Warren lied awake in his bunk in the barracks for most of the night, staring at the ceiling as he tried to process what the queen had told him earlier.

Bring Rei back to life? Is that even possible?

He hadn’t had a chance to ask her how she planned to do this before the queen’s guards came to get her for dinner.

“We shall speak again tomorrow, Sir Warren.”

And that was that. So now what?

Warren sighed. “I guess I’m going to bring Rei back to life,” he said under his breath. “Sure. That makes a crap-ton of sense. Yep.”

He ended up dozing off with his mind overflowing with what-ifs, waking up in the morning feeling as if he hadn’t slept at all. The other knights looked at him strangely, but that was nothing new. After all, he was “not chosen by the king” and “barely worth his title”. Normally he’d have a few choice words for the others, several of which could not be repeated with children present. Today however, he simply sat off to the side of the long breakfast table and listened in on whatever was being said. Warren wasn’t the gossiping type, but the other knights and castle servants were always spreading the latest rumors about this-and-that and so-and-so. It was incredibly tiring in his opinion. He was about ready to leave the table when he overheard something that caught his attention.

“With His Highness gone, the king and queen have no heirs. Rumor has it Faylinn’s done for.”

One of the other knights scoffed. “Faylinn? Fall to Edrys? That’s ridiculous. We’re ten times as powerful as they are. Even without the prince, we can easily handle ‘em.”

We can “handle ‘em” all you want, thought Warren. Won’t change the fact that if the king and queen die, the kingdom’ll fall apart.

“We need Rei,” he whispered, standing up and making a mental note to meet with the queen later.I wonder if she knows what her own knights are saying about her dead son…