Three years later, Chris sometimes suspected that time had passed the rest of the kingdom and simply failed to report to their household.
Not because life had gone still. Quite the opposite.
Too much had changed for stillness to be mistaken for peace.
Dean was in Alamina now, officially engaged to Arion in a development that had started as a private catastrophe, matured into a diplomatic reality, and somehow ended with both empires acting as though the match had always been obvious to civilized people. The photographs alone had been enough to make several noblewomen in Saha develop opinions strong enough to require medication. Dean, infuriatingly, looked magnificent in all of them, and Arion looked exactly like a man who had never once doubted that the world would eventually arrange itself around his preferences.
Meanwhile, Nero had developed a level of brilliance that exhausted adults upon contact.
