Tomas reared his horse to a stop. “You will let me pass.”

“It’s…it’s him,” one of them said, squinting. “It’s the crown prince! Make way! Make way!”

Once more, Tomas’s steed sprang into motion, thundering into the courtyard and then up to the grand palace doors, dismounting and flipping the reins to a waiting stable hand. “Feed and water her. I’ll provide further instructions later.”

“Yes, Your—”

Tomas didn’t hear the rest because he was already gone, striding up to the doors, which groaned open ahead of him, dragged by a pair of royal doormen. He didn’t break stride, didn’t concern himself with the dirt he was tracking on the expensive carpet that led the way to the throne room.

For the first time in his life, he didn’t even care that his rough and unkempt appearance was an insult to the station into which he had been born. All that mattered was seeing his father.

And then he was there, passing into the throne room, its door standing open, light spilling out into the corridor. “Father, I—”

He stopped. “Lord Gideon? Lord Skinner? What is the meaning of this?”

The crowd that was gathered before the empty throne parted. He saw their eyes judging his appearance, saw the way they curled their noses at his smell, saw the way they hid their whispers behind their hands.

He cared nothing for that.

“Crown Prince Tomas? Thank the Five you’re alive,” Lord Gideon said from his raised position on the royal dais. He was a tall man who resembled a polished shoe, his hair black and close-cropped, his face long and dour, his skin always shining wetly for some reason. The man standing beside him, Lord Skinner, was a young blond-haired rogue with a reputation amongst the court for being a womanizer. He was also the wealthiest non-royal in Finfalla, having inherited his father’s mining operations when he’d tragically died two years earlier in a rockfall. Since then, his men had discovered not one but two new veins of gold from which he’d amassed a veritable fortune that couldn’t be spent in a hundred lifetimes, much less the one that he had for himself. Though, from what Tomas had heard, Skinner had been trying quite hard to spend it, mostly buying favors amongst the court in order to improve his standing amongst his peers, something his father had never cared two licks about.

From his extensive study of history, Tomas knew all too well that once a man or woman had a taste of power, it was sometimes all they craved from that point forward.