“Of the ten of you here, four have Talents.”

Aside from Bastiaan and Hartmut, who else had a Talent? And what were those Talents? Two men swelled a bit, the smugness remaining on their faces.

“My father never trusted the Talented,” Mattias went on. “Not even those on his own council.” Clothes shifted like the ruffling of feathers. “He once told me, ‘If you leave them be, they will leave you be. They’re like spiders. Let them spin their webs and catch their flies, but in their own corners of the world.’”

Bastiaan had heard those exact words from King Vämbat’s mouth at the beginning. And he’d heard them retracted at the end.

Mattias’s face hardened to granite. “Yet a spider dared to scuttle out of its corner and murder him.”

No. It wasn’t like that.

“My father was wrong. The Talented don’t keep to their corners or webs. They’re among us.” Tense silence robbed the room of its air. “That’s why we had a census—not to number the people of our great capital, but to keep track of the Talented.”

Bastiaan folded his fingers so tightly that a knuckle cracked. He hadn’t shared the details of his Talent with Mattias yet.

“Few of you know that a Talented saved my life when I was a boy. My eldest brother, Prince Dedrick, feared I would steal the crown, so he had me abducted to be sent across the sea to Timberfell. A Talented rescued me and saw me returned safely to the schloss. When I asked this man why he saved me, he said . . .” Mattias clapped a hand on Baron Hartmut’s shoulder. “Do you remember, Hartmut?”

Hartmut responded in a low voice. “I said it is the duty of a Talented to serve the king. That’s why we exist.”

“Indeed you did.” Mattias turned his gaze to Bastiaan. “Do you agree, Bastiaan?”

Taken aback by the sudden address, Bastiaan answered before he could censor his own bluntness. “I agree that it’s the duty of a Talented to serve the king, just as it is the king’s duty to serve the people. One cannot find balance without the other.”

“Candidly spoken. Balance. This is why I must bring order to the madness my father’s system left behind. And so I’ve visited the Nightwell.”

Bastiaan’s throat went dry. Several men blustered nonsense while a handful of others paled and remained silent. This . . . this was not what he’d expected from the new king.

One of the men, Duke of something, managed to find his voice. “That is . . . that’s punishable by death!”

Mattias’s mouth twisted. “Ironic, isn’t it? That it would be punishable by death, and yet the past five kings of Winterune have all visited it, immersed themselves in it, and returned home with a Bane.”