He was beginning to regret declining her offer to use the training swords. Fighting hadn’t always been this difficult.

But after eight weeks of grieving, Audric felt thin and fragile, his muscles weak, his stamina eradicated. When he had pointed this out to Sloane, she had dismissed his worries.

“You’re the Lightbringer,” she had said with a small smile, trying to cheer him. “A few weeks in bed hasn’t ruined you.”

She was right; he wasn’t ruined.

He was, however, exhausted.

And Evyline was tireless. She flung her sword around as though it weighed nothing, dealing one ferocious overhead strike after another. Audric blocked all of them, but only just, and then he turned oddly, and his knees wobbled, making him stumble. He felt the fight’s tide turn and saw in Evyline’s pale brown eyes that she felt it too. Another shift of her weight, one more blow of her sword, and she would beat him.

Audric glanced over Evyline’s shoulder, meeting Sloane’s gaze. She stood against a pillar, her arms crossed. He knew very well the worried scowl she wore.

Then Evyline relented, dealing a clumsy, ineffectual blow Audric easily deflected, allowing him to regain some ground. She was letting him win, but he was too tired to care.

She dodged him, but not quickly enough. He spun and caught her blade with his own, pressed his weight down against her. Their audience would think he had trapped her under the pressure of his sword, but it was a lie. This needed to end.

“Do you yield?” he called out.

“I yield,” Evyline replied, and they stepped apart, breathing hard. Evyline sheathed her sword and bowed.

“Well fought, Your Majesty,” she announced for all to hear.

But no applause followed her declaration, and when Audric dared to look at the soldiers scattered around the yard watching the fight, his stomach sank.

Dozens had gathered—at the barracks windows, in the breezeways at the courtyard’s perimeter—and none of them were smiling.

Don’t worry, came Ludivine’s reassurance, there will be other opportunities to impress them.

He resisted the urge to swat her away like a fly. I asked you not to talk to me like this. This is my mind, and not yours to enter as you please.

Without another word, she was gone, and the little twinge of pain in his heart infuriated him. Every time she spoke to him, every time he dismissed her, it was like being presented with the full breadth of her lies all over again: Rielle had killed his father, killed Ludivine’s father, killed her own father—and both Rielle and Ludivine had kept these secrets from him. They had promised him only truth and then continued to deceive him.

Princess Kamayin kept trying to convince him to forgive Ludivine. They would need her as an ally in the war to come, she pointed out.

Audric didn’t disagree. He would accept her help when the time came.

But he didn’t have to forgive her.

A voice from the gathered soldiers sharply cried out one word in Mazabatian: “Traitor!”

A shocked silence. The word rang in Audric’s ears like a struck bell.

Evyline withdrew her sword and took two furious steps forward, making the soldiers nearest her stagger back.

“You are addressing the king of Celdaria,” she barked, “and you will demonstrate the proper respect or face the consequences.”

“It’s all right, Evyline,” Audric said, joining her at the crowd’s edge. She reluctantly lowered her sword and stepped back to flank him. “If someone wishes to speak to me, you may come forward and do so. In fact, I welcome it.”

A moment passed in which everyone gathered seemed to be holding their breath. Then, to Audric’s right, a young soldier, copper-skinned with shining black hair pulled into a tight braid, pushed her way forward, her eyes bright and ferocious. One of her fellow soldiers grabbed her arm, trying to pull her back; she yanked herself free.

“My name is Sanya,” she announced, “and I would like to speak.”

Audric nodded at her. “Please do so.”

“Eight weeks have passed since you arrived,” she began. “You sleep in our queens’ palace. You eat at their table. You sit in council meetings for hours, but when we ask our commanders for information about what was discussed, they deflect our questions and won’t meet our eyes. How are we to know you aren’t stalling until your queen can arrive and kill us all? How are we to trust a king whose queen deceived him so completely?”

Low rumbles of agreement swept through the crowd. Soldiers shifted their weight, glanced at each other uneasily. Others watched Audric in silence.

Something inside him quietly crumbled. He had never imagined he would be looked upon with such suspicion, such hostile distrust.

But this was now his world. This was what had come of the choices he had made, and the choices of others that he could not control. He would answer this woman with the truth.

“You can’t know for certain that you can trust me,” he said calmly. “I understand your frustration and your fear, and I’m sorry.”

Another soldier stepped forward—pale and glowering, Sanya’s companion who had tried to stop her. “We have heard that your friend, the lady Ludivine, is no human, but an angel.”

“That’s true.”

The crowd rumbled with anger. More voices cried out from behind him, from above: “Traitor! Liar!”

Evyline leaned close. “My lord, we must leave.”

“Their anger is valid,” he said, stepping away from her.

“Will you send us to die for you?” Sanya called out, her eyes fixed upon him like arrows on their target. “Since your queen showed her face here in the capital, we have faced storms, quakes, and floods that have left much of our country in ruins. And now we will be forced to leave and fight for your throne instead of protecting our home?”

“This is about more than my throne,” Audric replied. He knew he should say something better than that, that he should speak eloquently about the importance of all nations coming together as one to fend off the encroaching enemy.

But he was tired, and the escalating force of the soldiers’ collective anger felt like stones piling on his chest.

“Many possibilities are being carefully, thoroughly explored and discussed,” was all he could manage. “All I can tell you right now is that your queens trust me.”

Sanya scoffed, her eyes flashing. “So did your people. And now we hear they’re being turned out of their own homes and imprisoned for using magic, even if all they can do is light a single candle. Is that what will happen to us too? Will we all be sitting with our magic beaten out of us when the angels come at last?”