“What?”
“RUN!”
The historian shoved him toward the eastern colonnade.
Aren looked back.
The Stone Guardian had moved between him and the palace.
A wall of living mountain.
King Aldric shouted for the gates to be closed.
Prince Corvin shouted something else.
Aren ran.
Master Oren followed with surprising speed for a man who needed a cane.
They entered a service corridor behind the royal kitchens.
Aren knew these halls.
He had stolen scraps from them for years.
“That way.”
The historian looked at him.
“You know the palace?”
“The parts nobody notices.”
“Appropriate.”
They ran through a pantry.
Down narrow stairs.
Across a laundry hall.
Behind them came armored footsteps.
Oren’s breathing worsened.
Aren grabbed his sleeve.
“Faster.”
“I am eighty-two.”
“Today seems bad for that.”
Oren laughed once despite everything.
They reached a wooden door opening toward the eastern market.
Locked.
Aren reached behind a flour barrel.
Pulled out an iron hook.
Oren stared.
“You planned for this?”
“I steal bread.”
Thirty seconds later, the door opened.
They escaped into an alley.
Behind the palace, the Guardian roared again.
The entire city shook.
Aren looked upward.
“What happens now?”
Oren took his shoulder.
“We find somewhere the King cannot reach you.”
“There is nowhere.”
The historian looked toward the eastern hills.
“One place.”
They traveled after dark.
Aren wore a hood.
Oren had exchanged his royal robes for a plain traveling cloak taken from a sympathetic monastery near the southern gate.
They walked for hours before a wagon driver agreed to carry them beyond the city.
Only then did Aren begin asking questions.
“Who was my mother?”
Oren stared forward.
“Princess Elara.”
Aren waited.
The name meant nothing.
It should have meant something.
It did not.
“Whose princess?”
“Eldoria’s.”
“No.”
Aren’s frustration rose.
“You said a name like I’m supposed to know it.”
Oren looked toward him.
“You truly do not.”
“I told you.”
The old man rubbed his face.
“The histories were altered more thoroughly than I imagined.”
He began.
Before Aldric became King, Eldoria had another Crown Prince.
His older brother.
Prince Theron.
Theron married Elara Veyne, the last descendant of a royal branch believed extinguished centuries earlier.
Most considered the marriage politically irrelevant.
Then Oren found an ancient genealogy hidden beneath the royal archive.
Elara did not merely belong to an old noble family.
She carried the blood of Eldoria’s first rulers.
The rulers before the current dynasty.
The rulers bound to the Stone Giants.
“Your father was Theron.”
Aren looked toward Oren.
“The King’s brother?”
“Yes.”
“What happened?”
The old man’s silence answered before his words.
“He died.”
“How?”
“A hunting accident.”