Rejected by His Heir, Chosen by His Crown

The first throne anyone ever tried to build for my daughter was built out of love, by people I couldn't hate, for reasons I couldn't fault, and that is the whole reason it nearly worked.

It started, as the worst things now started, with a festival.

The city had grown one without anyone deciding to. Every spring, on the anniversary of the day we gave the last crown to the water, the tunnels held a remembrance — not a solemn one, the drowned didn't do solemn, but a loud sprawling argument of a festival where the rings competed over whose water ran cleanest and whose bread was best and old men lied about the war and children who'd never seen it acted it out badly in the galleries. I loved it. It was the most honest thing the city did all year, a whole people throwing a party to celebrate that no one was in charge of them, and for three years running I'd stood at the back of it, gloriously unimportant, and watched my free city be free at itself.

The fourth year, they wanted Wren to light the water.