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. Good night.”
Nobody questioned me—I was the freaking queen. They all bowed their heads, and I left Zawne at the head of the table, glaring at me as I stormed off.
The first thing I wanted to do when I got to Shiol was run my hands through Roki’s silky hair and kiss him.
No!
I cringed, clenched my teeth, and squeezed my eyes tighter. I couldn’t cheat on Zawne. It wasn’t in my personality. But I kept thinking about Lordin. I couldn’t help but wonder, was Zawne cheating on me?
All I could do was allow myself to get sleepy, sink deep into our cozy bed, and spell …
S-H-I-O-L.
I zipped through space in my spirit body, landed in the Crown of Crowns’ reception hall, and found them waiting for me beneath the cloudy, ethereal sky. They were sparkling light, the same as always. Riedel greeted me warmly enough.
“Queen Kaelyn, we’re glad you’ve come. We have seen that you and Zawne split the duties in half. We were surprised. It’s a wise move.”
“You might even get some rest,” Hanchell said.
I moaned, “Thanks, but it was Zawne’s idea.”
“We know,” Hanchell said.
Riedel’s laugh echoed through the void. “We know everything.”
I just wanted to get the meeting over with. I wanted to see Roki. We had a lot to discuss. I wanted to ask him about Lordin, if he had seen her with Zawne. I needed to know if they were an item again. If so, it might seriously change my feelings toward Zawne. It might also open up possibilities between Roki and myself. I needed to see him!
“Can we get to it?” I said. “I have a meeting after this.” I didn’t mean to be blunt, but it seemed like recently I had been shedding the timid, awkward girl I used to be. I was becoming bolder. I didn’t know if it was from age, stress, sleeping in bed with a man every night … or from finding out there were entire worlds secreted just behind the fabric of our universe!
“Of course,” Hanchell said. “You are a busy woman. Here, this is what’s on the docket for today.”
A blast of images, documents, video clips—all exploded from thin air and cycled around me. It was a lot to make sense of. All of it got sucked into the visin implant in my wrist.
“You may now access the files,” Hanchell said. “Use your visin normally. It will function in Shiol, but the files will be immediately erased upon your return to the physical world. We can’t have them slipping into the wrong hands.”
“Okay.” I was a bit excited. If there was one thing I knew how to do, it was to ignore my problems and bury myself in my work.
“One more thing,” Hanchell said. Her electric form seemed to giggle. She was awfully excitable for an all-powerful spirit.
Then Hanchell’s light fluctuated, and the space we were in changed. The clouds were gone, sealed off by a high ceiling. Four walls materialized, and within seconds, I found myself standing in NordHaven’s study, the one Papa had always used for work.
“It’s just a projection,” Hanchell said. “We hope it helps you as you go through the material. Take a seat on the sofa by the fire. Relax. You have time to review the evidence.”
“Thanks so much!” I said, but they had already evaporated.
I walked through the room in awe over how the Crown of Crowns could manifest NordHaven so accurately. It was my papa’s study down to the last carpet fiber: dark, musty, more comfortable than any royal chamber at VondRust. It even smelled like old books and smoldering wood, just like Papa always programmed it to smell like. I plunked myself down on the leather sofa, felt the warmth of the hearth on my feet, and turned on my visin. It was time to get to work. I needed to absorb all the information and still have time left over for Roki … and there were ten claims I had to go over!
At the top of the list was a request from Nurlie, asking for the Crown to stop a covert petition from Nurlie Island. The island was demanding independence from Nurlie. Over eighty thousand islanders had signed the petition, and the shadow government of the island wanted to push ahead with a referendum. The island represented forty percent of Nurlie’s exports, mainly due to rich mineral resources. It was one of the few places where the mines were still operated by human workers. The Nurlie clan leaders were fearful that the shadow government might try a hostile takeover of the continent, fueled by anti-mech and anti-authority sentiments.
I scrolled
