Queen Jadarah’s maimed body was burned on the high place at midnight, where the wedding of her only surviving child had occurred the night before. The royal family looked on while stinking, black-clad priests lit the pyre. Icy spring wind howled through the crenelations, whipping the rotting hair of the disembodied heads, scattering ash from the Springlight sacrifices, and urging the flames to devour the brush and wood and body at their center.

  Kelena stood shivering between her father and her eldest brother, staring at the queen’s ruined face. She had gone to sleep with a mother and woken up without one.

  “Jadarah’s gone,” Izak had informed her that evening, and Kelena was so stupid that she had asked him, “But where would Mother go?”

  On Izak’s right hand, she could see Etian watching through smoked lenses as the fire spread. From this side, the sweeping scar that twisted his cheek made it look as if he were smiling.

  Mother had hated Izak, and Izak had returned the sentiment. Etian must have hated Mother as well, or he wouldn’t have killed her. Both her brothers must be celebrating inside.

  What of her father? His cold, stately expression was no different from the one he had worn when he received Kelena in his makeshift audience chamber, and yet King Hazerial must have felt something for Jadarah at some point. To take her as his queen, he must at least have desired her.

  Kelena felt nothing but confusion and that unnerving buzzing. Her whole life, she had yearned for Mother to love her. Even knowing she would never have won it, Kelena couldn’t believe that maternal affection was now permanently beyond her reach.

  Alaan hadn’t spoken to her that evening, hadn’t even looked at her, but while she stood on the tower roof she felt him offer that ocean of strength through the grafting. While the pyre burned, he, Clarencio, and all servants and Thorns except Izak waited below. Would Alaan speak to her when she came down, or was she truly alone now?

  What sort of world didn’t have Mother looming over it? What sort of empty Nothing went on living without her?

  As the flames engulfed the butchered queen, their licking tongues shifted from oily orange to pale violets, ceruleans, and jades. The color of the Springlight sacrifices, but without the screaming.

  The strong gods were receiving their faithful worshipper into their arms.

  The heat coming off the pyre changed direction with the wind, sometimes blowing in the faces of the royal family, sometimes whipped away toward the Helat encampment just over the border.

  Etian shifted feet and watched the pale flames dance. He knew the stench of burning flesh, he’d smelled enough of it in the aftermath at Siu Ferel, but this was different. The mad queen’s polluted odor tainted the air around the tower. He wasn’t the only one smelling it, either. Hazerial looked vaguely disgusted. Kelena held a kerchief beneath her nose. Izak turned his face into the wind to breathe.

  “You really are his son,” his elder brother had said when Etian returned from the audience with Hazerial alone.

  “What do you want from me, Izak? Tears? Wailing?” Offering up Seleketra for the slaughter had made Etian sick, but he had bought and paid for her like one would any other mercenary. He wouldn’t cry over a fallen sellsword—especially not one who fell in the fight to protect his wife and son.

  “Wailing would be a start,” Izak had sneered. “Then at least I could say you were human.”

  Humanity was a luxury Etian had forfeited a long time ago.

  “I did what had to be done.” And not just for Pasiona and their child. For the brother who reviled him for it and the little sister who cringed away in fear every time he passed close to her. Two people who wanted Jadarah dead, who knew she needed to die, but would never have lifted a blade to make it happen.

  He had freed them from her. He didn’t need their thanks or understanding, just their safety.

  Greasy smoke rose from the eerie pastel flames, and the priests began to chant and carve at their flesh. From below came the affected lamentations of the servants.

  Izak squinted as a violent gust of wind kicked up a dusting of still-glowing cinders. If those blew into in his eyes, they would produce the only real tears anybody wept over the mad queen.

  When the king returned to Siu Rial, decrees would go out declaring an official mourning period for the queen. Commoners would accept the death and go on with their lives unaffected. Nobles would make noises and hatch plots. Priests would cut themselves and howl to the strong gods.

  Izak would be a world away from it all. All three of the king’s children would be spared the enforced grieving, all deep in enemy territory, and all for a different reason.

