Mena accepted his embrace, welcomed it, and wanted to be folded into it for much longer than she allowed herself in public. But she did not think as he suggested. Not completely, at least. She would never forget the look in the beast’s eyes.

That night, after the celebrations, she dreamed of the creature’s stare. She woke unsure where waking events ended and dreaming began. She told herself that it was the dream that made her so uneasy, not the reality. It was not possible that she had seen intelligence in the creature’s eyes. She had not heard its thoughts, not with her waking mind. It had not expressed a hatred for her and her kind that, in its reasoned, simmering potency, went far beyond that of any simple beast. That had been only in her dreams. Of course. Only in her dreams. Strange, though, that so soon after the event she could not easily separate the truth of it from her imaginings.

She decided to send a letter to the queen, declaring that they had one less foulthing to worry about. That’s all she would say. She would keep moving. Keep believing.

C HAPTER
T WO

In the offices that had once been her father’s, Queen Corinn Akaran bent over her desk, arms spread wide and palms pressed against the smooth grain of the polished hardwood. The flared sleeves of her gown formed an enclosure of sorts, a screen that shielded the document from view on two sides. She was alone in her offices, but she knew—better than anyone else in the palace—that until she had eyes in the back of her head she could not trust that she was ever as unaccompanied as she believed herself to be. She favored this posture when she wished to focus her attention on a particular document, above which she would hang like a falcon poised to drop on a held mouse far below.

Nine years had passed since she had wrested the Acacian Empire from Hanish Mein’s grasp. Nine years of wearing the title of queen. Nine years of bearing the nation’s burdens on her shoulders. Nine years in which she confided fully in no one single person. Nine years of showing only glimpses of herself to different people, never the whole to anybody. Nine years as a mother. Nine years of secret study. Nine years of learning to speak like a god.

Her beauty was such that few noticed the effects of the passing seasons on her. She was slim enough to be the envy of women ten years her junior; youthful enough to be the ideal for girls who did not yet have to measure themselves against her; shapely enough in her carefully tailored gowns that men’s eyes followed her of their own accord, whether the man himself wished them to or not. No man who was attracted to women failed to see beauty in her full mouth, in her olive complexion, in her rounded shoulders and bosom, and in the curve of her hips. When had such a form ever embodied so much power and been driven by a mind as calculating? When had such a sensuous face ever been so latent with danger? She had surprised everyone with her sudden emergence to power, and all who had known her in her youth remained shocked by it.