Prince Aurel Vask has been dead for eleven years. His kingdom has not noticed. He sits the black throne by daylight, signs laws, eats dinner with his court — and every night the unquiet dead of his realm rise to petition him in a language only he can speak. Mara Aldane is the census-taker sent by the empire to prove that the kingdom cannot govern itself. What she finds is a nation whose harvests are too good, whose people are quietly wrong, and whose prince cannot be killed because he has ...