The newly crowned Princess Pasiona exuded cold disdain to everyone equally, servant and noble alike. A popular rumor circulated that she and the crown prince kept separate bed chambers and condescended to a businesslike conjugation monthly, a practice that would be set aside as soon as the princess was with child.
Etian had never wasted time listening to gossip before his wedding, and he didn’t start after. His wife’s icy public demeanor was a soul-piercing contrast to the Pasiona he knew when the bedchamber door closed. She burned like a fire rampaging through a straw village. She screamed and begged and demanded, and Etian threw himself into fulfilling her every desire.
There was no thought while he was with her, nothing but exertion and pleasure. He loved seeing her drenched in sweat, hearing the rip of her clothing beneath his fingers while she tore at his, tasting her salty skin. He adored the frozen alabaster statue who sat at his side during affairs of state, and he craved the voracious creature who waited to pounce when they were alone.
He loved her.
But he did keep a separate bedchamber.
It was on their wedding day that he’d been forced to establish the secondary room.
“Is there another woman?” Pasiona had asked when he slipped out of their bed.
“No.” Etian shoved the sweat-soaked hair off his forehead and slid his lenses on. He’d thought she was asleep. He should’ve waited longer to make sure, but the sensation of his filth sinking into her pure, perfect skin had been excruciating.
She sat up, wrapping the disarrayed bedclothes around herself. “If there ever is, tell me. I want to know before the court gossips do.”
“If there ever is, I swear I will.”
“Are you angry?”
“Why would I be angry?”
“Because I called for Darios.”
“I barely heard it,” Etian said honestly.
He cast around for a way to say that the dead man likely deserved her affection more than he did, couldn’t find one, and left.
The servants had started keeping a cauldron of water always warming for the crown prince in the kitchens. He couldn’t find anyone awake after the feasting and celebration of the day, so he brought up the warm water to the bath basin himself, then added two more from the springhouse. Not the scalding sanitization he’d had in mind, but better than nothing.
He returned to the bedchamber and climbed in beside his now truly sleeping wife.
Sometime in the day, a weight crushed his chest. Thick, close blackness pressed in all around him. The overpowering stench of fear and human waste filled his lungs. He hammered on the lid of the trunk, unable to get enough breath to scream. The most sound he could make was a low, whimpering whine. The lid wouldn’t budge.
Trapped and left to die. Alone. Forgotten.
Someone shook him. “Etianiel, wake up. You’re having a terror.”
He came awake fighting. It was a glancing blow, but it knocked Pasiona out of bed.
He apologized, expended a huge amount of royal blood magic healing the bruise, far more than necessary, apologized again.
Pasiona shrugged it off. Everyone was haunted by bad dreams.
But Etian should have known it would happen. It had been a misstep not preparing ahead of time when this particular dream had been terrorizing him daily.
In Sangmere, an old servant’s cell adjoined the bridal chamber. Etian slept there when he and Pasiona were finished with each other. At Mistfen in Siu Carinal, he commandeered Izakiel’s former bedchamber, which lay across the hall from his. When the court moved to Siu Patanal for the summer, he had a cot put in the bathing chamber off their quarters.
The dream hounded Etian wherever he was, but he made certain it couldn’t hurt his wife again.
***
Clarencio winced as he made his way up the Siu Patanal pit house steps toward the boxes. He had never paid attention to stairs as a young man; he had taken them two and three at a time just because he could. He’d even made fun of his father for moving the lord’s chambers to the ground level of Blazing Prairie, calling it an old man’s laziness. A progressive disease, his father had joked.
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If Clarencio could apologize for one thing to his father, it would be that. Not the explosive anger at finding out what Lord Paius had done, not dismissing his father’s arguments that nothing short of total overthrow would change the kingdom, not even aiding in the man’s arrest. No, he would apologize for teasing an old man who was just trying to save his aching joints a few stairs. In any case, who was to say that all the other disagreements hadn’t risen from the same root—an arrogant young fool’s lack of understanding?
He certainly understood now. Everywhere he went with the court, there were stairs. Stairs to meeting chambers, stairs to feasting halls, stairs to residences, stairs to take the floor against another lord arguing some ridiculously evil new paradigm.
Stairs to this night-forsaken arena of butchery.
If the king hadn’t summoned him to the pit house, Clarencio would never have limped his way into one. His father had taken him to the dyre fights once as a child, when Clarencio had asked why he should care about the stupid beasts. It had been a viscerally educational experience. He hadn’t darkened the door of one since.
