The dead had been arguing about the seating since noon. Emperor Edric Vale dies at the Feast of Witnesses, in front of a hall of people. In an empire where the dead persist along bloodlines and can be called into public view by any descendant willing to speak their names, his children wait for him to appear. He does not. The absence is the scandal. Ilyra, who runs the grain levies and the mint, and her brother Corven, who commands soldiers, need an explanation the court will accept. A deputy genealogist named Mara Venn keeps refusing to skip the ordinary answer. A seventeen-year-old messenger, who has always seen dead people nobody else acknowledges, turns out to be the last traceable descendant of a queen the state took considerable trouble to silence. This is political fantasy of depositions, grain arithmetic, missing ledger volumes and a long public hearing, far more concerned with who signed an order than with who swings a sword. The magic is a single rule, worked out with lawyerly care. First in The Unquiet Throne trilogy.
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