I stared at Queen Elara like she was a hallucination born from bond fracture and exhaustion.

"You are dead," I said stupidly. "You died five years ago. Poison."

"I got better." She swept into the tent with the confidence of someone who had never doubted her welcome anywhere. Behind her, twenty palace guards filed in, their movements synchronized and deadly. "Well, not better exactly. More accurately, I faked my death to escape my husband's increasingly erratic paranoia and have been building ...