Rejected by His Heir, Chosen by His Crown

Two days before the vote, I called everyone I had left to the deep gallery — my ground, the water, the place Marrow had gone down same as everyone — and I did not sit at the head of the table, because there was no head, because that was the entire point and I was done forgetting it even for the shape of a meeting.

Alaric came down from the glass world. Sable came up from the tunnels with three of her people. Kellan came on a litter, because he could not walk, half-blind and one-handed and grey, and he had them prop him against the wall where he could see the room with his one eye, and he looked, God help him, delighted to be at a war council again. And my father came last, down out of the fourth ring where he'd spent three days teaching widows to read pressure valves, and he stood at the back with his arms folded, furious with me still, staying anyway.

Five people and no throne, in a stone room under a drowned city, two days before a bought Council crowned a king over the freest place in the world.