The Queen of Lies Read Online Free PDF

of the deaths.”
    “The fuck?” Sword said. “The killings are supposed to be random.”
    Heath unfolded the parchment Loran had given him. “This is who we’re looking for. Recognize him?”
    “The fucking shepherd from Reda,” Sword said.
    “He’s back.”

F OUR
Deposed
J ESSA
    T HOUGH I AM distant relation to the Empress Iridissa, I’d never imagined being called before the Coral Throne. The circumstances of my birth are ignominious, and all that needs be said is that the man who begat me was a Stormlord of a minor lineage who abandoned my mother and me to squalor.
    The first tremor came when I was ten. I didn’t know what was happening to me—I seized with pain as if my whole body were vibrating. It lasted only a few seconds, but it happened three times during the night. Much, much later I would coincide the event with the traitor Stormlord Renax and his family’s assassination in Rivern.
    There were other fits spread so many years apart that I forgot them entirely until they came upon me. Then on a fateful windy Krackensday in Low Tide, my birth father died in a port a hundred miles from Sargasso. The pain was excruciating beyond anything I’d felt before. But as with all the others, it passed in an instant. To the great surprise of my loving wife, my eyes had turned bright silver.
    She wept with joy as she pressed my head beneath the waters in our little bath, and I calmly breathed the soapy water. My children squealed with delight as I blasted seagulls from the sky with arcs of lightning. I exulted in the rains that once chilled my very bones. By the pure accident of my birth, I had become the newest and last in line for the Coral Throne, an heir to the glory of the Thrycean Dominance.
    — EXCERPT FROM THE DIARY OF STORMLORD MELICOR, NINETY-NINTH IN THE LINE OF SUCCESSION FOR THE CORAL THRONE, BARON OF FANG ISLAND, AND CAPTAIN OF THE WAILING SIREN
     
    S ATRYN PREENED IN the mirror, fixing her long silver hair with scrimshaw-and-onyx hairpins. She could have passed for Jessa’s older sister, a fact she was fond of telling nearly everyone. Jessa had inherited some of her mother’s features but none of her presence. Whereas Satryn’s silver eyes smoldered with intensity, Jessa’s were pensive.
    Jessa stared out the window panes at the Rivern Patrean guards and shadowy Invocari gathered on the lawn below her third-story guest quarters. She counted fifteen Patrean soldiers and two Invocari.
    “They don’t trust us, Mother,” Jessa said nervously.
    Satryn sighed. “If the soldiers are there for our protection, it’s unnecessary. And if they’re there to detain us, it’s an insult. Either way I would pay them no mind.”
    “Should we have brought our own guard from Amhaven?” Jessa worried.
    “Honestly,” Satryn said reaching for her powder, “you could kill those guards with a flick of your wrist.” Like her mother, Jessa had been born with the power to control lightning and water.
    Jessa spun toward her. “I don’t think that will be necessary. Muriel is my cousin. I’m sure she’s just ensuring our safety.”
    “She underestimates us,” Satryn corrected. “Either way.”
    “The countess has been nothing but gracious in receiving us,” Jessa said.
    “Don’t be fooled by our hosts’ hospitality,” Satryn cautioned. “The countess appears generous because she believes we’re weak. This veneer of civility will crack like an eggshell if these negotiations go poorly, and they would gladly see us strung up in the tower so all the toothless city folk could gawp at our moldering, naked corpses. Now fetch me a necklace that accentuates my neckline.”
    “Are you trying to negotiate or seduce her? I’d have thought the countess was a bit old for you.” Jessa rummaged through her mother’s jewelry box for something tasteful.
    Satryn played with the button on her silk blouse, which she wore open to her bosom, beneath her embroidered crimson naval doublet. Like all highborns in the