Crown of Crowns by Clara Loveman

Author:Clara Loveman [Loveman, Clara]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-08-11T05:00:00+00:00

After spending the entire morning and afternoon in the conference room, choosing our councillors, it was nice to attend the welcome party Torio had organized for them. Zawne and I showed up fashionably late, around six thirty. I didn’t want to linger too long. I was eager to go to bed and transport myself to Shiol, where I could find out what Roki had to say. I was smelling him everywhere. I figured he was close by.

Didn’t he have a job to do?

Zawne and I were seated at the head of the table, our councillors to either side of us. There were seven courses, endless bottles of wine, and lots of laughter. Lady Shiru loved to tell jokes, and everyone else seemed to appreciate her sense of humor. This made me feel confident about our decisions earlier in the day. We had to spend four days a week governing with these people for the next forty years. It was important that we all got along.

It was as Lady Shiru began to tell a joke about three Ava-Lodden and an unfortunate goat that Zawne whispered in my ear, “I want to go to Shiol tonight.”

My heart sank. He couldn’t be serious. Roki was waiting for me, and I wanted him to show me more of Shiol. There was no way I could miss our meeting! I had been thinking about him all day.

“Why?” I asked.

Zawne crossed his arms and pursed his lips. “I just want to,” he said, no explanation given. He was acting like a stubborn baby.

“You can’t.” I had to make something up quick. My heart was racing and I was sweating. “It’s my turn,” I told him. “We need to keep to the schedule. I’m sorry, Zawne, but I won’t budge.”

His face warped into a scowl. I thought he was thinking of something mean to snap at me. Why was he doing this? It seemed so unnecessary. But then something occurred to me. I realized that Lordin was a Min. She could watch us, read our thoughts, follow us as a bodiless spirit. She could also visit Zawne in his sleep. Now that I was thinking about it, Zawne had been waking up around the same time as me every day. Had he been going to Shiol in secret? Had he been seeing Lordin like I had been seeing Roki?

I boiled over with anger. It was a good thing the councillors were distracted and half-drunk. No one paid me any attention when I hissed at Zawne, “I’m going to Shiol and that’s final. And I better not see you there. I know you don’t have an appointment with you-know-who, so I don’t know what you want to do there.”

I got up in a huff, pushed my chair back too loudly, and the whole party stopped to stare at me.

“I’m going to bed,” I said flatly. “Thank you all for agreeing to work with me and the king as we mend our kingdom and push forward into the new dawn, but I’m tired.

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