Chapter 7: The Archive

Caspian's POV

My father's seal-box was an iron case the size of a bread loaf, and someone had opened it with a chisel.

I stood in the Archive at one in the morning and looked at the hole in the lid.

The captain waited by the door with his hands behind him.

"Nothing's gone," I said.

"No, Majesty."

"Something's been copied," I said.

I had known it the second I opened it.

The old law was in there, the original, signed in my father's hand, and the wax over it had been lifted and laid back down by someone careful.

I knew the wording by heart.

Any lycan daughter unmated when her wolf wakes is a ward of the throne, to be bound to the royal line.

My father wrote it the year I turned twelve.

He wrote it because he had run out of lycan women to take by force.

"Search the guests' rooms," I told the captain. "Quietly. Start with the Alphas who came down from Stonefall."

"Yes, Majesty."

He left.

I stood in the dark with the box in my hands.

I was thirty-four years old and had been King for six years, and I had not repealed it.

I'd tried.

It took two thirds of the Alphas to undo a Crown law.

Thirty of them had grown up in my father's house and liked what the law did for them.

So I'd put it in a drawer and told myself I would find the votes.

Then a woman had stood alone on a lawn with her palms open and a bare wrist.

Last night her wolf had woken, and the law had started to run.

I had six years of drawers behind me and about a week left to find the votes.

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