Rejected by His Heir, Chosen by His Crown

They caught Coll three days after the vote, and they brought him to me, because that was still the reflex even in a city I'd spent a year teaching to have no center: when something breaks that badly, you carry it to the Blood Moon. Two of Marrow's own people had him, and their faces said they'd already decided what they wanted me to do, and it was the thing every part of me wanted to do too.

He'd killed Marrow. He'd burned nineteen people, nine of them children, in a fire he'd set to look like mine. The city wanted him dead, and the families of the granary wanted him dead, and I wanted him dead, standing there looking at the boy who'd put a blade in the first man who ever took me in — I wanted to give the word so badly my mouth ached with it. One word. I'd earned it. No one in the drowned world would have said I was wrong.

And that was exactly how I knew I couldn't.