While his brother prepared to sleep the day away, Izak wolfed down the servants’ supper brought up by a bloodslave and set a watch rotation among Etian’s guard, with Hare and Sketcher as the watch leaders in anticipation of the king summoning Izak away.
Sure enough, Ondreus came to fetch him before he’d finished his wine.
It was just some common local vintage, and the grafting only allowed a Thorn to drink a single glass of any alcohol at one time—any more than that, and his body would violently reject it, as Rake proved whenever he got the chance.
But as Izak gulped down the dregs and wiped his mouth, he looked back fondly on the nights when he could linger over dinner for hours, enjoying the flavors and textures and getting blind stinking drunk. Even better when the food and intoxication was shared by a beautiful companion or three.
Light burn it, he wished he could trust the wenches here to pass some off-duty time with. He’d been practically celibate thus far into his service, only indulging once, when they had stopped at a village on the edge of Siu Carinal to have one of the carriages wheels repaired. A few hours in the arms of a blacksmith’s daughter, deliciously lusty though she had been, was nowhere near enough to satiate a Teikru-blessed Thorn. At that moment, the risk of some awful pox rotting his brain and eating holes in his face felt like a small price to pay.
The only thing more insistent than Izak’s blessing right then was the grafting. It got worse the farther he moved from his brother, adding shaking and sweating to the constant demands echoing in his skull. Etian had become the center of Izak’s world the moment he’d been summoned back from the grave, a magnetic pole pulling at him. He could fight it for a while, but he would have to return, have to make certain Etian was still well, for his own sanity if nothing else.
Ondreus, like most of the king’s Thorns, had less trouble leaving his master. There were scores of Royal Thorns to watch over the king in his place.
“Out of curiosity, how do you sleep?” Izak asked his escort.
Ondreus’s brow furrowed. “I was expecting you to ask why the king was summoning you.”
Izak snorted. “I don’t care as far as I can spit what he wants.” Seeing the Thorn’s dark look, he added, “Which I say with the utmost respect for the Chosen of the Strong Gods, divine and mighty ruler of our great kingdom.”
Clearly, as one of the servants now, he couldn’t spout off whatever he pleased around his father’s guard anymore. At least not without retribution from men whose loyalty was enslaved to the Eketra-blessed king. Unfair, considering he was still legally a prince.
“I only ask because I can’t keep my eyes shut for more than an hour at a stretch these days,” he explained. “Sketcher and Phriese say the same. They’re waking from a dead snore certain Etian—pardon, His Highness Crown Prince Etianiel—is in grave peril. I imagine it’s considerably easier for a Royal Thorn?”
“It wears off faster, anyway,” Ondreus said. “Most guys in the king’s guard have those panics for a few weeks before they start to settle in and sleep for three or four hours solid.”
“Three or four hours.” Izak scowled. “Delightful.”
The older Thorn chuckled. “Keep going at one-hour stretches for long enough, and three will seem like a luxury.”
They turned down a corridor, boots rustling the fresh layer of rushes spread on the flagstones.
“So, that little thief Nine was a girl,” Ondreus said in a poor attempt at a segue.
The mention of the runt caught Izak off-guard. He forced a lighthearted smile.
“It would appear so.”
Ondreus fidgeted with his sword’s positioning. “There’s a rumor going around the guard that she was a plant from the beginning. You know, as a, uh, royal concession.”
The smile felt like it creaked under the strain.
“A plaything to keep the Teikru-blessed prince entertained,” Izak said. “A piece of gutter trash no one would miss when it came time to dispose of her. Forget the fact that she fooled every man at Thornfield for three years. Forget that she was fast and fearless enough to steal your bookmaking take from under your nose two years in a row—yes, it was her both times. Even forget that dirty little runt won the spring tournament right in front of you. Yes, she was just there to keep me sated. You figured it out. Well done.”
“I didn’t say she was! That’s just the rumor.”
“I was the bloody Crown Prince of Night,” Izak snapped. “Don’t you think if she was a plant, I would have demanded a slightly less offensive specimen? Some beautiful, lithe seductress who bathed regularly and spoke like a human rather than that garbled Siu Carinal babble?”
“Light, forget I said anything.”
The note of injury in Ondreus’s voice finally got through to Izak. He gave himself a mental shake. That lack of sleep must be affecting him worse than he’d realized.
Like most of those he’d trained with at Thornfield, Ondreus must have thought of Izak more as one of the men than some lofty royal, not quite an equal, but certainly close to a friend. If he didn’t get himself under control, Izak might tear apart all the bonds he’d made over the past three years.
“No, it’s my reaction that requires apology.” He turned up the charm in his false smile, his famous royal dimples flashing. “I haven’t been sleeping much lately.”
