Nine Hot Therians and Their Only One Queen novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Crowned By The Stone
The Hearthstone names Linnea queen and lights nine marks; she refuses the Chancellor's regency paper before the court, and the Whiteblight creeps in.
Linnea Fothergill had been poling a ferry across the Rush River when the soldiers came for her.
Now she stood barefoot on the black marble of Ember Hall, still smelling of river mud.
Three hundred nobles stared down at her from the galleries.
In the center of the floor sat the Hearthstone, a rough grey boulder as tall as a man.
It had been dark for three days, ever since her aunt Orsa died.
"Touch it," said Lord Chancellor Bracken.
He was a thin man in a black chain of office, and he said it the way he might order a dog off a chair.
"The Stone has never named a ferry girl," he went on, loud enough for the galleries.
"Put your hand on it, show the court it is a mistake, and we can all go to dinner."
A few lords laughed.
Linnea's friend Wren, who had been dragged along as her maid, gripped her sleeve.
"Don't," Wren whispered. "He wants you to look stupid."
"I'm already barefoot in front of three hundred people," Linnea whispered back. "How much stupider can I get?"
She walked up to the Stone and laid her palm flat on it.
For a breath, nothing happened.
Then the grey rock turned warm as bread, and a crack of gold light ran down it from top to bottom.
The galleries went silent.
The light climbed her arm and burned itself into her palm, a small gold sun with nine rays.
"It's a queen's mark," someone said, in a cracked voice.
Light shot out of the Stone in nine thin lines and crossed the Hall.
Each line struck a man standing among the guards and the lords.
One by one they flinched and grabbed their left hands, and a gold sun lit on each palm.
Linnea counted them with her mouth open.
A tall wolf-eyed soldier with a scarred jaw.
A lean man in black who had been standing in shadow a second ago and was now in plain light.
A bear of a man holding a ladle, of all things.
A slender man in green velvet, a red-haired man grinning at his own hand, and a sharp-eyed scout in a dusty cloak.
A pale man in a temple robe.
The eighth line struck an empty spot by the door, where no one stood at all.
And a boy of twenty-two who had apparently climbed in through a fountain, because he was soaking wet.
"Therians," said Bracken, and for the first time his voice had cracked.
"Nine of them. That is not possible."
"The law says nine," said the man in green velvet, calmly.
"Every queen was meant to have nine, but the Stone has not found more than three in two hundred years."
"It found them," Linnea said.
She turned her palm over and looked at the sun.
Her knees felt like river water.
But she was the one the Stone had picked, and she was damned if she would be the one to faint.
Bracken recovered fast.
He was already pulling a paper out of his sleeve, and she understood he had brought it ahead of time.
"The Crown is young and untrained," he said smoothly. "A regent must rule until she has learned court. I have prepared the Regency Writ."
He held out a pen.
"Sign, Your Majesty, and I will carry the burden for you."
Linnea looked at the writ.
She could read, barely. Her aunt had paid for a village priest to teach her.
It said "full authority of the Crown" three times.
"What happens if I don't?" she asked.
"Then you rule alone, with a Stone that answers to no one, and a kingdom you know nothing about," said Bracken. "Or you sign."
Wren made a small sound.
Linnea held the paper over the Stone, so every gallery could see.
"I poled a ferry for nine years," she said.
"Every man who paid me a coin thought he knew the river better than I did."
"I let a few of them find out the hard way."
The galleries gasped.
Linnea tore the writ in half, then in quarters, and dropped the pieces at Bracken's boots.
"I'll keep the crown," she said. "And I'll find out where the river is on my own."
The Hall exploded in noise.
Bracken's face went white and still.
Then the Stone went dark again.
All of its light drained away in one breath, and a white line crawled across the marble from the far doors.
It was frost, thick and shining, and it chewed up the floor toward her feet.
A guard at the doors touched it, and screamed, and fell with his hand black to the wrist.
"The Whiteblight," Bracken said quietly, and he almost smiled.
"The Stone holds it back only for a queen who is bound to her nine."
"You have refused my regency, Majesty. Now bind them, or watch the kingdom freeze."
The wolf-eyed captain crossed the floor and went down on one knee before her.
He did not touch her.
"The Stone wants an answer tonight," said Kaelen Ashgrove, his voice low and rough.
"I'm the first mark. Say my name, and I'll answer."
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