They Gave My Crown to an Adopted Daughter. The Queen Raged novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Circlet
Verena walks into the Rite of the Heir with her northern husband and finds her circlet on an adopted girl's head; the Queen rages and is dragged out, Verena takes the crown off Marigold's hair, and the king names the law that bars her.
The doors of the great hall at Highmere were open, and my circlet was on somebody else's head.
I knew it from forty paces.
It was the thin gold band with the green stone, the one my grandmother wore at twelve and I wore at sixteen.
The girl kneeling under it was twenty-one, small and golden, in cream silk.
She was my adopted sister, Marigold, and she was smiling.
Three hundred nobles stood in rows with their hands folded and their faces carefully blank.
My father sat the throne above her with his heavy gold chain on, looking older than I had ever seen him.
"By the law of Merrow," he said, "the crown that was my daughter's passes to my daughter."
Nobody in that hall stopped to wonder which daughter he meant.
I had ridden nine days through snow to be here, and I was still wearing the grey northern coat.
My husband walked one pace behind me, the way he had agreed to, with his hand away from his sword.
Nobody had announced us, because the herald had stepped aside the moment he saw my face.
"This is wrong," a voice cried from the front of the hall.
My mother was on her feet in the royal gallery, thin and grey-haired and shaking.
She was the Queen of Merrow, and the whole court called her the Queen Who Shouts, and she had never once been ashamed of it.
"You are crowning a stray over your own blood!" she screamed down at the king.
"She is not dead, Osmund, you never showed me a body!"
"Cecily, sit down," my father said, without looking at her.
"I will not sit down while you hand our daughter's crown to a girl from a burned farm!"
Two guards were already climbing the gallery stairs for her.
I walked faster.
My boots rang on the tiles, and heads began to turn one row at a time.
"Mother," I said, not loudly.
She heard it anyway.
She looked down, and her whole face came apart.
"Verena," she whispered, and then she screamed it.
"Verena! That is my daughter! That is my daughter, you blind old fool!"
The guards took her by both arms.
"The Queen is unwell," my father said, and his voice cracked on the last word.
"Take her to her rooms."
They dragged her backward through the gallery door while she shouted my name over their shoulders.
I did not run to her, though everything in me wanted to.
I climbed the dais steps instead.
The hall had gone so quiet that I heard Marigold's silk whisper as she turned her head.
Her blue eyes widened, and for one breath they were nothing but cold.
Then she put a trembling hand to her mouth.
"Oh," she breathed. "Oh, Verena. We thought you were gone."
"I know you did," I said.
I took the circlet off her hair with two fingers.
It came away easily, because it was mine.
A sound went through the hall.
"Put that down," my father said.
I turned the circlet over in my hands.
The scratch on the inner band was still there, from the day I dropped it down the east stair.
"I'm putting it where it belongs," I said, and I set it on my own head.
It was colder than I remembered.
"Guards," said the Lord Chancellor from the foot of the dais.
He was a thin man with a silver beard and a voice, and he did not sound surprised.
"Your Majesty," I said to my father. "I did what you sent me to do."
"Three years, in Skarn, under a false name, and I came home with your peace."
"You wrote to me that the crown was mine the day I returned."
"I wrote to nobody," my father said.
His eyes slid away from mine.
"My daughter died of fever in the north eight months ago, and this hall has mourned her."
"I am standing in front of you."
"You are a stranger in a northern coat who has insulted this court."
Behind me, I heard my husband take one slow step.
I did not turn around.
If Conroy drew steel in this hall, the peace would end in front of three hundred witnesses.
I felt the whole room waiting for me to cry.
I looked at the man who had taught me to ride, and I did not cry.
"Then who is this man?" the king asked suddenly, pointing past my shoulder.
"The Prince-Regent of Skarn," Conroy said in his low, even voice. "Her husband."
The Lord Chancellor smiled for the first time.
"There it is, Majesty," he said gently.
My father's expression closed, cold and resolute.
"By the oldest law of this kingdom," he said, "no heir of Merrow may kneel to a foreign crown."
"You married the enemy, Verena."
"You are barred."
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