Rather than make north directly for Shamasa Redoubt, Lord Clarencio’s first stop was at the estate of his noble neighbors to the south. House Agata was famous throughout the kingdom for its horses. Since the time they had begun furnishing the royal stables, every noble son had wanted a House Agata hunter or racer, and no lord could outfit his standing armies with better than a House Agata warhorse. Some of their war lines went back to the wild, hateful mounts taken from captured war riders of the horse nomad a century before.

  The lane to the estate took Clarencio’s carriage between rolling pastures dotted with the magnificent creatures. A few energetic yearlings tossed their heads and ran, their thick winter coats shimmering healthily in the gray light of the rising sun, but most of the horses and new colts turned their backs to the cold wind, noses down as they cropped the few blades of early spring growth. Ariane had told him that the horse nomad slaves liked to say when the herds faced south, nasty weather was inbound.

  Half a dozen stables and barns flew past the carriage window, each as handsomely kept as the lord’s manse. The ramshackle prairie grass-and-daub slave shanties clustered near each stable were the only evidence that not every resident of House Agata lived in pampered luxury. Between the shacks, leathery-skinned children played with sticks or kicked around inflated bladders. Small, stocky women collected bitter greens, crouched against huts, or wove baskets.

  Nearly every one of the horse nomads in the little shanty towns was missing an arm. Some were missing both. When the men didn’t work hard enough in the stables or the fields, the foremen punished them by hacking a limb from their women or children.

  Clarencio had hoped to end the barbaric practice by marrying Ariane, Lord Mosole’s eldest daughter, and combining their houses. He’d proven with cold mathematics that keeping the horse nomads as slaves was bleeding House Agata dry, but Lord Mosole refused to see reason. A noble house had its history to honor, the lord said, and the conquering of the horse nomads was the pride of House Agata.

  But King Hazerial had denied Clarencio’s request to wed Ariane. His Majesty’s later announcement that Clarencio would marry Princess Kelena and be raised to Duke of the Cinterlands had soured the already tenuous relationship between House Agata and House Mattius.

  Lord Mosole’s reception was predictably cold. After years of friction with Clarencio’s father, Mosole held Clarencio directly responsible for jilting his favorite daughter.

  Luckily, Ariane had always been more capable of seeing sense than her father. She and Clarencio had been friends since their teen years, when a brief courtship proved they functioned better as colleagues than lovers, though in their mutual old age they had both been willing to accept what they had rejected in youth until the marriage request was denied.

  Rather than open with pleasantries, as soon as she entered the parlor, Ariane went straight to business.

  “Did you receive my letter on Tolashne’s pit house venture?” Her reading glasses were still perched on top of her head. Study of arcaneries was her favorite pastime these days, though like Clarencio she possessed no blood magic herself.

  “Yes. Even if I didn’t object to dyre fighting on moral grounds, you’re right, Geraldio doesn’t have the population to recoup any investments he could round up.”

  Clarencio leaned down as she gave him a brisk kiss on the cheek.

  Two years younger than Clarencio, Ariane was as tall and sturdy as her family horses, with a serious air that never quite gave way to humor. That last was the chief reason they hadn’t been suited to one another.

  “I imagine Kariot’s fool enough to put up security for him,” she said.

  “Then I doubly object to it.”

  “Because of Kariot’s sacrementals or because he’s probably the one who tried to have you assassinated?” She waved Clarencio into the seat her father had conveniently forgotten to offer the cripple. “Oh. You can go now, Father. We won’t be discussing anything you have a vested interest in.”

  “I’m staying to make certain Mattius hasn’t come to corrupt my daughter into treason.” Lord Mosole scowled over his cup of port, another courtesy he’d neglected to offer to his visitor. “Or to take advantage of her.”

  Ariane looked to Clarencio. “Have you come to take advantage of me?”

  “Your expertise on arcaneries, certainly,” he replied, fighting the urge to smile. “I’m afraid I don’t have time for anything more licentious; I’ve got to be at Shamasa Redoubt by Springlight, and I still have my banker to see. As for treason, House Mattius hasn’t been in that business since shortly after your father negotiated House Agata’s support for my father’s attempted coup.”

  “You know Paius strongarmed me into that!” Mosole thundered.

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  “By offering to make Ariane your heir. Yes, your lordship, I recall; I was there when you swore fealty to him. Though I’m afraid I was unable to attend the trial where you convinced the king to spare you in exchange for all the warhorses you could supply over the next ten years. Oh, but I was in the Hall of Law last year when the crown agreed to install Ariane as House Agata’s legal inheritor for lack of male heirs.” He nodded at Ariane. “Congratulations, by the way. His Majesty made a wise decision.”

  “Agreed.” She sat forward on the settle and adjusted her skirts absently. “What exactly about arcaneries have you come to discuss? Shall I send someone for my notes?”

  “That might be helpful.”

  Disgusted, Mosole tossed back his drink. A house slave, a sweet-faced young horse nomad on the edge of womanhood, made to refill it, but his lordship slammed his cup down on the sideboard and stalked out. She tucked the bottle under her half-arm and replaced the stopper with her hand, then returned to her place on the wall and stood with what remained of her arms behind her back.

