Tomas blinked, reassessing the board, searching for some way out, refusing to accept that he’d been bested, and by his father of all people. He blinked again when he realized he had no choice but to accept just that. “How did you…”

“Sometimes you must play the long game, Son. A war isn’t won from a single battle. And if you commit too many of your forces to a single gambit, you leave yourself vulnerable in other places.”

He slumped back in his chair. “All those easy victories…,” he murmured. Had his father really been playing him this whole time, setting himself up for this one game?

“A ploy,” his father confirmed. “Nothing more. Never underestimate your opponent. Never, do you understand? I might be an old man, but that only means I have more to teach you than I have time left in this world.”

“Yes, Father. I will…learn from this.”

“I know you will. Now, forget all about what happened earlier.”

“I don’t understand, Father.”

“There is something else you must do.”

Tomas couldn’t fathom what could be more important than bringing a murderer who’d infiltrated the palace to justice. “Like what?”

“Go see your mother.”

“I have no mother.”

“Whatever she’s done since, she carried you for nine long months inside her own body. I think she earned the title.”

“She abandoned us.”

“I won’t go around in circles with you again on this topic, Tomas. You’re going to Drouin if I must have you bound and carried there by a retinue of palace guardsmen.”

“You wouldn’t.”

“Try me.”

There was something in his father’s expression that Tomas hadn’t seen in a long time. A steely glint in his eyes. A hardness to the set of his jaw. For just a moment, he looked like the strong ruler that Tomas had always remembered from his childhood. But then he coughed, barely managing to get his cloth to his mouth to cover himself as he turned away. The hacking continued for longer than usual, until Tomas found it prudent to rise and go to him, rubbing his back tenderly. “What can I do?”

“I’m fine,” the king said, waving him away, trying to hide the blood on the handkerchief by folding it in the middle.

“You need a healer.”

“I said I’m fine. You need to prepare for your trip to Kinkalla.”

“May I ask why I’m going there?”

“Your brother is missing.”

“Edward?”

“Do you have another brother I don’t know about?”

“Father,” he said flatly. “Just tell me what happened.”

“That’s the thing. No one knows. One day he was just gone.”

Seven

Korsiris

Lostwood, Finfalla

Korsiris slammed the bat’s dead body onto the rock in frustration. Its chest was ripped open, sheened with gold blood, the cavities where its eyes had once been now hollow and dark. He’d already chewed and swallowed the creature’s heart, followed by its eyes, felt that delicious surge of power, a surge that had lasted so pitifully short a time that he’d barely taken wing before he was forced to return to the forest floor in a rough landing that had scraped his elbows and knees.