Lucien's POV
They tell you power tastes like wine. They lie.
Power tastes like iron and ash, the metallic certainty of a plan unfolding, the acrid smoke that rises when someone else's world burns. Tonight it tastes like both, and I drink deeply.
Adrian's grief is a thing I can almost hold in my hand. I can feel it through the castle's bones, the way his shoulders slump when he thinks no one watches, the tremor in his voice when he orders me and everyone to leave him alone. I saw it when I stood before him with Blackthorn's blood drying on my blade. He tried to be a king. He tried to be a god. But gods crumble when their hearts are split open. I made sure his did.
Adrian grows weaker with every passing hour, not in body, but in spirit. He drowns himself in grief, and grief is the finest chain. A king who mourns cannot rule. A king who doubts cannot defend. And Adrian, Adrian has doubts thicker than fog.
I see it in his eyes when he speaks of Damien, though he does not know I notice. I see the trembling in his fingers when the wolf king's name is uttered. He loved him. That much is clear. Love? how pathetic. How ruinous. He fell into his own trap, for it was he who first schemed to use Damien, to seduce him, to bend him to submission. And yet, the seducer was seduced. He played at power and ended a fool, bleeding out his heart in the dark.
It is a shameful irony, and I am glad to be the one who twisted the knife.
But the throne is not won with one act of poison. It requires patience, precision. My mother reminds me of this nightly.
"Adrian must unravel himself," she whispers as she pours wine at council dinners, her smile a mask of cold courtesy. "Let his grief hollow him. Let him make mistakes. The nobles will not follow a broken king. They will look for strength, and they will find it in you."
Valerius nods along, playing the ever-supportive duke. He already sows whispers among his faction of nobles, rumors of Adrian's weakness, his strange mourning, his poor judgment. Soon enough, those whispers will roar into cries for new leadership.
And when they do, I will be waiting.
My father told me once, when my little hands were still too soft to hold a dagger, that the world is a table and a throne is only another chair. If you have the stomach to take a seat, you take it. If you have not, you die hungry.
My father believed it, but he never took his seat. He believed, like many fools, that honor would be enough. It was not. Honor starved him.
Adrian's sire, the man who sat there but his son Adrian in every song like a legend stole that seat. He marched into halls where men like my father waited in shadow and took what he wanted with a smile and a sword. I was a boy the first time I watched the coronation. I felt the world tilt then, felt my lineage shoved aside like garbage in the gutters. I remember my father's hands trembled, the little boy inside him breaking when he whispered, "It should have been ours."
That whisper became my ballast, my hunger, my oath. I spent the years since learning every currency that buys a crown, cruelty, patience, networks, and, most important, secrets.
My mother, Duchess Isolde Veyra taught me the final, quietest coin of all.
Isolde is a cold thing masquerading as a woman. People call her beautiful because they do not want to see how sharp her beauty can be. She moves through court like winter, men bow because warmth dies under her gaze. She is my mother in name and my master in method. She taught me to read faces like maps and to talk like honey while working a blade out of sight. Her lessons were never tender.
"You are not a prince to be adored," she told me when I was old enough to understand fear. "You are a weapon to be wielded. Thrones do not give themselves out, they are taken. And sometimes, taking is messy. Sometimes, taking requires art."
The art she taught me had a name, Venorix.
Venorix is not a potion, it is a legacy. My mother made it from things the court would not speak of aloud, spider-venoms that whisper on the tongue, root-ashes burned until the smoke remembers death, the final tincture mixed with a drop of the maker's blood so the poison remembers who commanded it. It is slow, precise, a long unraveling rather than a snapping.
My mother used it, once, years ago. She slipped it into cups, into wounds, into places where trust would swallow the blade whole. Men died thinking their chest only felt heavy from wine. That was the miracle. That was the cruelty.
She used it to end those who stood between her and power. She used it when expedience demanded discretion. She used it to remove Adrian's father from his seat, a historical footnote, a "natural" death whispered about in the right salons. They said fate. We called it preparation.
And she used it again, when it suited us, when I would stand at the edge of a throne no one would hand me. I did not expect the ache in Adrian's face when I rode back into his halls. No, I expected triumph, but I had not expected how much the sight of him mourning would taste like victory and ash at once. The guilt? The shame? They are for fools. I am not foolish.
Still, there is an artistry to cruelty and a finesse to timing. Poison alone is not enough, someone must present it with elegance, make sure it pierces the right life at the right hour. My mother taught me that too.
She smoked the vials under her cloak until they smelled like sin. She taught me the names of trafficked herbs and the slow patience that makes a death look like destiny. When I was old enough, she let my hands be the hands that delivered the gift.
"Remember," she had whispered once, after the candles were put out and the servants carried the goblets away. "Remember that a king's downfall is always his own doing. We only provide the stage."
Valerius, my mother's chosen consort and my stepfather, is the hand that oils the wheel.
He is the smiling duke with alliances, land, and an appetite for advantage. Where my mother is cold and surgical, Valerius is warm and poisonous, he flatters and then sells the crown to the highest whisper. He married my mother because marriages are not about love for those who have influence, they are investments. And he made the perfect transaction.