  “He can’t see what’s right in front of him,” Uncle Ahixandro had told Izak. “That’s why he needs me.”

  Izak stared into the oily flames. I don’t know how to make Etian see. Can a man do the right thing the wrong way? Does that make him right or wrong?

  Another stiff gust blew hot smoke into his face. He rubbed stinging eyes.

  Ahixandro had told his nephew about the existence of true right and true wrong. Unfortunately, he hadn’t taken the time before he died to explain how Izak could discern one from the other when affairs became this snarled.

  Night’s sake, I’m the last person who should be trying to answer these questions. How can I help Etian when I can barely help myself?

  Hours passed in cold keening wind and tormented screams from the priests. The royal family shivered silently and looked on as the strong gods accepted their faithful worshipper Jadarah.

  In time, the flames dwindled and left behind nothing but bones and ash.

  ***

  The evening after the committance of Queen Jadarah’s body to the strong gods, the new Duke of the Cinterlands left Shamasa Redoubt with his princess wife and household. Few farewells were made. The House Mattius servants had had very little time to mix with the rest of the fort’s other visitors, though there were always Thorns charming and forward enough to make love out of the shortest acquaintance.

  While the fast-working young swordsmen bid their light-of-loves goodbye, Izak hugged his newly wed sister, wished her a safe and happy journey and an improbable number of babies, then helped her into the duke’s carriage.

  “I’ll look for your signal at the river,” Izak told Alaan as they watched the last of the baggage strapped down. “Remember: four nights after Summerlight.”

  Izak was set to depart the fortress two nights hence with the crown prince and his Thorns. At Blacktower east of the Salt River, they would meet up with Etian’s handpicked soldiers then make their turn northward into the Empire of Day. It would be just over three months before he and Alaan saw one another again—assuming they both survived the stretch between.

  Izak offered his hand, expecting the typical pirate snub. Instead, Alaan clasped it.

  “Learn from your losses,” he said.

  “I hear they’re more informative than wins.” Izak slapped him on the shoulder. “I can’t fail to learn from Loss, friend. I carry her with me everywhere.” A touch less blithely, he added, “Take care of Kelena.”

  Alaan nodded, then climbed on top of the duke’s carriage to ride with the driver.

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  Izak felt a twinge of anger on the pirate’s behalf, being banished like a common servant. Had Duke Clarencio separated Thorn and mistress, or had it been Kelena’s idea that Alaan distance himself from her? Or had the stupid, noble pirate done this to himself out of some fool notion of honor?

  The small caravan splashed through the muddy bailey and rolled beneath the raised portcullis. Izak had an urge to follow them out of the gatehouse and watch until they had disappeared, but he had duties to attend. The work of the crown prince’s Commander of Thorns was never done.

  Most of Shamasa’s stores were loaded onto the king’s baggage train to provision the fortnight journey back to Siu Rial. A small portion of the dried meats, fruits, and hard loaves and cheeses were set aside for the crown prince and his six remaining Thorns—anything which could be eaten without building a fire. The soldiers who would eventually reman the fortress would bring along wagonloads of replacement stores that Hazerial’s chancellors would levy from local lords.

  For Izak and Etian, the final nights at Shamasa were spent in strategy meetings with the king, though there was little ground of the attack on the Helat imperial city that they had not already tread and retread. They had no new intelligence; to Izak’s eternal annoyance, Hazerial was just loath to take his hands off the reins.

  “Strong gods forbid someone think for themselves,” Izak muttered after they left the final conference with him.

  “He’s Eketra-blessed,” Etian said, adjusting his cracked lenses. “Plans go to rot fast when the fighting starts, and because he fears nothing so much as loss of control, he tries to mitigate it with contingencies.”

  Izak grunted. “Tries to mitigate us with contingencies, you mean.”

  “You, more likely. Remember the time he left you as regent?”

  “Am I supposed to answer for that for the rest of my life? He still had a realm when he got back.”

  “Barely.”

