Chapter 16: The Council's Price

Thane's POV

I left her asleep with the sheet pulled up to her shoulder and her hair across my pillow.

I stood over the bed longer than I should have.

Her hand had slid into the warm hollow where I'd been, and I wanted to lie back down in it and never get up.

Then Pippa's knuckle rapped the window frame from the gallery outside.

"The Council is in the south hall," she whispered. "All eight lords, and they didn't ask you."

"Before dawn?"

"Their herald is knocking at your front door. Go the other way around."

I went the other way around.

The south hall was a cold room with a long oak table and nine chairs, where the lords of Highmark had sat in judgment of kings for six hundred years.

Eight of the chairs were full.

The ninth, the one at the head, had been left empty for me.

The senior lord sat at the right hand of it, a lean, silver-bearded man with eyes like wet slate.

"Majesty," he said, and he did not stand. "Sit."

I stayed on my feet.

"You called a Council without the Crown."

"We called one with the whole of Highmark watching you tear your shirt open." His eyes dropped to my collar. "That wound has a handprint on it."

"It has."

"It did not heal in eight months."

"No."

"The packs saw it, and so did the Stanmores, and the fen. They know their king bleeds from a refused bond and can't shift."

"I can shift."

"Can you?" he said.

I didn't answer.

He leaned back with his fingers laced.

"The law says a king without a mated queen keeps the crown only by Council leave," he said. "We were content to wait for Harvest."

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