That didn’t smooth over the rift, but Ondreus’s gruff nod said he was willing to mark the outburst up to the stress of being a newly grafted Thorn.
Deciding he had better take himself more firmly in hand if he wanted to survive an audience with his father, Izak faced the men guarding the door.
“I believe His Majesty sent for me.”
***
Hazerial lounged on the settle facing the hearth as his Thorns showed his pest of a firstborn into the antechamber.
Izak glanced around the room, likely searching for a spare seat he could take without being invited. Anticipating the same, Hazerial had made certain that there were none. Without a way to show his preferred style of disrespect, Izak set his swordstaff at a careless angle and swept a mocking bow.
“Your Majesty,” he said.
Hazerial waved a hand at his Thorns. “Leave us.”
Despite knowing that Hazerial had the Blood of the Strong Gods and could destroy an attacker in a heartbeat, their grafting would hound them at leaving him alone with an armed man. No matter how incompetent and how poor the excuse for a man.
But they couldn’t disobey their master’s order. Reluctantly, the young swordsmen bowed themselves out and shut the door.
“A swordstaff?” Hazerial swept his dark gaze over the long ebony haft tipped with the polished steel blade. “How quaint. I believe those went out of fashion early in my father’s reign.”
“I’ve decided to bring them back.”
“You never could stomach blood on your hands. A staff should give you sufficient distance from the slaughter.”
The fool smirked. “While I do so enjoy these opportunities to hear you air your grievances, I have duties to attend to. Will His Majesty be getting to his reason for summoning me sometime today? Expressly without Etian, I might add.”
The corner of Hazerial’s mouth twitched upward at his elder son’s neglect to use Etianiel’s new name with the suffix of inheritance attached. Old habits were hard to kill, it seemed. Especially in their bloodline. Not since Khinet implemented the grafting for his sons had a man in the royal family been shunted aside in favor of enthroning his younger brother.
“Has Etianiel informed you of his plan to take the Helat imperial city?”
“While we were at Thornfield, he told me we were being grafted to push into the betrayers’ territory, but there hasn’t been much opportunity to discuss anything since. For some reason, mud keeps taking priority. It’s almost as if this were a bad time of year to travel.”
“Spare us your tedious notions of cleverness. The route he’s chosen.” Hazerial gestured Izak to the table spread with the map from the Royal Archives. “No doubt your brother thought it best to keep the details of your mission undisclosed until it was time to strike. We, however, believe it important that, in the event Etianiel is injured or killed during the fighting, another be prepared to carry out our strategy in his place, as it may well mean a final victory over the Helat.”
Izak hmmed absently and bent over the map, one arm crooked around his swordstaff like a drunk hanging off a whore.
The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
“Judgment is coming to the land of the betrayers,” Hazerial said. “The strong gods have decreed it to descend four days after our festival of Summerlight.”
Another infuriating grunt.
Hazerial scowled. “Your conversational skills have finally surpassed those of your late mother’s.”
“No doubt she was awestruck by her husband’s enchanting personality. What exactly will this judgment look like when the strong gods send it?”
This was the part that required delicate wording. When Hazerial had asked Etianiel why he hadn’t told Izak about Kelena’s part as the Cursed of the Strong Gods, the crown prince had replied simply, “Izak can’t do what needs to be done.” That was putting it mildly. Izak might be maddening, but he wasn’t stupid. If he caught wind of harm to his sister, he would do anything within his power to sabotage Hazerial’s carefully laid victory.
“We have arranged to send our agent into Helat territory,” Hazerial said. “Kelena’s betrothed, Lord Clarencio of House Mattius. Duke, rather, after the wedding. When the Endless Night occurs, Mattius will unknowingly unleash the strong gods’ weapon, the fruit of a thousand hells, upon our ancient enemy.”
“Oh, to live the life of blissful ignorance that is the king’s dupe. Why send Kelena with him? She’ll be in danger from this weapon as well, won’t she?”
“Rebellious old houses do not bend the knee cheaply,” Hazerial said. “She was the price of Mattius’s loyalty.”
“Aha, so Etian’s marriage bought you the largest standing army in the kingdom and Kelena’s nets you its heaviest coffers.”
Hazerial smiled. “In seven years, the Lord of the Cinterlands rebuilt the fortune it took his ancestors centuries to store up. Had we married him to ten princesses, still the investment would have proven worthwhile.”
“Brilliant strategy. Kill the lord who sweats gold rather than lock him in the royal treasury with the fire stoked for the rest of his life. I’d do the same if I blew through the fortune I had seized from his father in that same seven years.” Izak smoothed a curling corner of the map. “I’ve heard that when the pirates perceive the battle as lost, they scuttle their ships. Must be hard to fund an eternal war with all that treasure sitting on the bottom of the ocean.”