Probably the reason Hazerial had summoned him to the pit house that day.
The younger set of the nobility jounced up and down the stairs, gawking in surprise or calling idiotic taunts when they recognized the Lord of the Cinterlands.
“Finally coming to see what you’ve been missing, Mattius?”
“Are you here to set the dyre free?”
“Best bring a chunk of meat if you want them to follow you.”
“If you don’t hurry, you’ll miss the fight.”
“He doesn’t care. House Mattius is only interested in the times when dyre look human.”
In a way, it was refreshing. The offspring had their fathers’ callous thirst for blood, but hadn’t yet developed the two-faced inveigling required to wheedle favors from a lord they hated who also happened to wield much more wealth, land, and power than they did.
“My father is going to kill you.”
That one was a little more direct. Clarencio paused on the top step, distributing his weight between the walking stick and the corner of the wall.
The speaker was a boy in his late teens scarred by horrendous acne and backed by two thuggish friends with clearer skin. Neither of the thugs looked familiar to Clarencio, but he recognized their leader.
Clarencio gave the boy a smile. “You’re Lord Kariot’s son, aren’t you?”
Recognition didn’t give the boy pause. But then it must be hard to cow a child used to watching bloodslaves scream for mercy before they were enthralled in his family’s sacramentals.
“You’ll be dead before the Festival of Summerlight,” he sneered.
“If your father puts his mind to it, I don’t doubt I will.” Clarencio tapped the boot of his stiffened leg with his walking stick. “I’m not a fast-moving target.”
Kariot the Younger took a step toward him. “I could push you down these stairs right now and break your neck.” His dark eyes glittered. “Everyone knows you don’t have any blood magic, and my friends and me could make sure no healer got to you in time.”
It sounded like certain lords had progressed past idle talk and into the planning phase of his assassination, if they were discussing his blood magic abilities around their sons.
“You could,” Clarencio said. “Now that I’ve reached the top of the stairs, such a death would hold a layer of irony that I doubt you’re capable of appreciating at this age. Perhaps one you never may be capable of appreciating, if you share your father’s lack of intelligence. Of course, I’d prefer you don’t push me. Falls are particularly painful these days, and if it doesn’t kill me, I’ll wish it had before the recovery’s over. I’m a notoriously sulky patient. Ask my family healer.”
The boy scowled. “Did you just call my father stupid?”
“I also suggested you might be. It doesn’t bode well that you haven’t picked up on how heavily your father relies on my holding’s iron. That’s why he hasn’t killed me yet. He’s scared to do it before I supply his latest demand. Though I’m sure he appreciates your alerting me to the imminent danger.”
By then the boy’s face was red around his weeping acne.
“My father doesn’t fear anything!”
Clarencio smirked. “Except bloodslaves before the enthrallment ritual shuts off their free will and angering the cripple who supplies the iron for said ritual.”
The boy charged him, head down, arms out to shove or grab. His friends caught on that they were in a fight a moment later and followed, though they were smart enough to keep their eyes up.
Clarencio turned his body, leaning against the wall to avoid the boy’s tackle, and tripped him with the walking stick. With an undignified cry, Kariot the Younger crashed down a handful of stairs and sprawled, dazed, across the risers.
The larger of his thug friends swung a fist. Clarencio twisted away and cracked him in the knuckles with the stick, following with a sharp whack to the ear. Blood burst from the point of impact. The thug screamed and grabbed the bloody flap of gristle, the scuffle forgotten in the pain.
Surprisingly, the last friend had the brains to back away, hands up, presumably to stop the crippled lord from chasing him down.
“Blood sport isn’t as much fun to participate in as it is to watch, is it?” Clarencio returned his stick to the floor and leaned his weight on it. “You’ll forgive me if I don’t help pick up the pieces. I have a rather urgent appointment to attend.”
With a polite nod, he headed down the rounded corridor toward the royal box.
He was grinning, his heart pounding in his ears, the flush of victory warming his face and swelling his chest.
Stupid. Reckless. Entirely irrational. The smallest misplacement of his good foot, a minor shift in weight, a little more courage or speed or determination from any one of those boys and he could have been a corpse lying at the bottom of the stairs. A tiny miscalculation and he would’ve saved Lord Kariot and his coconspirators the trouble.
But a Josean-blessed man got sick and tired of being a cripple. Every now and then, he wanted to remember what it was like to win a fight.