#Chapter 99 The King's Doubt

Ember The King receives us at first light, before the Court, before the whispers can dress themselves up for the day. He looks older than he did yesterday. Kings are supposed to look carved from stone, and yesterday, on his throne, he did; this morning, in a plain robe with his hair loose and gray at the temples, he looks like a man who has been lied to for a very long time and is only beginning to count the cost. He tells us to speak plainly because he has had enough theater to last him ten reigns. So we speak plainly, and Kaine lays it out the way he'd brief a war council—clean, cold, in order: the forged documents that nearly cost him his head, Lady Chantarelle silenced by poison the same night the Queen's scheme fell apart, and Chris, the traitor captain who tried to gut me in a tent months ago, freed from these very cells under suspicious circumstances and never recaptured. "One of those is a coincidence," Kaine finishes. "Two is a pattern. Three is a war, Father, and it i