  The brotherly conversation fell off as a handful of Royal Thorns escorted the king’s beautiful new prisoner into a bailey crowded with officials, Thorns, and servants. Her eunuchs came next in chains, their rich satin clothing stained and torn. Their swords were gone, and blood oozed from a wound in the larger one’s upper arm.

  Late the day before, the eunuchs had tried to mount a rescue of their ward. They had killed one Royal Thorn and wounded Commander Poiran, but ultimately they had failed.

  An undersecretary stepped forward to list their crimes—which amounted to wishing to protect an innocent woman from a terrible and undeserved fate—but Izak already knew what would happen. Summary execution would gain the king nothing.

  The carefully scripted interruption came along just as anticipated.

  “We see no reason to waste two good swords in a land full of faithless raiders,” Hazerial said, one hand raised in a travesty of a compassionate ruler. “We grant you this mercy, Seleketra: Choose which of the two shall die, and we shall allow the other to live on in your service.”

  That service no doubt being to remind Seleketra that disobedience would be repaid in blood and sorrow.

  Tears streamed down Seleketra’s tattooed cheeks. Throughout the bailey, eyes sparkled with malicious glee while the proud demigoddess they had worshipped only nights before crawled on her knees in the mud, begging the king not to harm either of her eunuchs, to kill her instead.

  Izak’s fist tightened on Loss.

  “If you intervene,” Etian told him in a low voice, “you kill my wife and my son.”

  He need not have bothered. Since the moment the poor girl had been marched out into the bailey, the grafting had been holding Izak in check. Always its first aim—and hence Izak’s until he died—was to protect Etian and his bloodline. No matter who else was at risk, no matter what it cost him or the world.

  Hazerial was growing impatient. “If you do not choose, Seleketra, both will die.”

  The former close-rat clutched her breaking heart, spreading mud across the bodice of her handsome gown. Her ghostlit eyes searched the gathered crowd for help, for a sympathetic face, for anything.

  “Please, Etian,” she sobbed, stretching a mud-caked hand toward them. “Prince Etianiel. Prince Izak. Please.”

  As a child training in the royal blood magic, Izak had learned far more than his tutors and his father ever meant to teach him. One of those unintended lessons was how to leave himself behind. He hadn’t had to use the tactic in years, but as Seleketra reached for him, her sweet face streaming tears, Izak slipped away as if it had only been yesternight.

  From somewhere in the crowd, he watched a demigoddess’s hope of rescue die at the feet of two blackhearted princes. He heard the prince with the swordstaff whisper, “Get up, Seleketra. Don’t show him it hurts, or he’ll never stop.” Or maybe the prince only thought it. Maybe he was too much of a coward to say it aloud.

  He watched the pair of mute eunuchs signal their tenderhearted charge to doom them. He watched the demigoddess finally break and choose the taller one, falling on his neck and kissing his smooth cheeks and begging tearfully for his forgiveness.

  He watched a Royal Thorn step up and, in a series of heavy chops, sever the condemned eunuch’s thick neck while the demigoddess was violently sick and the remaining eunuch tried to comfort her.

  And just like always, he watched the king, Chosen of the Strong Gods, relish every moment of the bitter torture.

  This wasn’t a world for close-rats. It wasn’t a world for the kind or the good. Once, Izak had hoped that Etian was one of those men, noble, honest, and strong, but now he knew his younger brother was no different than he was. Better disciplined, but just as despicable.

  Izak couldn’t even hate Etian for it; he understood too well. House Khinet’s family tree bore only twisted and rotten branches. Thank the nonexistent Blasphemous One that Kelena had escaped the grasping fingers of family corruption before they caught hold and ruined her too.

  ***

  The king’s train left soon after the eunuch’s execution, leaving behind a handful of grafted swordsmen to hold the redoubt until it could be remanned. Hours later, as night sank and dawn clawed at the eastern sky, the Crown Prince’s Thorns abandoned Shamasa as well. The Hare of West Crag’s adopted war hound trotted happily alongside his new master, looking like a pony among the horses.

