Hazerial never let a night go by that he didn’t visit with his son’s consort—not for bed play, but to converse and to demonstrate that she was always within his reach.

  The moment he saw the disbelief haunting her green ghostlit eyes, he knew that she knew.

  “My dear,” he said in his best approximation of a comforting purr, “I’m well aware of what you just discovered. I trust, too, that you know it’s his. Let me assure you now that I will not allow any harm to come to you so long as the babe remains healthy.”

  Seleketra gaped at him, bewildered.

  “That child is your shield,” Hazerial explained. “Protect it, and it will protect you. But trust that if you attempt anything to rid yourself of it, I will know that as well, and I will bring down upon you the full force of the sentence your beloved Etianiel condemned you to.”

  He expected more trembling, but as his words sank in, Seleketra’s fear dissolved and resolution replaced it.

  “I understand, Your Majesty.”

  “I knew you had more instinct for self-preservation than the average courtesan.” Hazerial patted the back of her tattooed hand. “If you don’t disappoint me, my dear, you just may find that sentence suspended indefinitely.”

  The royal procession rolled through the war gate of the City of Blood the next night to the wild cheering of commoners drunk on the warm weather. Musicians joined the commotion. As usual, most of them struck up songs celebrating the mighty Josean-blessed prince.

  Hazerial had never found the ignorance of the peasantry quite so annoying before. But let them worship the wrong Son of Khinet for now. Eketra would give Hazerial the true victory.

  When the king finally reached the solitude of his apartments in Castle Sangmere, he sent for Commander Poiran. The aging Thorn arrived as Hazerial’s deafened, dumbed armor-bearer, a former Thorn himself, took off the king’s last piece of ceremonial plate and set to shining it.

  Hazerial eased himself into the hot waters of a long-awaited bath.

  “Now that we have returned to the safety of our royal residence, Commander, we wish our grandson to attend us,” he told Poiran. “You will find him at House Skalia’s country manse. Lord Zinote has always been a dutiful and obedient servant, so we have no doubt he will agree to escort his daughter and the child to court. His Thorns, however, may require persuasion.”

  Poiran nodded. “I’ll bring enough of my men to make sure they’re convinced, Your Majesty.”

  ***

  The battle at the Overlook lasted three hours. In that short time, Pasiona’s tiny green army was slaughtered almost to a man. But then she had never expected Werin and Nock to win this fight for her. Pasiona was no Josean-blessed conqueror like her husband. She had been born Teikru’s handmaiden, but she could see the webs of Eketra when it was required of her. All Pasiona had truly hoped to gain from House Skalia’s bolstered defenses was a delay between the initial attack and the moment the Royal Thorns laid hands upon her.

  Three hours proved more than enough time. By then, her father and Hawk and Ranger had joined the fight against her tiny force of barely trained soldiers, adding to the confusion and eventually winning the day for the king.

  In the end, it was Hawk—the black-eyed Thorn her father relied on like a right hand, the one who had once warned Pasiona that an entanglement with Darios would not turn out well for either of them, the Thorn who had protected House Skalia since before Pasiona had been born—who dragged her to her family’s Hall of Mirrors to surrender.

  The babe squirmed and screamed in the normally lighthearted Ranger’s arms, frightened by the noise of the fighting, his mother’s panic, and the touch of unfamiliar hands.

  “Princess Pasiona,” the balding Commander Poiran said with strained civility. His uniform was torn and stained with mud and blood and the offal of the short-lived standing army. “The king wishes his grandson to attend him. His Majesty let it be known that if you won’t agree to go peaceably, he has no qualms about taking the boy and imprisoning the mother.”

  Pasiona stared at the trickle of blood running into Commander Poiran’s left boot from a slash just above his knee. Through the gash in his uniform, she could see the wiry black hair on his thigh.

  She raised her ice-blue eyes to his, looking at the man as if he were filth.

  “How many men did you lose in the fight, Commander?”

  “None, Your Highness.”

  “Nor did my father. The army you slaughtered was mine alone.” She cast a disdainful glare at Hawk. “More’s the pity. I suppose I had better go as commanded. I wouldn’t trust any of you sword-happy fools to know how to care for my son. Give him to me, Ranger.”

  Commander Poiran moved between them. “Not until you’re in the carriage and set to go.”

  She affected bored disdain as they led her past her fearful lord father and lady mother to the waiting conveyance.

  The Overlook’s carriage yard was a butcher’s den of young men who had once thought they would make their living defending House Skalia. Werin was easy enough to find, lying by the front steps. His head had been split down the side, brain and bone leaking out onto the trampled grass. His battle-ax lay by his left hand, the thinnest sliver of red drying on its gleaming edge. She hoped he’d been the one to land that embarrassing blow on Commander Poiran.

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  Hawk handed Pasiona into the carriage, watching her with those sharp black eyes, but said nothing as his gap-toothed fellow Thorn handed up the squalling babe.

  “Just as well I never had a babe of my own, Hawkie,” Ranger muttered as they stepped back from the carriage. “I never did get along well with those things.”

  Except every night at the table, where Ranger had made faces at Reuel until the little prince giggled and made them back and Pasiona had to scold both of them to stop playing so the child would eat. But Commander Poiran didn’t know that.

  “We’ll be along shortly with your parents, Princess,” Hawk said through the window.

  Pasiona rolled her eyes to the opposite seat. Commander Poiran climbed in across from her and called to the driver that they were ready. With the snap of a whip, the carriage lurched into motion.

  In her arms, the boy fussed and fretted and refused to be comforted, even when she offered the breast. He rarely nursed anymore, she’d been told; these days he preferred mashed up foods and pieces of bread.

  Young men were predictable creatures, Pasiona thought as they left behind her family’s estate. She’d expected better from Commander Poiran, but Hawk had assured her the man was a lifelong bachelor and would have no greater insight than his younger counterparts.

