The emperor and the healer

THE THRONE HE KILLED FOR

In the khaganate the heir isn't named. He's whoever's still standing.

Urus took his ivory throne the way khagans do — by surviving. His dying mother named him and his elder brother Orda to fight for the succession, and set wild animals, spike-wheeled chariots and traps on them in an amphitheatre for six hours. When Orda went down wounded, Urus threw aside his own sword to help him; Orda answered by trying to stab him in the heart, missing by inches, and Urus pulled that same knife from his own chest and killed his brother with it. Thirty years of rule followed. The gentlest instinct in that arena nearly got him killed — and the merit-succession of the Khaganate is exactly that pitiless.

THE EMPEROR WHO WORE NO CROWN

Adarlan's kings pile on the regalia. He sees the point of none of it.

When Chaol Westfall and Nesryn Faliq reach Antica, Urus receives them from an ivory throne on a green marble dais, four or five of his children ranged around him — the ruk-riding Sartaq, fire-eyed Hasar, cavalry-commander Kashin, spymaster Arghun, pregnant Duva. He wears cobalt robes and no crown at all, because in the Khaganate the ruler is reckoned a god among mortals, and gods need no markers. His spies have already told him why the envoys came, and he says it to their faces: they have come to drag him into a losing war. He rejects the gold Aelin sent — he recognises it as hers — and notes, pointedly, the wedding gift they failed to bring for Duva.

THE GRIEF THAT STALLED A WAR

White silk in every window, and an emperor no one could reach.

For most of the book Urus is unreachable, sunk in mourning for his youngest daughter, Tumelun, who fell to her death from a balcony — grieved across the palace in strips of white silk tied to the open windows, the Khaganate's colour of mourning, carrying the family's thoughts to the dead. He refuses Chaol the private audience the alliance depends on, again and again, too deep in his loss to be moved. What no one yet knows is that Tumelun did not jump: she was pushed by her own sister Duva, sweet and pregnant and secretly ridden by a Valg demon that Erawan planted in the most powerful court on the planet.

THE HEALER WHO CHANGED HIS MIND

Nothing diplomatic reached him. One saved daughter did.

The Valg in Duva finally shows itself, turning her dark magic on the healer Yrene Towers at a royal gathering — and Yrene channels her power to burn the demon out, saving Duva and her unborn child both, and proving the Valg can be purged. It is the thing the whole book of envoys and gifts could not do. The grieving, sceptical emperor who refused the alliance for the length of a novel promises Yrene anything, and commits the Khaganate to Erilea's war at last — some three hundred healers, a thousand ruk-riders, a thousand ships of horse and foot — and names his second son, Sartaq, his heir. A daughter's life bought the war that gold could not.