As fall turned to winter, the royal household moved into Mistfen, the Siu Carinal residence. The great muddy river flowed past the lavish mansion like coagulating blood, great chunks of ice and snow dragged down from the north turning brown and melting as they oozed toward the ocean.
Standing and status were more relaxed in Siu Carinal due to the delta’s strange view of wealth being a substitute for good 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 prince and princess, and the Lord and Lady of Siu Carinal, all sat on the High Stand. Right next to all this noble, ancient 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 merchant who’d built his shipping empire outrunning the pirates before the war. This last was escorted by the infamous courtesan, the Daylily of Siu Carinal.
The Winterlight sacrifices were lit, the strong gods were pleased, and it was announced to the gathering that Crown Prince Etian and Princess Pasiona were expecting an heir.
As the former crown prince Izakiel had been betrothed several times, married none, and hadn’t even fathered a bastard in all the time he was in line for the crown, public opinion was that Hazerial’s unorthodox choice for future king had proven correct. The strong gods clearly smiled upon the move, Teikru particularly, since the god-goddess had blessed the young couple with a child.
With this joyous announcement ringing in the smoke-, mud-, and blood-scented night, the revelry began. Noble and wealthy commoner alike swept across the opulent High Pavilion in time with the majestic strains of court musicians. Below, the peasants jumped and twisted and swung one another along with wailing delta tunes.
The juxtaposition of high and low, noble and common appealed to Pasiona. She flowed through the steps with her husband in icy perfection, watching the wild cavorting taking place 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 you’re going 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 façade, but one that could easily be dismissed as accidental placement by an expecting princess growing weary of the festivities. He acknowledged the sign of affection with a hint of a smile and a squeeze of her waist.
Though no one at court guessed 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 compose romantic verse or lavish frivolous affection, but his attention, when it came to focus on her, was all-consuming.
There was something, too, in the way his steely public face contrasted with the rare vulnerability only she ever saw. It had been the same with Darios. Her admiration for the commoner had sprung from the disparity between the hardened warrior and the lovesick poet who shared a single body.
Etian spent his nights in punishing exertion, 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 mornings, he dined with Pasiona in their chambers, and they took their pleasure of one another. Some days they bathed together, some days he bathed alone. Then it was off to the Royal Thorns, occasionally with the princess’s company, where Etian fenced and practiced sword scenarios until Pasiona could barely stand to watch another match.
It was no mystery where his iron physique and stamina had come from. He was relentless. The mystery was how he managed to keep going at such a pace. Surely even the second coming of the warrior god needed rest.
“It’s what I’ve always done,” was his explanation.
“Have you considered 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 unconsciously 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, clawed at the bedcovers and himself.
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In the depths of the terror, she heard him whimper, “Kelena.”
The name was a splash of icy water on her face. Pasiona hadn’t seen the girl since the royal progress the year before and had never spoken to her. According to the queen then, Princess Kelena had been too busy training to join in any of the customary feminine pursuits.
In truth, Pasiona had forgotten that her husband had a sister. No one in the royal household ever alluded to the girl. No place 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 accustomed to secrecy in her own affairs, she preferred blunt openness in the affairs of others. She approached her husband the next night as he dressed.
“What happened to 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 Helat.”
“Where is she?” Pasiona asked. “Why have I never seen her in the palace? Why does no one ever speak of her?”
The washstand and basin exploded, splintered wood and shards of glass 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 chin.
“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 turned to face her then, his eyes locking on hers. Though he wore his glasses, 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 Helat sacked the northeastern city of Siu Ferel in all her shimmering, ivory beauty.
Clarencio had held the motion off longer than he expected to, winning over nearly a third of the lords to his side—Kariot supposedly included—before a late winter croup caught him. Every sickness was potentially deadly for a man with his family’s failing lungs, and this bout in particular kept him away from the Hall of Law for a few nights shy of a month. Clarencio sent the House Mattius representative in his place, coaching 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 Clarencio’s convalescence, the king made a rare appearance on the floor and ordered a vote. With Hazerial standing there, of course, a good portion of the chaff who’d blown over to Clarencio’s side blew back to Zinote’s, and the matter was decided just as the king had predicted.
The redrafted marriage contract was delivered the day after the motion passed, complete 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, Clarencio examined his representative’s transcription of the king’s address to the Hall, while the Mattius family healer grumbled about wasting perfectly good blood magic on a man determined to work himself into the grave. Luckily, Clarencio had plenty of practice ignoring the healer’s disapproval.
The address had been a powerful demand that the Kingdom of Night expend every resource available to crush the invaders, with suggestions that the lords who had been blocking the motion cared more about their own appearance 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 parchment. Less than he had been hacking up, but still a reminder that he could go the way of his many siblings at any time.
He glanced at the updated marriage contract on the writing desk.
The memory of the girl weeping in the dungeons beneath Blazing Prairie haunted him.
His peers bought and sold bloodslaves younger than 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.
And yet the 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 Clarencio as nothing else did. Her own parents. The very people who were supposed to be protecting her, coddling her, spoiling her to 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.
Clarencio 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 innocent from her circumstances. Survive and succeed at communicating with the Helat. Convince them 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 Clarencio 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 come from the strong gods,” Paius had told him once. “You know when something isn’t right. But bury that spark, push forward toward perversion, shovel enough manure on top of it, and the spark will go out. So many convince themselves 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, Clarencio had observed the truth in his father’s words over and over again.
The only response was to soldier on for as long as his crippled leg, failing lungs, and bleeding heart kept working.
***
The day after the Hall of Law voted to give command of their standing armies to the crown, Hazerial summoned Etianiel to the royal chambers.
“Reinforcements will be mustered by the spring thaw,” he told the crown prince. “Prepare to ride out with them. It is time for the second coming of Josean.”