  Frost had settled across the mud in the night, decorating the waves of dead grass and emerging spring shoots with crystals. Puddled snowmelt had grown thin veneers of glass that crunched beneath their mounts’ hooves, and the ground, iced by the night’s cold, gave slushy protest wherever the heavy-laden beasts trod.

  Most Thorns never saw war during their service. They trained to fight knights and soldiers and pikes and archers because every man who came out of Thornfield must uphold the martial excellence of their order no matter what threatened their master—but most often those threats came calling in the form of assassins, treacherous family members, sellswords, and the Thorns of other lords. As such, Thorns weren’t issued armor when grafted, only their weapons, two uniforms, and a set of common clothes.

  Izak had sent those uniforms south with the king’s guard. The House Khinet red and black would be too easily seen. Instead, they would wear the drab riding leathers, padded jackets, and thick cloaks they had found at the fortress. Before they rode out, Izak made sure every Thorn and crown prince wore a shirt of mail and carried shield from the armory as well.

  Izak would have liked to supply his men with bows and quivers full of arrows as well. Sketcher was the only one among them other than Etian versed in archery—poaching game from his lord’s forest was what had landed the big rustic at Thornfield—but Izak thought the rest could learn fast enough.

  After Sketcher had inspected the pickings at Shamasa, however, he had disabused Izak of the notion. The bows in the armory had sat unused and unstrung for some time, gathering moisture, swelling, shrinking, and cracking with the temperature swings. The cared-for bows had fallen with their owners during the Mad Queen’s Massacre, splintered by axes or swords, or lying in pools of blood and bodily fluids until the arrival of the royal household.

  Between the materials in the armory and the corpse pile, Sketcher had cobbled together a single bow that he guessed had equal chances of bringing down some game, stopping an enemy charge, or breaking apart the moment their lives depended on it.

  “It’s not archers we’re short on,” Etian had reassured Izak. “I didn’t graft Thorns hoping they could shoot. Some of the best longbowmen in the Kingdom of Night are waiting for us at Blacktower. What they’ll need is a replenished supply of arrowheads.”

  So they looted sacks of bodkins and broadheads from the armory and added them to the princes’ baggage. The purses of steel jingled to the beat of the horses’ hooves as the redoubt grew smaller behind them, the music of war’s most precious metal.

  As they rode away, Izak twisted in his saddle to look back. Something about knowing that the fortress sat empty except for a few men and a pile of corpses made its battlements look tired and forlorn bathed in the green light of the ghost city. He found himself wondering whether the bailey and halls that glowed in the night sky were any more populated than the ones built of battle-scarred stone below.

  “He is ours,” Eketra had said on the night of Izak’s grafting.

  Josean hadn’t been as certain of a former heretic, but Teikru had.

  “I have blessed him,” the god-goddess had said. “He cannot fail.”

  “It is decided. Send him north.”

  Shamasa had been bad enough, but Izak couldn’t see it being the reason the strong gods had sent him north. Not when the only outcome of his being at the fortress was the death of their beloved Jadarah.

  Perhaps they had sent him to witness the punishment of Seleketra, the close-rat who presumed to play at being a demigoddess. But why? To warn Izak that Etian would come to the same if the crown prince tried to kill Hazerial before the strong gods were done with him?

  The whole Kingdom of Night might believe Etian to be the second coming of Josean, but Izak had stood before the real strong god in that ghostlit vision. The betrayal of Seleketra had put the blood of the innocents on his brother’s sword along with the blood of their enemies, but even so Izak knew that Etian was not the warrior god reborn.

  For Izak’s part, he didn’t think Etian believed the notion of his being the second-coming any more than Izak did. And even if Etian had been Josean reborn, that didn’t make him invulnerable. Just like the warrior strong god, Etian could be defeated—but unlike the Josean of the ancient texts, Etian was well aware of the possibility. That was why he was so careful and so ruthless.

  That, and the fact that he was Hazerial’s son.

  As was Izak. For a time, he had strayed from the path of reality into hopes and fantasies, but the bitter truths were all conspiring to bring him back. The Prince of Loss, riding with his brother the Prince of War.

  Riding north to Judgment.