You must know, he is not blameless in all of this. His role has been to shape opinion, to rust the gears, to nudge the nobles into panic when a king markets his grief. Valerius has been whispering to the merchants and the minor lords that Adrian's decisions are strange, that mourning is a sickness when a ruler must be steel. He sows doubt like seeds, knowing the harvest comes quick.
Tonight the harvest is ripe.
I watched Adrian return from the edge of Blackthorn and I watched him crumble. The man who once stood like a statue of obsidian, a face that never betrayed heat, is now a skinned animal, pacing, hands raw with regret. He orders me away and then calls me back. He forbids me to enter his sight and yet he leaves his innermost wounds open for me to watch. He thinks that pain could make him stronger. He is wrong.
When I stepped into the chamber after the raid, blood on my hands and Blackthorn's dusk on my cloak, I saw him tremble. He blinked and for the first time since I can remember the old arrogance had a crack. It is a terrible pleasure to see a tyrant naked with loss. I confess it. I admit it in the name of truth. I have wanted that throne since the first winter I understood what a crown did. To see the man who took my legacy fall? It is the sweet part of revenge.
But the throne is not won by spectacle alone. You must gather allies. You must build noise.
My mother and Valerius are both architects of such noise. "Let him stew," Isolde told me when we met after I returned. Her silhouette cut a dark figure in the hearthlight, the vial of Venorix gleaming like a jewel at her belt. "Let him be a man who mourns in public and rules poorly in private. Let him deny strength and watch the nobles scramble to the side of anyone who will?" She tapped my shoulder with a finger delicate as a knife. "That man will make a fatal mistake."
Valerius smiled quietly over wine. "We have already begun to whisper," he said, toasting without raising his glass. "Adrian cannot afford to be weak when men look for leadership. A single mismanaged order, a single misstep, and the marshals will begin to question who should give commands."
They smiled in a way that made my skin hungry. They were pleased, and I was pleased. Not only because the throne was a promise near to being fulfilled but because this was justice, in my mind. Justice for fathers and for stolen legacies. Justice for bloodlines scorned. Justice for me.
Tonight, when the nobles praised the strike and clinked goblets over Adrian's grief, I let them. Let them dance. Let them laugh. Let them toast with wine and song. I listened as Valerius' whispers hit the right ears.
The duke moved tonight like a spider among flies, his hand laying threads to pull when the time came. He has a thousand small debts to call upon now. My mother's poison gave me the opening, Valerius' finesse will turn it into a cascade.
Isolde sat with me afterwards, as she often does after a decisive act and she did not bother to comfort me. All she wanted was to sharpen the next step. "Adrian will break," she said flatly, eyes like chips of ice. "He will make choices driven by sorrow. We will scrape those choices clean and sell them as reason to change course. The nobles will follow anything that promises certainty."
"You think they will name me?" I asked. It would be a step, it would not be the final fall.
The throne will not be placed in my hands with a single toast. It will take meetings, bribes, assurances. A public face to stand above men who fear weakness.
Isolde smiled, and it was a smile without warmth. "Not at first. A council, perhaps. A reformed regime. But once you stand as the pillar of stability once you hold the sword and the purse and the pledge of the guard, then crowns become inevitable."
Valerius, always the dealer, has already begun smoothing the necessary pathways.
He has a dozen favor slips ready, a half-dozen marriages to broker that bind the lesser lords to our fold. I am patient. Was my father patient? No. He took his sword and charged, and he bled out like a child. That is not my way.
I learned the lessons of strategy and timing. I learned how to feed rumors with breadcrumbs of truth and how to use a poison that looks inevitable. I learned the stomach for watching the man with the crown crumble and then moving in with a smile that sells safety.
Tonight, while Adrian weeps into pillows like a man who cannot comprehend the cruelty of his own fate, I am already arranging the furniture of power. I am meeting men in the buttery rooms at dawn. I am inviting small lords to private suppers, allowing them to see Valerius speak so kindly of order and strength. I am turning their fear into our momentum.
There is a moment I savor, one that will be a memory like a bell tolling. My mother leaned close to me and held my face in her hands as one might hold an heirloom. "You are not merely reclaiming a seat," she said. "You are finishing a line. This is not theft. This is restoration."
Restoration, then. Let historians debate the righteousness of kings after the fact. Tonight our house takes what it believes is owed, and I will not apologize for being the one with claws and patience enough to take it.
Adrian's grief will be his ruin. My mother's poison will be our instrument. Valerius' silver tongue will be our trumpeter. And when the nobles finally look for a leader who will not be broken by tears, they will find me standing with a steady hand.
I am Lucien Veyra. My blood remembers being denied a crown. My heart remembers betrayal. My hands remember poison. The throne is in the map of my bones. I will not be denied this time.
Power tastes like iron and ash. I will learn to love it.
I will take everything from him.
Just as his father took everything from mine.
Adrian thinks grief is his punishment. But it is only the beginning. Soon, the nobles will turn. The people will murmur. The throne will tremble beneath him.
And when it falls, I will rise.
My mother's venom runs not only in my veins, but in my purpose. My stepfather's cunning shapes my every move. Together, we are shadows waiting for the perfect strike.
Adrian is already crumbling.
And I, Lucien Veyra will be there to watch him shatter.
The crown will be mine.
By blood. By poison. By destiny.