King Rega IV sat hunched over a stack of grim dispatches, a flickering magical light orb casting long, skeletal shadows across the throne room. Commander Vihan stood stiffly beside him, pointing at a particularly bloody tally. The man's face seemed permanently etched with the weariness of someone who had been delivering bad news for so long he'd forgotten what good news felt like.

  "As you can see, Your Majesty, the losses at the Crimson Pass were… substantial. Another five hundred gone. And the Northern tribes show no signs of relenting." Vihan's voice was flat, the tone of a man reciting an unpleasant truth he'd recited too many times.

  Rega tossed the parchment onto the table, the sound echoing in the vast chamber. "Five hundred more. For what? Because my father, in his infinite wisdom, decided that free ase training for the general populace was a drain on the royal coffers. Now we have a generation of soldiers who can barely conjure a decent shield spell." He leaned back. "Why are we even fighting this war, Vihan?"

  Vihan shifted uncomfortably. "It was your father's will, Your Majesty."

  Rega fixed him with a look that could have frozen magma. He debated, for a fleeting and dangerous moment, whether the man's staunch loyalty to a dead tyrant still outweighed his usefulness. It was the kind of thought that arrived quickly and departed just as quickly — Vihan was competent, and competence was scarce enough to be worth tolerating.

  Before he could voice anything, a nervous shuffling at the entrance of the throne hall drew his attention. A young servant stood just inside the massive oak doors, eyes wide, clearly having spent the walk here rehearsing whether to knock.

  "We're busy," Rega said, already reaching for one of the sleek handguns holstered at his hip. The weapon was old — pre-war manufacture, the light-magic housing along the barrel worn smooth from years of handling — but it still hummed with quiet menace when his fingers wrapped around the grip. "Go before I use you for target practice."

  "Sir, I have urgent news," the servant stammered, his gaze darting between the gun and the looming figure of the commander.

  Rega sighed. "Fine. But if I deem this trivial, I'm shooting off one of your ears. Out with it." He leveled the gun with the unhurried ease of a man who had done it before and not lost sleep over it.

  The servant swallowed hard. "There are multiple reports, Your Majesty. Of a child — with a green ase affinity, sir."

  Commander Vihan's head turned sharply. "Impossible. They are extinct."

  "Eighty years, give or take," Rega said, his finger resting lightly on the trigger. "The reports — are they credible?"

  "Yes, Your Majesty. Several nobles witnessed the attribute stone turn green themselves."

  Rega lowered the gun a fraction, not holstering it. "So. A rare aseborn child. What does this have to do with me or the war effort?"

  "Your father made it a matter of highest urgency, sir," the servant said, the words coming faster now, as though speed might substitute for armor. "He authorized a reward of two thousand gold coins for information leading to a finding. Twenty thousand for anyone who brought one in alive."

  Rega's hand stilled entirely.

  Twenty thousand gold coins. He turned the number over in his mind the way a man turns over a stone he's not sure he wants to look under. "Twenty thousand," he repeated.

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  The servant could only nod, his face a mask of terror.

  "Where?"

  "The sightings place the child in the southern territories, Your Majesty. Moving north, based on the most recent reports."

  Rega set the gun down on the armrest and looked at the ceiling. His father had wanted a green aseborn badly enough to offer a small fortune, and had never explained why to anyone still living. The bounty had sat in the royal ledgers for decades, quietly accumulating dust — a standing order with no attached reasoning, like a locked door with the key buried somewhere Rega had never thought to look. That was either a serious problem or a significant opportunity, depending entirely on what a green aseborn actually was.

  He realized, with some irritation, that he had no idea.

  "Keep the reward as is," he said finally. "And I want someone reliable running down these sightings — not whoever filed the initial report. Someone who understands discretion."

  Vihan straightened. "And if the child is found?"

  "Brought here. Alive and unharmed." Rega picked the gun back up and turned it slowly in his hand, not pointing it at anything in particular. "Whatever my father wanted with a green aseborn, I intend to find out. I'd prefer to find out before someone else does."

  He dismissed the servant with a wave and held the silence for a moment after the heavy doors closed.

  "You were saying something about the trade delegation from Dakara."

  Vihan consulted his notes with the careful precision of a man grateful for something concrete to look at. "Yes. They've refused to proceed. Their delegation cited —" a brief pause, the particular restraint of someone choosing words carefully "— 'unholy abominations' near the Blackwood pass. Apparently a single fire arrow from a nervous guard caused an entire unit to ignite."

  Rega closed his eyes briefly. Njiru.

  His Master Necromancer had grand promises — an unstoppable legion, impervious to fear, the ultimate weapon. The reality had been considerably more modest. The undead were, as advertised, impervious to fear. They were also spectacularly vulnerable to fire spells, holy magic, determined village militias with torches, and apparently nervous trade guards with a single arrow. Entire platoons had dissolved under a cleric's prayer. The cost of raising them, only to watch them dispatched by a farmer with a burning pitchfork, had been quietly galling in ways Rega had never voiced aloud.

  They were, however, exceptional miners.

  He had made the adjustment without ceremony. Njiru's undead now worked the iron mines of the mountains and felled timber in the woods — no wages, no rest, no complaints about the dark. The mines had never been more productive. He had attempted to extend the arrangement to the farmlands along the Serene River, which had gone badly in ways he should have anticipated. The farming guilds had sent furious delegations. There had been burning effigies outside the palace gates. The phrase Bone King had begun appearing in pamphlets — cheaply printed things, passed hand to hand through the market districts, the ink still smudged from whoever had run them off in haste. Food, it turned out, was where his subjects drew the line.

  Mining and logging it was. Vihan had never said I told you so, which Rega had noted and privately credited to him.

  "Tell the Dakara delegation the Blackwood pass will be cleared by living patrols," Rega said. "Reassign whatever unit Njiru had there. The dead go back to the mines." He picked up another dispatch and turned it over without reading it. "And Vihan — the green aseborn. Find me someone quiet."

  "Yes, Your Majesty." Vihan gathered his notes, then paused at the edge of the lamplight — a half-second's hesitation, barely long enough to notice. "The northern tribes, the undead, the trade routes, and now this. Your father left you a great deal to manage, Your Majesty."

  It was the closest thing to an opinion Vihan had offered in three years of service. Rega glanced at him.

  "He did," Rega said. "Goodnight, Commander."

  After Vihan left, Rega sat alone with the dispatches and the flickering light and the particular silence of a throne room at night. He thought about the bounty. Twenty thousand gold coins, no explanation, kept so close that not even his most senior advisors knew the reason behind it.

  His father had been many things — cruel, paranoid, shortsighted in ways still costing Rega lives on the northern border. But he had not been stupid, and he had not been reckless with money. If he had wanted a green aseborn badly enough to offer that sum and hold the reason to himself until he died, there was something behind it.

  Rega intended to find out what — before the child arrived at the capital on their own terms, or in someone else's hands.

  He picked up the next dispatch and began to read.