Page 2 of Lord of Ruin (The Age of Blood #2)

Chapter One

Shan

T he grandfather clock chimed one, startling Shan out of her light doze.

It was much later than she intended to work; she had planned to only stay an hour after dinner to finish up the latest inventory, but lost herself as she dug into the ledgers that were her main responsibility.

The ever-dwindling supply of blood for the Kingdom of Aeravin, diminishing a bit more each day as they ran through what remained of the supply.

She cursed Isaac de la Cruz under her breath; the Blood Factory he revealed was abhorrent, the slow draining and death of the capital’s undesirables to fill the Blood Workers’ endless hunger for blood, but so was every other option.

He had achieved his goal, he had seen the program ended under the threat of civil unrest, but here she was, left to pick up the pieces of his mess.

It was her greatest duty as Royal Blood Worker, and still, months after her appointment, she found no reasonable solution.

She gently closed her notebook, setting it aside with the ledger for the next day’s efforts.

It looked so small on the grand desk, a mahogany monstrosity etched with hand-carved details of roses and thorns.

It matched the rest of the furniture she had inherited with the office—large, oversized pieces that made her feel small, from the chair that dwarfed her to the shelves that covered the walls to the wide bay window that overlooked the capital and the grand sea beyond.

Some nights, she wished she could fly out that window and never look back, but every time she so much as dared to dream, she remembered the shackles that held her fast and the work she had yet to do.

Work that she was only just learning the importance of, the complexity of balancing a nation wound together in intricacies she never learned, back when she was just a foolish girl dreaming on the burning of hope of change.

But she knew better now—knew just how painful the cost of her grand schemes would be.

So here she was, Royal Blood Worker, chipping away at the little gains she could achieve.

But there was nothing she could accomplish now, not with ache in her back and the way her eyes threatened to drift closed one more. She needed rest, her soft bed, and the comfort of Samuel’s arms if she had any hope of solving any of the great issues left at her doorstep.

Pushing herself up, she carefully brushed the stray locks of hair from her face, taking a moment to refresh her appearance.

Despite the hour, there would still be people flitting about the Academy—students cramming for exams, instructors frantically preparing the next lesson, and the nearly invisible servants gliding between them, ensuring that everything ran smoothly.

As soon as she stepped out of her office, the sole bit of privacy she had would vanish as the performance began again.

Appearances had always been important, as a LeClaire, as a child with foreign blood.

As the Royal Blood Worker following de la Cruz, it had become everything , the entire court of Aeravin watching her every movement, waiting to see if she would make the same mistakes he had, if the quality of her blood would be as poor as his.

Yet another mess he had added to her plate, another bitterness left where there had once been the hope for something more. It was uncharitable of her, she knew that, but it was better to be angry at all he had done than to mourn everything she had lost.

That was the lie she kept telling herself, anyway.

Prepared to face the night, she exited her office and stepped out into the top floor.

The witch light had been dimmed for the night, casting a warm glow over the couches and low tables throughout the space, places for the enlightened of Aeravin to mingle as they discussed the newest bits of theory and magic.

Empty, thankfully, except the door to the Eternal King’s Archives.

The sole door was cracked open, light spilling out across the marble floor.

Shan’s heart sank into her stomach as she realized who was there. There was only one person who could access it on their own, whose blood would allow them to pass through the ward and into the room beyond.

It seemed that the Eternal King had been stirred from his own offices again, as he had many times in the past few months, poring over the knowledge he had spent a millennium collecting as he tried to understand what had been done to Samuel.

It was a great puzzle in his eyes, nothing more, a bit of intellectual inquiry that he wanted to solve.

Whatever pain Samuel went through did not matter.

Still, she squared her shoulders as she stepped through the ward, the buzz of her own magic sizzling against her skin—no doubt the King knew she lingered, and it would be better for her to go to him. She had learned that lesson the hard way.

The room was large but windowless, bookshelves lining the walls and reaching almost all the way up to the ceiling.

A long ladder was braced against the shelves, attached to a railing that allowed one to roll it to the proper stack, climbing through the very ranks of history itself.

Each shelf was carefully preserved against the ravages of time by being encased in specially made glass, a collection of journals and books dating back all the way to the founding of Aeravin itself.

Journals full of knowledge that Shan, in her time before serving the King, had not even been able to imagine. There were too many of them to get through in her meager lifetime, not unless she devoted herself solely to this endeavor, but there was a part of her that ached to try.

The Eternal King stood in the middle of the room, the brightness from the witch light casting shadows across his face, as inexorable as ever, a man who never changed or aged.

There was a sternness to him that she knew waited just beyond the surface, a promise of unyielding will and cruelty, but she had learned to walk around the edges of it, managing his moods just as she managed everything else.

Still dressed in his court finest, the Eternal King stood with his hands pressed into the wood of the table, a slight frown marring his otherwise flawless features.

Before him was one of his old journals, bound in leather and filled with his scribbled handwriting, a journal that he protected even from his own skin with the special gloves he wore to flip through the pages.

“Good evening,” the King said, without looking up. “How goes your work?”

Shan still had to fight the urge to lie, the words already hung on the edge of her lips, but she swallowed them down like the bitter fruit they were.

“Things are not going as well as I would have liked. We are burning through blood faster than our initial projections called for, even with the increased Blood Taxes and the rationing we established.”

Even with the first two collections of the doubled Blood Taxes, two pints from every Unblooded citizen over twelve, she hadn’t been able to balance the looming deficit, given just how much of the supply had come from the secret Blood Factory.

So, she balanced it as best she could, pulling back in the scant areas that she could find, fat that she had been able to trim from the endless requisitions that came to the Royal Blood Worker’s office.

Under Isaac, it had been brushed off to aides and secretaries.

But in these new conditions, she had to account for every single drop of blood in their coffers, and there was only so much rationing that the nobles would allow.

The entire balance of their nation hung on a tightrope, and with each step Shan feared that she would fall into the abyss.

The King only hummed, turning the page in his journal with a careful hand. “I am sure that you will come up with something. I know you are too clever to let something as minor as this defeat you.”

Fear thrummed a heady beat in her veins.

Shan still didn’t know how she withstood it, the level look the Eternal King sent her way, eyes as hard as emeralds, peeling away all her schemes and lies to get to the heart of her.

His faith was a burning potential, almost too much to bear, but she could not flinch away.

“I will,” she swore, though she did not yet know the particulars of how she would appease him. She just knew she had no other option, lest she end up like all the others who had crashed and burned. Like her father.

Like Isaac.

The King only smiled, gesturing her forward with a gloved hand. “What do you think of this?”

He stepped aside, allowing her to take his place at the research table, but lingered close enough that she could still feel the warmth of his body, the nearly overwhelming taste of his magic on the air.

He had stopped masking around her, when it was just the two of them, no longer even bothering to play at being merely human.

Perhaps it was meant as an intimidation tactic, a reminder of just how far above her that he was.

Perhaps it was a kind of trust, the only way he could be able to show it.

But it did not matter why. In truth, all it did was make her hungry. What would power like that feel like, in her hands? Who would dare challenge her? Would it let her, for the first time in her life, know what it would be like to be free?

The journal before them was one she had seen before, one of the first he had shown her after her ascension to Royal Blood Worker.

In those early weeks, they had spent so many nights in this very room, poring over theories and details as they struggled to understand exactly how the Aberforth Gift had been decoupled from Samuel.

It had been entirely fruitless, but here was the Eternal King once more, searching for answers they could not find.