up for the longest time, hiding the women away in towers, locking them into secret rooms. It hadn’t mattered. It had never helped.
His opponent excelled at games. She had promised to make the king pay. And it was said that she had never broken a vow.
Though Stewart might have spent his waking hours devising plans to thwart her, he remained unable to call her out by name, even from the safety of his throne. He could only say that magic was at fault for what was happening in Inara and could not bring himself to stand on his dais and point to the head of the Trust as the murderer of the women who might someday carry his heirs, she who had planted a son of their own to overtake his throne. And it was good that Stewart had done so, because should he break the unspoken rules, there would be war. The queen would win. The kingdom would fall.
As it was, there was only one thing holding it all together—one thing that kept the two sides at an impasse, the Kingdom and the Trust only biding their time.
It was Warrick, half Inaran and half the dark magic that was the Trust.
“You favor your father.” Stewart’s voice was quiet but strong, his appraisal of her not entirely arguable. “Your mother was a beauty, but there”—his eye narrowed—“at the set of your mouth, I see his determination.”
Nim inclined her head slightly, not mentioning that Warrick might favor the king, too, in his mannerisms and in the set of his jaw, though nothing of his coloring or the lines of his nose and brow. The king was softer, stronger, where Warrick was lethal grace, wolfish where his brother, Calum, had been more raptorial. Both had looked far more like their mother. Both had inherited her magic.
“I know nothing of where you have been the intervening years,” he said, “though I know Warrick would never have let you come so near, had he not already discovered every detail of your past. He keeps it from me, despite his vow that the kingdom comes first. I might not have discovered how you came into his association, but that does not mean I’m fool enough to assume it was mere coincidence.”
“I’ve been at Hearst Manor for the last several years, Your Majesty. By the grace of the gentleman Hearst and his family—”