Chapter 12 · free to read
He did not arrive like a man who had won. He arrived like a man collecting something he had already paid for.
It was not a crown. It was the last piece of one he still owned. He spent it in front of eight hundred witnesses.
Traitor to the empire by dusk. Traitor to the south by that one sentence. Whatever he was now, he had chosen it himself.
The Regent had planned for a general, an army and a boy. Nobody in that square had planned for the winter that came over the wall behind them.
Artwork and narration generated with AI.