Crown of Shadows

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The author would like to thank the following people for their help in making this book possible:

Neil Rackham, for sharing his volcano;

Gene Fisher, for sharing his horses;

Helen Zebarth, for fielding some very strange medical questions;

and Shirley Maddox, for the most precious gift of all: time.

There was lipstick on his cheek. He could feel it when the wind brushed by, a spot of waxy moisture on his cold-parched skin. Red, he thought. Crimson. He recalled it vaguely, distantly, in the same way he remembered its wearer. Lips. Breasts. Thighs. Parts of a body, divorced from the whole. Flesh without a soul. He tried to remember her name and found that he couldn’t. Was that his fault or hers? What kind of woman would cast her net for the heir of Merentha, when the very name of his family had become an epithet for disaster?

Ahead of him the castle loomed, cold stone arches framing the night in moonlit numarble. Once there would have been lamps in the windows, a crackling fire in the great hearth, the smell of mulled cider seeping out into the courtyard. Once there would have been servants aplenty, running up to greet him as he made his wee-hour approach to the great estate. Once Samiel himself might have stood in the doorway, scowling at his younger brother as he dismounted, prepared to lecture him until dawn on matters of propriety. Or Imelia might have been waiting, equally concerned but gentler in her castigation. Or Betrise, broad-shouldered and belligerent.

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