I might've narrowly missed my calling as Soap Queen of Verald, but that didn't make me an idiot. I’d seen the same hungry looks on the young men in Verald as those on the younger Phaetyn rioting at the tree. Whatever was happening here, either the queen wasn’t making the choices, or she was making the wrong ones. Happy subjects didn’t have that look on their faces. Trees didn’t decay when properly tended to. Dyter was right. We’d walked into a civil war.
