I had VanBilt brought to me in the throne room and put into motion my plan for dealing with the nobles. VanBilt's brief time in prison had been harsh on him; he had only been down there for three weeks but he was showing clear signs of aging.

"I want you to send a message to the heads of all the noble families, telling them that the queen wishes to have a dialogue with them in the hopes of resolving the differences that exist between them that are threatening to plunge the kingdom into civil war."

"May I ask what you are planning to do with them?" He asked sheepishly, keeping his head down.

"No, you may not, you will do as you're told, and if you perform the task that I've given you well, I may choose to be lenient with you when deciding your sentencing."

"Your grace, if I may, one of the noble families, the Remdahls, are not like the others; when the king sought to unify the kingdom under his rule they did not take up arms against his troops, nor did they collaborate with Volstaff and the syndicates, they are adherents to the noble families' founding principles of honor and integrity; please, your grace, I beg of you, spare them."

"You care a lot for the nobles, don't you? Your loyalty is admirable, I guess that counts for something, even if it is dangerously blind. I'll take your request under consideration. Is there anything else you'd like to say to me before I have you taken back to your cell?"

"Just that I've always believed that the nobles had the kingdom's best interests at heart and that in serving their interests I believed that I was serving the interests of the kingdom."

I had VanBilt taken back to his cell and repaired to my study with Uraia.

The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

"He seemed sincere," Uraia said to me.

"He is. He's a relic of the old guard, his loyalty to the nobility is such that he's incapable of seeing the insidious truth of what the nobles really are; that being said, his blind loyalty will engender no clemency from me."

"Have you decided what you're going to do with them?"

"I haven't. My original plan was to simply kill the lot of them, but what I just witnessed from VanBilt has given me pause. It's possible he's symptomatic of something much bigger that exists in the kingdom. There are probably lots of people who share the same unbreakable sense of devotion to the nobles, and if they feel like they're under attack from the throne they'll organize themselves into a rebellion, and we'll have years of civil war, the very thing that I'm trying to prevent."

"Are you thinking about brokering some kind of treaty with them?"

"The previous king tried that, and look how that ended. No, they'll have to be eradicated, it's just a matter of shedding more blood than I'd originally anticipated."

"What?" I asked Uraia, who was looking at me with an expression on her face that I couldn't read.

"It's just that you've grown into your role as queen very quickly."

"Come, let's go outside."

We went outside into the garden. Myra was sleeping, and the chicks were playing amongst themselves. One of the chicks, a male, did as he always did when we came out to the garden and broke away from the rest of the chicks and ran to us. I made a point of not showing any favoritism to any of the chicks, and so this chick, whenever he ran to us, had learned to go to Uraia to get the attention that he wanted.

"Keep him," I said to Uraia after she had picked him up and was stroking him on his ruff.

"What?"

"If you're going to protect me then you need to be able to go with me wherever I go, so keep him, become his master."

Uraia didn't have the words to respond to the gift that I had just given her. From that moment on the chick that I told her to keep never left her side. She named him Igor, and, despite not using a binding stone on him, the two were as close as me and Myra.