A king is not the ruler of land. A king is the guardian of his people.
PROLOGUE: THE LAST DAY
The old man sat beneath the great oak with his back against its bark and his sword across his knees.
He was not old in the way that frightens men — not frail, not hollow-eyed, not trembling. His shoulders were broad as a doorframe. His hands, resting upon the flat of the blade, were scarred and enormous, the hands of someone who had built things and broken things in equal measure. His hair had gone silver at the temples and white at the crown, and the lines of his face were deep, but they were not lines of weakness. They were the lines of a man who had looked at the world for sixty years and refused to look away.
The city spread out below the hill where he rested. It was his city — which was to say it was one of thousands — but this one he had visited often in his youth, and the sight of it now made something move in his chest. Towers of pale stone caught the afternoon light. The harbor was full of ships flying the flag of the empire: a golden sun on a field of deep blue, seven rays extending outward like reaching arms.
He could hear the sounds of the city even here. Vendors calling. Children running. Hammers on metal from some workshop near the lower wall. The empire at peace, which was the empire at its finest, which was the empire as he had always dreamed it.
His children were gathered around him. Not all of them — there were millions, and they were spread across every land beneath the sun — but the ones who had traveled with him on this last tour of the world he had made. His generals, now aged. His closest ministers. His crown prince, who sat a little apart with his hands folded, watching his father with quiet eyes. And ordinary people of the city, who had come when word spread that the Emperor was resting on the hill, and who now sat or stood in a wide half-circle, not daring to come too close, not willing to leave.
They did not know, yet, what was happening. He had kept the wound hidden under his robes. He had not allowed them to call a physician. There was no point.
He looked up through the leaves of the oak at the sky.
It was very blue today. Very wide. Very far away.
He had wanted, his whole life, to reach it.
Well.
He smiled.
He had done what he could. The rest was for them.
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