As fall turo wihe royal household moved into Mistfen, the Siu al residehe great muddy river flowed past the vish mansion like coaguting blood, great ks of id sned down from the north turning brown aing as they oozed toward the o.
Standing and status were more rexed in Siu al due to the delta’s strange view of wealth being a substitute food breeding. As a result, the Festival of Winterlight was a mix of royalty, nobility, and the very rich. The king and queen, the newly married prind princess, and the Lord and Lady of Siu al, all sat on the High Stand. Right o all this noble, a blood lounged some of the wealthiest sacramental owners in the south, a handful of affluent gambling house owners, certain men of means who remained vague about their industries, and a mert who’d built his shipping empire outrunning the pirates before the war. This st was escorted by the infamous courtesan, the Daylily of Siu al.
The Winterlight sacrifices were lit, the strong gods were pleased, and it was annouo the gathering that Priian and Princess Pasiona were expeg an heir.
As the former prince Izakiel had beehed several times, married none, and hadn’t even fathered a bastard in all the time he was in line for the , public opinion was that Hazerial’s unorthodox choice for future king had proven correct. The strong gods clearly smiled upon the move, Teikru particurly, sihe god-goddess had blessed the young couple with a child.
With this joyous annou ringing in the smoke-, mud-, and blood-sted night, the revelry began. Noble ahy oner alike swept across the opulent High Pavilion in time with the majestic strains of court musis. Below, the peasants jumped and twisted and swung one another along with wailia tunes.
The juxtaposition of high and low, noble and on appealed to Pasiona. She flowed through the steps with her husband in icy perfe, watg the wild cav taking pce below.
“They look as if they’re having more fun down there,” Etian said.
Pasiona locked eyes with him. “You always seem to know what I’m thinking.”
“If you were a fencer, I’d tell you not to look where yoing to strike.” The flickering light from the sacrifices glinted off his lenses. “Your eyes give you away.”
She slid her hand up his shoulder until she could stroke the warmth of his neck. It was a rare breach of her frozen fa?ade, but ohat could easily be dismissed as actal pt by an expeg princess growing weary of the festivities. He aowledged the sign of affe with a hint of a smile and a squeeze of her waist.
Though no o cuessed it, Pasiona had grown to love Etian. As he had told her when they met, he was Josean-blessed; his tenderness was not like the tenderness Darios had shown her. Etian didn’t pose romantic verse or vish frivolous affe, but his attention, when it came to focus on her, was all-ing.
There was something, too, in the way his steely public face trasted with the rare vulnerability only she ever saw. It had been the same with Darios. Her admiration for the oner had sprung from the disparity between the hardened warrior and the lovesick poet who shared a single body.
Etia his nights in punishiion, pushing through hours of study with his blood magic tutors. After washing the sweat and blood away, it was off to court or the Hall of Law or war meetings. In the early ms, he dined with Pasiona in their chambers, and they took their pleasure of one another. Some days they bathed together, some days he bathed alohen it was off to the Royal Thorns, occasionally with the princess’s pany, where Etian fenced and practiced sword sarios until Pasiona could barely stand to watother match.
It was no mystery where his iron physique and stamina had e from. He was relentless. The mystery was how he mao keep going at such a pace. Surely even the sed ing of the warriod needed rest.
“It’s what I’ve always done,” was his expnation.
“Have you sidered that these exertions aren’t required of you now?” she asked. “No king fights his own battles. Your Thorns will see to them.”
Etian frowned. “I won’t leave men to do a job I wouldn’t do myself.”
In sleep alone did the cracks appear. Sometimes after Etian had left her bed for the day, Pasiona woke and slipped into the separate chamber where her husband slept.
The day of the Festival, in spite of their exertions on and off the pavilion, he slept as fitfully as ever. Pasiona pressed herself against the wall, one hand unsciously pressed to her lips as she watched him.
Without his lenses, Etian appeared younger, more vulnerable. The shadows seemed to paint his face with much deeper pools. He gasped for air, fought some awful creature, wept bitterly, cwed at the bedcovers and himself.
In the depths of the terror, she heard him whimper, “Kelena.”
The name sh of icy water on her face. Pasiona hadn’t seen the girl sihe royal progress the year before and had never spoken to her. Acc to the queen then, Princess Kelena had been too busy training to join in any of the ary feminine pursuits.
In truth, Pasiona had fotten that her husband had a sister. No one in the royal household ever alluded to the girl. No pce was ever set for her, no things were packed for her when the court moved. Pasiona couldn’t think of a single sign she’d seen of the girl in all the time she’d been a part of the royal family.
Though Pasiona was aced to secre her own affairs, she preferred blunt openness in the affairs of others. She approached her husband the night as he dressed.
