Chapter 13: The Council

The High Council sat in a half-circle of stone chairs below the throne, twelve old gods in grey.

The King sat above them.

Phaedon stood at a lectern of white marble with a scroll laid open on it.

Behind me the benches were packed to the doors.

Theron wasn't on any of them.

He was confined, and the Sun guards had stopped him at the gatehouse arch with four gold spears at his chest.

"Go," he'd said to me there. "Take their heads off."

"That's your job."

"Not today," he'd said. "Today it's yours."

So I had come with Eudora on one side of me and my head priestess on the other, leaning on her cane.

The eldest councillor rapped his staff on the floor.

"The charge is oathbreaking," he said. "The Lord Phaedon will read the oath."

"A year ago," he said, "in the temple of the Oath, the Lady Nysa swore herself to me."

He lifted the scroll and read in his warm, carrying voice.

"On my own name, I give my hand to Phaedon of the Sun House, to wed him on my Selection Day."

He let the scroll roll shut.

"And on her Selection Day," he said, "she walked past me and laid her garland on my uncle."

A murmur went along the benches.

"The Goddess of Oaths broke her own oath," Phaedon said. "If she can, the oath means nothing."

He turned to the twelve.

"Strip her," he said gently. "Give the power to someone who'll keep it."

Ismene sat on the front bench beside her mother, with a veil over her split lip.

The eldest councillor turned to me.

"Lady Nysa. Do you deny the words?"

"No," I said. "I deny that he finished them."

I walked up to the lectern.

I unrolled his scroll and ran my finger down it.

The writing stopped at "Selection Day."

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