Hazerial lifted a dark brow. “It seems you’ve taken quite the interest in gold since you left for Thornfield. Have you been spreading your disease between the legs of a moneylender’s wife of late?”
“You’d be surprised what you learn about finance when you’ve got to pay for your own whoring and gambling.” Izak raised his eyes from the map at last. “Is that why you grafted the pirate to Kelena? To make certain your investment is returned from Helat territory in one piece?”
Hazerial cared more about the girl’s arrival in the imperial city, but let Izak believe what he would. “A Thorn ensures the safety of his master above all else. His mistress, in this case.”
Izak nodded. “It’s also a humiliating position for a conquered pirate. Everyone will assume he’s her plaything, especially given the…” He smirked. “… fidelity of the queen who spawned her.”
“We do not require a faithful queen, only a useful one.”
“Not to mention, it should serve to handily turn Mattius against his new bride so he can neither trust her nor she him. He’s the one who’s always railing against the grafting, calling it soul slavery, isn’t he?”
“Regard is an unnecessary element in marriage,” Hazerial said. “Wedlock is a means to an end, no more.”
“Whispering sweet nothings like that, it’s a wonder you’ve fathered any children at all.”
Hazerial had to make an effort not to grit his teeth. Somehow this walking plague always managed to draw him out.
“Upon the Endless Night,” he growled, returning to business, “Etianiel’s unit, your unit, will be poised to take the imperial city and seize the Helat royal family. When the sun they worship rises again, you will put the offspring and the wives to death by the sword in full view of what citizens remain, then put out the king’s eyes and return to us with him.”
As if he hadn’t heard anything Hazerial had said, Izak squinted down his nose at the king.
“Why kill Lathe?” he asked.
Hazerial blinked. “Lathe?”
“The girl you pretended you were going to graft, the little runt over whose head you dangled promises of gold and placement—everything she’d ever been looking for. Don’t try to tell me you botched her grafting. You’ve held far too many thornknives for that to be true. Why kill her?”
An incorrect, but pleasing, assumption. Given the attachment Izak had developed to that lowborn urchin, she would have been an invaluable weapon. Hazerial would never have willingly conceded such an Eketra-sent treasure. Something had gone wrong beyond his control. Whether that had been the attempt to graft a woman as a Thorn or some failure on the girl’s part, the king couldn’t say. The mystery had originally infuriated Hazerial, but seeing that his rebellious elder son believed him to still be master of every string in the web was excellent consolation.
“The reason should be perfectly obvious,” Hazerial said. “I killed the girl to remind you that I hold the power of life and death over every soul you’ll ever come into contact with. She was a stand-in. A reminder that Kelena can die just as easily or as painfully as I choose, pirate or no.”
***
Izak’s instinct was to go immediately to Alaan with what he had learned about the Endless Night of Judgment, but he held off.
Hazerial had told him about the attack endangering Kelena and her future husband knowing full well that Izak would relay the information to his sister’s Thorn. That meant Izak was supposed to pass it along, either because some part of it was a lie, or because it was all true and telling Kelena and Alaan would create a reaction necessary to whatever Hazerial’s true aim was.
Instead Izak went to Etian the night after they left Tolashne’s holding. They were ranging well out of sight of the carriage so that the crown prince could hunt. Izak rode by his brother’s side, while the rest Etian’s Thorns kept to a defensible distance and watched for threats and game.
“I told him it would be better to kill the king when we take the city, but he won’t hear of it,” Etian said when Izak asked him about the orders for the Endless Night. “He wants the man to kneel and swear fealty to him as Helat should have to Khinet.”
“And he calls me dramatic.” Izak nudged his mount with a knee, bringing it closer to Etian’s. The only men who might overhear them were grafted to the crown prince, unable to betray him even if they wanted to, but Izak couldn’t bring himself to speak of his brother’s traitorous plot above a murmur. “How will that affect your plan?”
“Our plan.” Etian’s smoked lenses caught the moonlight as he searched the waving grasses for movement. “It doesn’t change anything. Either we return the triumphant heroes who brought the king of the Helat to the City of Blood in chains, or we return the heroes who killed the Helat king and took his throne.”
“You’re not going to set yourself up in the Helat king’s place and sew up one kingdom in your pocket before you return for the Chosen of the Strong Gods?”
Their horses passed into a copse, casting them in dappled shadow.
“I became the next Chosen when Hazerial proclaimed me the heir,” Etian said, ducking beneath the branch of an oak. “Both kingdoms belong to me by his own word.”
“Which he knows full well, and yet he’s still sending you.” Izak batted away a cedar’s prickling arm. “That’s what worries me. Meanwhile, he was hinting heavily that you might not make it to the imperial city.”