“What happeo your sister, Kelena?”
“The strong gods chose her,” Etian said, going to the washstand.
“For what?”
He scooped water from the basin and scrubbed it across his face. “The war with the Het.”
“Where is she?” Pasiona asked. “Why have I never seen her in the pace? Why does no one ever speak of her?”
The washstand and basin exploded, splintered wood and shards of gss littering the floor. Blood dripped from Etian’s fist. He snatched a linen out of the debris, dried the water from his face, and slid his lenses on as if he couldn’t feel the injury.
Pasiona shook, poised somewhere between rage and fear. Her hands felt like ice, but her cheeks burned as she lifted her .
“Am I to take that as a warning and shrink away cowed?” Her voice crackled with the cold. “Before we married, you promised you would give me anything I wanted. I want to know where the girl is.”
He turo face her then, his eyes log on hers. Though he wore his gsses, Pasiona was certain in that moment that his dark eyes saw nothing. She backed away a step before she realized what she was doing and stood her ground.
“We are at war,” Etian said, his voice as hard as steel. “If you don’t have the stomach for that, get out.”
***
The motion to shore up the king’s army with the lords’ standing armies passed at the turn of the new year, about the time the Het sacked the northeastern city of Siu Ferel in all her shimmering, ivory beauty.
cio had held the motion off lohan he expected to, winning over nearly a third of the lords to his side—Kariot supposedly included—before a te winter croup caught him. Every siess otentially deadly for a man with his family’s failing lungs, and this bout in particur kept him away from the Hall of Law for a few nights shy of a month. cio sent the House Mattius representative in his pce, coag the man daily, grilling him for every word said in his absence, and more than likely drawing out the illness with his refusal to rest.
At the height of cio’s valesce, the king made a rare appearan the floor and ordered a vote. With Hazerial standing there, of course, a good portion of the chaff who’d blowo cio’s side blew back to Zinote’s, and the matter was decided just as the king had predicted.
The redrafted marriage tract was delivered the day after the motion passed, plete with the new five-year betrothal period. The king might be Eketra-blessed, but he had yet to default on a promise.
From his sickbed, cio examined his representative’s transcription of the king’s address to the Hall, while the Mattius family healer grumbled about wasting perfectly good blood magi a maermio work himself into the grave. Luckily, cio had plenty of practice ign the healer’s disapproval.
The address had been a powerful demand that the Kingdom of Night expend every resource avaible to crush the invaders, with suggestions that the lords who had been blog the motion cared more about their oearance of strength than the holdings being ransacked.
No hints at treason, however.
A vicious coughing fit disrupted his reading and sprayed fine droplets of blood onto the part. Less than he had been hag up, but still a remihat he could go the way of his many siblings at any time.
He g the updated marriage tra the writing desk.
The memory of the girl weeping in the dungeoh Bzing Prairie haunted him.
His peers bought and sold bloodsves youhan the princess as if they were cattle and paid top price for catches off the street if they were young and handsome enough. He’d overheard Kariot and his friends discussing the best ways to make peasants offer up their virgin children.
Ahe idea that a man and wife would not only subject their child to the torments he’d seen Kelena suffer but would use her suffering as a bargaining piece hounded cio as nothing else did. Her own parents. The very people who were supposed to be proteg her, coddling her, spoilio the core like all the other noble girls her age.
Maybe his father had been right. Maybe there was no hope for the kingdom short of total overthrow.
cio added the dried mullein the healer had left to the burner and tried to calm his lungs long enough to breathe in the smoke.
He had to survive, if only to save this one i from her circumstances. Survive and succeed at unig with the Het. vihem to take in an ambassador of peace from a people who tortured their own children.
But suppose the Children of Day were as twisted as the Kingdom of Night. Suppose they were worse.
Light, maybe cio was the twisted one. How could he be certain he had the moral high ground when every other soul in the world said he was wrong? If everyone believed the same thing, then that made him the aberration, didn’t it?
“You have a spark of the divine in you—we all do—and it doesn’t e from the strong gods,” Paius had told him once. “You know when something isn’t right. But bury that spark, push forward toerversion, shovel enough manure on top of it, and the spark will go out. So many vihemselves that only their pleasure matters. The pain of those around them ceases to hurt them. When seeing others suffer stops hurting you, then you’ll know you’ve lost the truth.”
A touch heretical, certainly, but in his now thirty-two years, cio had observed the truth in his father’s words over and ain.
The only response was to soldier on for as long as his crippled leg, failing lungs, and bleedi kept w.
***
The day after the Hall of Law voted to give and of their standing armies to the , Hazerial summoiao the royal chambers.
“Reinforts will be mustered by the spring thaw,” he told the prince. “Prepare to ride out with them. It is time for the sed ing of Josean.”