These Gilded Bones May Bloom by C. G. Honer

Author:C. G. Honer [Honer, C. G.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lance & Letters Press

THEY CALL HER BELOVED

With every passing day, Queen Samira’s grip on her crown weakened.

She wasn’t born to the Eselin throne, just a girl that caught the eye of King Aeros Tauer. A bride because he’d liked her laugh, her bow-shaped mouth. Now she governed lands that despised her, their ruler in the absence of a perished king.

Too naïve, her councilors claimed when they thought her attention was preoccupied by the company of courtiers.

Too weak, men muttered when her procession passed them in the streets.

Too cold, the women whispered among themselves when she invited them to join her for tea.

For almost a year, she’d listened to their judgments. No one loved her. No one even liked her. And certainly, no one feared her. Without commanding at least one of those things, her crown was bound to be ripped from her grasp. A dethroned queen wouldn’t survive long, and that was assuming the coup didn’t include taking her head as well as her title.

It left her with one option.

The palace enchanter.

She ventured into the southern garden. Spring had turned the grounds from a hardened, colorless expanse into a paradise of blooms and shrubs and greenery, all of it gleaming beneath the sun’s warmth. Soon the peach trees would bear fruit, filling the air with fragrance.

In the center of the garden, Thaddeus sat at the edge of a pool. His long, obsidian hair was tied into a wild knot. Wisps fell down his bare back, broad and covered in ink, tendrils like smoke cutting across his umber skin. He’d been a fixture in Eselin since the early reign of Godfrey Tauer, Aeros’s grandfather. But magic protected his youth, and he appeared no older than her own twenty-three years.

“Stay here,” Samira told her guards. “I must speak with the enchanter in private.”

The train of her skirt dragged through the dirt as she approached. Her handmaidens would grumble, but they had done little else in the last two years since her coronation. They always found something wrong with her. A blemish or a chipped nail or a smile they didn’t like the tilt of.

“Thaddeus,” she called—grateful, when he turned, for the black silk that covered his empty eyes.

Enchanters got their power through making deals with the Hidden Ones, the forgotten gods of their world. But deals came with a price. Thaddeus had traded vision for visions. Glimpses of the future, ever-changing and ever difficult to subvert. She wished he’d seen the future where Aeros’s ship went down in the Merizar Sea, warned her husband against crossing oceans in which sirens congregated. Her husband wasn’t only a beloved royal to the people of Eselin, but to her, too. She had loved him as her king before she loved him as her husband.

“My queen,” Thaddeus said, moving to his feet and bowing in a single, fluid motion. “You honor me with your company.”

He honored her with his kindness. Insincere, she presumed, but more believable than the rest of the kingdom.

Thaddeus gestured toward the pool and the pale, flat rocks surrounding it.

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