  If she had asked any one of the king’s Thorns about their mission that night, Pasiona was certain they would have told her that they had come to the Overlook to get a baby.

  What sort of baby? she might ask.

  Then they would look at one another, bewildered.

  Is there more than one sort? they would ask each other.

  Not one of the king’s Thorns, Poiran included, had thought to check the boy’s eye color before the carriage got under way, any more than they had thought to stop the weeping, pink-cheeked serving maid and her long-haired husband as they fled the lord’s manse with the screaming infant bundled in rags when the fighting began.

  ***

  The crowned prince’s wife faced the crown prince’s consort in full view of the court four nights later.

  Pasiona had begun preparing herself for the meeting the night she received Etian’s message a month earlier. Seleketra. She’d heard the name whispered by servants while she was dressing herself and Malli and Nock’s son for their audience with the king. Daughter of Eketra, a demigoddess whose beauty and charms had ensnared the Josean reborn from the moment he saw her.

  Seleketra was not as popular a topic as the murder of Queen Jadarah, but she was close. And when Pasiona finally saw the woman face-to-face, she did not disappoint.

  The courtesan was everything Pasiona was not—dark where Pasiona was fair, short where she was tall, curvy where she was slender, expressive where Pasiona was ice.

  A worm gnawed at Pasiona’s insides. What was it she lacked that Etian found in other women? How often had he held his small, soft creature? Did Seleketra have his heart? Had the mad queen?

  Could anyone?

  Cold blue eyes met ghostlit green orbs shadowed by darkness. Pasiona was not the first to look away.

  Head held high, she carried the boy past her husband’s courtesan and knelt before the throne.

  “Rise and bring us our grandson, Daughter,” King Hazerial commanded. “With the loss of our beloved Queen Jadarah and the brave foray of Crown Prince Etianiel into Helat territory, we seek to console ourselves with the closeness of what family remains to us.”

  Slowly, Pasiona rose and approached the throne. Early on in her son’s life, she had gone to great pains to keep Reuel from Hazerial and Jadarah, terrified that they might try to take him from her. Though the boy she held now was no blood of her own, Pasiona had no need to feign the shaking of her hands as she passed the babe to Hazerial.

  It seemed as if hours crawled by while the king held the boy, touched his plump cheeks, brushed fingers across his fine dark hair. The babe frowned up at him, but did not burst into tears. It seemed Norian the Younger was growing used to unfamiliar people handling him.

  “His father wore the same expression for much of his infancy,” Hazerial said. He returned the child to Pasiona. “We have no doubt that he will grow into a warrior as skilled and strong as his sire. One night, this kingdom will prosper in the capable hands of Reuel VI.”

  “You are gracious, Your Majesty,” Pasiona answered, cradling the babe to her and bowing her head to hide her relief. “That is my prayer to the strong gods as well.”

  ***

  Saint Daven found Shamasa Redoubt empty except for a skeleton crew of the king’s Thorns. He recognized most of them, young men recently grafted, forced to fight the enchantment’s draw to its master and hold the fortress until reinforcements from the king’s army arrived.

  Reluctantly, Saint Daven dropped his invisibility so he could inquire after Clarencio. The Thorns were shocked to see their former weapons master so far north, but they helpfully supplied answers to all his questions.

  The Lord of the Cinterlands had been raised to a duke when he married the king’s daughter—news Lord Paius would have been proud to hear.

  The mad queen and her Thorns had been murdered by Helat assassins. Using betrayer magic, a squad of them had apparently infiltrated the fortress under cover of day. Crown Prince Etian and his Thorns had tried to stop them and lost a man in the fight. Phriese—did the weapons master remember him?

  Both twins did. An ugly, bug-eyed boy with an aptitude for the longsword.

  Yarish thought Duke Clarencio had allied himself with the assassins and allowed them entry, but Seether, Blacking, and Vries shouted him down on that and called him an idiot for believing it. If it were true, the king would never have allowed Clarencio to leave Shamasa alive, much less with Princess Kelena in tow.

  Seether had heard from a House Mattius serving girl that they were bound into Helat territory on a dangerous mission from the king; supposedly the whole staff had been under strict orders to tell no one.

  That would mean that Clarencio had succeeded at convincing the Helat to enter peace negotiations. Mosole’s attack on Blazing Prairie and his insistence that Clarencio had defected must have come from some rumor or misunderstanding.

  Two years before, Saint Daven had delivered the first missive to the betrayers’ imperial city, after which, the Helat emperor had told him in no uncertain terms that they didn’t want a Khinet-born sneaking uninvited into their capital again. All subsequent communication had been carried by Helat messengers, while Saint Daven had returned to his post at Thornfield.

  But he kept all that to himself. There was a sort of unspoken rule among active Thorns that the less information shared, the less liability spread. If the boys holding Shamasa didn’t know anything about the missive, they couldn’t be executed for it. By the same token, their graftings couldn’t interpret Saint Daven or anything he knew as a threat to their king.

  One thing the young men could all agree on was that the crown prince’s Thorns had left on a secret foray into Helat territory as well, though they couldn’t decide whether Etianiel had gone to kill as many betrayers as possible in retribution for Queen Jadarah’s assassination or whether the second coming of Josean had gone to wipe out the Helat once and for all.

  The crown prince’s movements didn’t have much bearing on Saint Daven’s, but he listened to the Thorns’ guesswork all the same.

  The sun came up while they talked. The young men offered Saint Daven supper and a roof for the night, but he’d been the center of attention for as long as he could stand. He made an excuse about needing to get to the next redoubt west to keep up with his orders and left the unit to their camaraderie.

  He rode far enough west to lose sight of Shamasa, then he turned north toward the Helat imperial city.