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Prologue

The world would come to know her by many names. The Murderer Queen. The Banished Queen. The Plague Queen. To others, simply, the Scourge. Her kingdom: Nirole, the Stolen Realm. The Taken City. The Petrified Kingdom.

In the beginning, though, Reema Morgan was just a woman—a common mage—who fell in love with the wrong man.

When Prince Atticus of Nirole first asked her to marry him, Reema Morgan refused. She did not love the prince, and she could not marry one whom she did not love. For it was his Duke, Sir Hadrian, who had stolen the heart of the commoner woman, and it was he whom she wished to marry.

The prince persisted, and the Morgans, wanting only the best for their daughter, pushed too. Reema would marry Prince Atticus, for he was a good man who was kind and just, and would lead the nation to greatness when he came to assume the throne. It was a chance to be a queen, they told her. It was a chance for her to have everything, to want for nothing, to be safe and protected and beloved by all. It was a chance for her to have the power to make a difference in the lives of her people—and of her family.

The marriage made sense and so, at the third proposal, Reema Morgan agreed.

But, as the world would come to learn, a more sinister plot was at work.

Prince Atticus and Princess Morgan were married for one year before King Sebastian renounced the throne to his only son. Soon after the ceremony, the new King's Court began to press for the birth of an heir. Reema, having grown selfish and ungrateful in the wake of the gifts and liberties King Atticus had granted to her and her family, refused. To give birth to a child was dangerous, and for some even deadly, and she used this knowledge against the king to convince him to spare her this risk. The king, bewitched by the queen and her beauty but unable to continue defending the lack of an heir, sought the council of his friend, the Duke. He didn't want to lose his wife, and he knew her magic might not be strong enough to see her safely through a delivery.

In secret, Sir Hadrian arranged for a surrogate and, with the queen's blessing, King Atticus lay with the woman until he had conceived a child. But the Duke did not wish to see Nirole one day ruled by an illegitimate heir—not when the heir would supersede his own position in the line for the throne—and not when he still loved the queen. He came to Reema Morgan in the night, told her of a plan in which they could save the kingdom from scandal and be together.

A few days later, King Atticus was found in his quarters, slain. The surrogate and the bastard child were murdered as well. In the weeks after the turmoil, Queen Reema and the new King Hadrian were married and conceived another heir.

Three months into the pregnancy, the new heir, too, was lost, for Reema had become warped with the taste of power and wanted to rule alone. Now King Hadrian, whom she had once loved, had become the next target.

King Hadrian, enraged by the loss, told the kingdom of the queen's murder of King Atticus, of the plot to let a bastard child reign as king, of the murder of the legitimate heir, and of her desire to kill him, the new king, as well. Calls for her execution rang throughout the kingdom, but King Hadrian still loved her, and so, he would not kill her. Instead, he called for the help of another mage who placed a curse upon Queen Reema.

Never could she bear a child—she had her chance.

Never would another man love her lest she break his heart.

Never could she die by her own hand—she would live forever with her past.

He branded his wife with four slashes beneath her right eye—one for each soul lost to her barbarity—and a fifth, broken slash, to indicate her failed attempt at one more.

Then he banished the Murderer Queen to a life of solitude, weak and hungry and powerless, and shunned by all who would see her scars.