  Ariane spoke a short, guttural sentence to the slave, sending her scampering from the room with the awkward grace of a half-grown colt.

  “She’s fetching my papers,” Ariane told Clarencio, returning to Khinesian. “Word arrived ahead of you; you’re leaving for your wedding. Until your betrothal was announced, I had no idea House Khinet had a third child. Acari wouldn’t believe the girl was real until they met at that ball in Siu Carinal.”

  “That seems to have been the popular assumption. I met her once at Blazing Prairie, but never saw her again until the ball. You recall that I wrote you she was in training with her mother to become an instrument of the strong gods?” Clarencio stacked his hands on the silver head of his walking stick. “Did you happen to learn any more about the queen and her role in the high places?”

  “I sent you everything I found. What are your concerns?”

  “I saw Princess Kelena’s training when she visited Blazing Prairie. Unless I misunderstood some part of it, it didn’t match with what Her Majesty does. There was no communing with the strong gods, no orgy or sacrifice. We don’t even have a high place, much less a ghost city.”

  Frowning, Ariane had him describe in gory detail as much as he could recall of the bloodbath beneath Blazing Prairie, methodically going back through his story and checking for discrepancies.

  By the time she was done, the slave girl had returned with a stack of parchment. Another guttural order had the girl bringing Clarencio a drink from the sideboard.

  “Thank you,” he told the girl, taking it.

  Ariane lowered the glasses onto her nose and began shuffling through the parchments. “She can’t understand you.”

  The girl hadn’t looked at him either, so his expression couldn’t convey gratitude. For a moment, Clarencio was tempted to rehash House Agata’s horse nomad folly, but they didn’t have time to come back to the same conclusion of Ariane putting off a decision until she inherited.

  “Consider it for the sake of my own conscience,” he said.

  Ariane accepted that with a dismissive grunt.

  “There haven’t been any priestesses like Queen Jadarah recorded in a thousand years. The last one communed with the strong gods during the rule of Ahkhinet the Third.” She produced a leaf covered front and back in cramped writing. “Very little was recorded of her training, but it was a mark of pride that she never consumed the blood of her sacrifices—‘All blood I relinquish to the strong gods, from blood of my blood to bone of my bone, until to them I relinquish mine own,’—see here?”

  Clarencio couldn’t read her tiny scribbles from that distance, but he nodded. “Have you come across anything that sounds like what I’ve described?”

  “Assuming your observations are correct and not colored unduly by your natural bias or memory? It’s similar to the Worship of the Blessed.” More paper shuffling. “After the king receives the Blood of the Strong Gods, he maintains it by a periodic rite that includes taking his pleasure of beautiful offerings for Teikru, drinking their blood for Eketra, and slaughtering them for Josean. Hm. That isn’t in this stack of notes. But I’m fairly certain it was first recorded during Mikuel the First’s reign. Apparently it’s quite pleasurable. Mikuel was said to have partaken many times more often than required. Wiped out whole villages. In fact, he’s the predominant reason Teikru-blessed sovereigns are considered an inauspicious sign for the realm.”

  “The princess certainly wasn’t taking pleasure in any of it,” Clarencio muttered, remembering the girl’s ashen face and wide, horrified eyes.

  Something in his voice must have caught her attention. Ariane let her notes rest on her lap and raised her glasses to eye him.

  “You made your marriage to her sound like a business transaction when you wrote me, but you’re investing emotions in it. That’s a dangerous prospect.”

  The purple hair ribbon burned accusingly in his breast pocket.

  Clarencio smiled. “Given the family I’m marrying into, it hardly seems I could do much more to put myself in danger. Do you recall the foreign venture I mentioned a few years ago?”

  “No. You must not have given it much weight in your correspondence.”

  “It was somewhat offhand.” He took a sip of his port, then glanced at the horse nomad girl.

  Taking the hint, Ariane sent the girl to take her notes back.

  “What is it?” she asked when they were alone.

  “A state secret, you might say. The venture’s in Helat territory.”

  She frowned. “Is this one of your jokes?”

  “It would be a poor one. Even I don’t find it particularly funny.”

  “That’s treason. Whatever the venture is, there’s no amount of return worth that investment. Just ask your father.”

  He rested his cup on his knee. “What about the end of a two-thousand-year-old war?”

  Ariane pushed her glasses up and squeezed the bridge of her nose.

  “I’m going to have to kick you out, Clarencio.”

  “I know we told your father we wouldn’t discuss treason, but this isn’t treason,” he hastened onto the defense. “The order came from the King of Night himself. Will you allow me to explain? I’d like at least one person to know the truth in case I’ve done nothing but set myself up for His Majesty.”

  For a long moment, Ariane glared reprovingly at him.

  “I’ll have to tell Father if he asks me.”

  “But only if he asks specifically whether I’m dealing with the Helat, right?”

  Her answer was a flat stare.

  “Fine,” Clarencio conceded, “but give me until after Springlight, so Hazerial doesn’t find out I let the secret out before I’m out of the kingdom. You can spend the time looking for ways to corroborate my story so you know I didn’t make it up.”

  Heaving a put-upon sigh, Ariane got up and locked the parlor door.