surfacing. . . .
So I promised you all cut scenes from Kings and Assassins, and promptly fell down on the job. Problem is, I'm a big writer. Tell me to write 100K, and I'll write 140K. Tell me to write 120K, and it just gets ridiculous. This is the sole reason I moved to novel writing in the first place: my "short" stories were all clocking in at 7K, 10K, 25K, and the first Sylvie "short?" reached 40K at the 3/4 mark before I got disgusted and decided she needed to be a novel character.

The point of all this rambling is, it took me a little time to find a fun snippet to show, and not a 10K monstrosity.  Have a fun bit of potential magic I really hated to lose.  Rough, as it was cut from the first draft.

Rue nodded once more, drew Janus closer to the desk with the lowering of his voice. "Shut the door, Downey. With yourself on the outside, please."
Janus watched Rue bring a ring out of his pocket, a man's ring, sized large enough to hold the pale moonstone across it. "What do you think of this?" he asked, passing it to Janus.
"Gaudy?" Janus said, flippant and unsure of Rue's apparent and irrelevant civility. "A giant's ring." Light caught in its milky whiteness, traced lines through it, and Janus raised the gem to take full advantage of the gas lamp on Rue's desk. Not a flaw in the stone, but deliberate design. He shifted the stone, trying to define the image that ghosted through the gem.
"It's an eye," Rue said, taking the gem from his hands. He cupped it in his own and studied it intently. "It's a miner's canary of sorts."
Janus parsed that, and said, "This was a test?"
"Maybe," Rue acknowledged. "But of the ring or you? I'm not sure if I've learned anything."
"It's a ring," Janus said. "What was supposed to happen?" He rubbed his hands along his sides, spotted a pen wiper on the desk, and used that instead. Gloves, he thought. He had been careless. Rue could have poisoned the stone; if the ring had been of the type so prevalent in the Itarusine Court, there might have been any manner of sharp protrusions designed both to injure flesh and deliver death.
"It's a device," Rue said, "not jewelry. Or at least, that's the legend that comes with it. What you hold, Janus is an eye of Baxit. A stone that supposedly darkens in the presence of a god."
Janus sat down before the desk. "You believe this?"
Rue flashed a quick grin with nothing of mirth in it. "Maledicte ran wild in the palace, spilled blood at will, and the sky was black with rooks. The stones themselves shook to the very foundations. I pride myself on being a pragmatic man. If there are gods still, then one walked with your lover that night. I will not see the palace taken so unawares again."
Janus eyed the ring again with something close to lust in his belly. With that ring, he could track Maledicte across the city, even across the sea. . . .
"But I don't know if it works," Rue said, fisting it and making it disappear back into his waistcoat. Padget, Janus thought, would have deplored the bulge it created in an otherwise well-cut suit. Janus merely wondered where Rue would put the gem when the waistcoat was removed, on a thong around his neck, on his dressing table, or safely locked away, and how well-guarded it was likely to be.