Lady Belrose, the Councillor of Foreign Affairs, entered first and took the middle chair, the four other Councillors flanking her. The Council—officially all equal with each other—rotated leadership with every year. This year fell to Lady Belrose, and thus she took the seat of honor at the head of the table.

It was part of the way they worked—never did one of the Council rise above another, as they all served as equals, placed above the House of Lords. They each held domain of their own branch of the government, and they were the absolute masters of it, bending only to the wisdom of the Eternal King himself.

Not that the Eternal King had bothered to intervene much in recent centuries, only coming down to pick his new Councillors and allowing them to run his country in his stead. Oh, he performed his duties with care and diligence, but everyone knew that his true home was in his palace, with his studies, far away from the cares of those he supposedly ruled.

So for the moment Shan contented herself with studying the faces of the most powerful people in Aeravin without breaking before them.

Even now, summoned in the middle of the night, Lady Belrose looked incredibly fine. She was a woman of middle years, and she had held this position for over a decade. Like Shan, she had given much care to her appearance, from her neatly pressed dress to the way her hair hung in carefully styled ringlets down her back, making Shan wonder if she had even had the chance to be to bed yet.

“Miss LeClaire,” Lady Belrose began, the formal words slipping from her tongue with the ease of a thousand uses, “you have summoned the Council.”

“Thank you for coming, especially given the hour,” Shan said, taking care to put an extra tremble in her voice. Not too much; overdoing it was just as false as underdoing it, and she had to walk an incredibly fine line. “Earlier this evening, my father passed away quite suddenly of a heart attack.”

Lord Dunn, Councillor of Law, leaned forward in his seat, his dark eyes beady and suspicious. He was a thin man of sharp angles and harsh edges, pale and sallow. “Strange to hear in a man of your father’s age.”

“I’m sorry to say that my father had not been well of late.” Shan cast her eyes down, ignoring the twist in her stomach as the lies fell from her lips. “He had been deteriorating for many years, ever since my mother left.”

She hated to use her mother in this fashion, but after seeing the collective flinch around the table, she knew that she had made the right choice. It had been such a scandal, and as much as they had reveled in the gossip all those years ago, their foolish propriety wouldn’t let them discuss it openly with her.