Long before the scroll was broken, before the gasps rippled like fire through the ballroom, long before Caelen's face went pale and the priests clutched their relics like frightened children.
I had known.
It was written in her eyes the first night I arrived in Solmire.
The Queen who met me in the garden that night had not been a monarch drunk on her own power... no, she'd been half-sober on resignation. There had been something ghostly about her then, something hollow in the way she smiled, as though she were already halfway gone.
I'd seen it immediately, though I pretended not to.
In the days that followed, that certainty only grew.