“I’m going to make it,” Etian said.
“Unless he orders an archer to shoot you down as soon as we leave Shamasa. We’ll be right on the border. He can say the Helat did it, and hail you as a martyr. You’ll be his rallying cry for his next fifty years on the throne.”
“I don’t think he will. He wants the Helat sovereign too bad.” The unscarred side of Etian’s face was toward Izak. The corner of his mouth twisted in grim humor. “If he’s smart, Hazerial won’t kill me until I return with him in hand.”
***
Across the moonlit landscape below Blazing Prairie’s terraced hill, the waves of brown grass crushed by the winter sparkled with the recent rainfall and revealed the occasional hint of returning green. To the east, the dark Cinterlands glittered threateningly. Blazing Prairie was the only large estate in the Kingdom of Night without a ghost city hanging overhead, and as such, the visibility from its vantage stretched unobstructed for miles in every direction and into the sky for uncountable lifetimes.
Lord Clarencio stood beside his waiting carriage, looking out over his family’s holding. For centuries, House Mattius had held back the raiders of the savage Cinterlands. They had worked the land and the mines long before they had ever heard of a kingdom, and the hardy people who lived there still considered their lord the king’s equal in authority. Around fires and public house tables, they spoke of the Cinterlands Massacre as the greatest injustice known to man. They nursed their children on tales of fearless Lord Paius making his last stand alone against King Hazerial and a thousand Royal Thorns.
To hear them talk, one would think Blazing Prairie’s halls had been bursting with spectators. Clarencio had been there, and still folk would disagree with him—as far as deference to their current lord would allow. He had seen the chambers and corridors of his ancestral home splashed with blood. Lying in a cooling puddle of death, with a leg that would never be the same again and the stench of slaughter filling his nose, Clarencio had watched his father and three stolen Thorns fall to twoscore and ten of the king’s finest. He had listened to the death rattle from his father’s weary lungs as the life left Paius’s eyes.
From that moment on, Clarencio had fought. Fought to take back his family’s title and holding. Fought to refill the coffers emptied by the crown and to rebuild the standing army the king had seized. As his father had before him, Clarencio fought in the Hall of Law for the dignity and freedom of every soul in the Kingdom of Night, be they foreigner, dyre, or orphan.
He had even fought to have the sole Thorn who survived his father’s rebellion released from the dungeons. Though Clarencio could hardly bear to look at the man who had lamed him and whose child had killed his sister, his nature would never allow him to yield his convictions, even for that.
When King Hazerial had given Clarencio the unfathomable dictate to open peace negotiations with the Helat, their ancient enemy, incentivizing him with an equally inexplicable betrothal to the Princess Kelena, Clarencio had fought to wrangle peace from centuries of war.
He slipped a hand into the breast of his doublet to touch the purple hair ribbon tucked in the inner pocket. A reminder of the terrified, dark-eyed young woman he had spent the last three years fighting to free from the clutches of her despicable parents.
It felt as if he had been fighting for a lifetime, and he was nowhere near finished. From where he stood now, he could easily see how his father had come to the conclusion that a coup was the faster, and therefore better, solution.
Breath steaming in the night air, Clarencio turned back to the manse, its colored windows glowing orange, yellow, red, and blue fire in the night. Jarik had come out to bid him farewell. Most of the household would stay at Blazing Prairie with the elderly steward, while a few trusted members accompanied Clarencio to Shamasa and then on, into Helat territory.
“I have my doubts I’ll be coming back,” Clarencio told Jarik as he shook the old steward’s hand. Whether this mission of the king’s turned out to be a way to frame Clarencio as a traitor or his ever-worsening lungs finally failed in the Helat kingdom, death had to be accepted as a possibility.
Jarik’s wrinkled brow furrowed. “Please, your lordship, don’t tempt the strong gods. What with your new bride, Her Highness, and your advancement to duke, you’ll return the Cinterlands holding to her full glory and spend the rest of a long life governing her.”
“Between one thing and another, I’d rather be prepared for the worst than hope it never comes.” Clarencio held out the sealed testament he had finished just before sunset. “If I die without an heir, or if the line of House Mattius succession is somehow cut off, legally or otherwise, I hope you’ll see my last wishes completed. If for some reason, you can’t…”
He looked back at the manse where his father had fallen. It stood in peaceful darkness, while high above, stars glittered like diamonds in the black water of the sky.
“My father never wanted our home to fall into the hands of the crown. If my will proves impossible to carry out before the king seizes Blazing Prairie, have the servants and the folks from the village loot the manse, then put the torch to her. Don’t leave one stone on another for the king to gloat over.”
