Phriese looked for his girl for hours, but it was Rake who found her early the next evening.

  “What the— For Josean’s sake, Hare, don’t let him come over here!”

  Unfortunately, unlike his namesake, Hare wasn’t fast on his feet and Phriese was.

  “Jili?” The bug-eyed Thorn pulled her off the pile of rotting soldiers and tried to hold her in his arms. She had stiffened over the cold spring day, bent slightly backward at the waist, one leg twisted awkwardly over the other.

  Phriese sat down in the half-frozen mud and laid her side-on across his legs, smoothing her hair from her icy, bloodshot eyes. Tentatively, he traced the bulge in her throat. Her face was livid purple, two of her teeth broken.

  When Etian arrived in the bailey, he had Izak and the others wrestle the dead girl away from Phriese, then he took his distraught Thorn aside.

  “I know those claw marks on her cheeks,” Etian said in a low voice. “The mad queen killed her.”

  Phriese’s protruding eyes ran with tears, and snot oozed onto his upper lip. He looked bewildered more than grieved, like a man who wasn’t sure where he was.

  That could be me, Etian thought. The dead girl could be Pasiona or our son.

  He lowered his head until his eyes were in line with his Thorn’s, their noses an inch apart. Close enough that he almost didn’t need his smoked lenses to see; close enough that his words wouldn’t carry.

  “I’m going to kill that murdering harpy, Phriese. I’m sorry I didn’t do it sooner and save you this.” Etian squeezed the smaller man’s shoulder. “Will you help me?”

  Phriese’s blink didn’t quite close his eyes, but it sent more tears dripping off his face. He didn’t respond for so long that Etian questioned whether the Thorn was too deep in his grief to understand.

  “Phriese. Will you help me kill her?”

  Finally, dazedly, the Thorn sniffed and nodded.

  “The rest of them can’t know,” Etian warned him.

  Another slow nod.

  “From now on, you’re my chamber guard during the day, Phriese. You and no one else.”

  “But Commander Izak assigns—”

  “He takes his orders from me, the same as all of you. He’ll put you on the shift I tell him to. I’m ordering you not to tell him anything you see or hear over your day shifts. Understood?”

  The agreement came faster that time.

  “And I’m ordering you not to make a move against the mad queen until I say. You don’t so much as look cross at her. Can you do that? For Jili?”

  Gulping, Phriese nodded.

  “Keep that sword sharp,” Etian said, stepping back. “We’re going to need it.”

  ***

  Kelena had learned during her brief travels with her father that the king didn’t hold audiences before midnight. His Majesty’s evenings went to his toilette and the quiet business of letters. More parchment and ink went into running a kingdom than she ever would have guessed.

  Out of respect for a ruler’s necessities, and hoping to catch the king in a good mood, Kelena requested an audience with him after the midnight meal, when she had heard he typically held court. As they were currently in residence in a desolate fort and there were no other petitioners seeking the king’s time, the princess was granted his first audience of the night.

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  One of the king’s secretaries, who had come north to record the royal marriage and Lord Clarencio’s rise to Duke of the Cinterlands, showed her into the fort commander’s sitting chamber.

  The oblong walls were lined with her father’s Thorns. Kelena felt Alaan assess them, felt an increase in that coiled readiness that permeated mind and muscle whenever they left a secured room.

  His Majesty sat on a wooden wingback near a small but blazing hearth. The chair was without ornamentation, its back as tall as a man standing. At first Kelena thought that time had worn the shadow of an occupant into the wood. Then she saw the dark brown of dried blood and the splotchy green of a putrefying corpse.

  She stared down at the flagstones and knelt, tucking her skirts around her and trying not to imagine how long the chair’s last occupant had sat in it.

  “Rise, Kelena,” the king said kindly. “Our beloved daughter need not approach us prostrating like a common petitioner.”

  A gesture to one of his Thorns brought a smaller, backless seat for her.

  “Now, what is it, child?” Hazerial asked when she’d been seated. “We give you leave to speak freely.”

  Kelena clasped her trembling hands in her lap. As a child, she had hardly ever seen her father, and when she did, the weight of his enormous power and presence had frightened her speechless. Even now, after so much time in close confinement with him, she felt the force of it pressing down on her like a great invisible hand. Hazerial of House Khinet was the Chosen of the Strong Gods, their blessed sovereign; in his company, it was impossible to forget that she was their most hated creation.

  “Your Majesty—”

  “Please, Daughter. You need not stand on ceremony. ‘Father’ will suffice.”

  “F-father.” Her tongue was unaccustomed to the familiarity. She couldn’t remember ever using it before. “I come to beg Your Majesty’s leave to carry Alaan’s thornknife myself.”

  A bolt of surprise shot through the grafting. She hadn’t told Alaan why she wished to see her father.

  When the king didn’t immediately refuse, Kelena plunged ahead. “You told the Grandmaster of Thornfield that you held it for me because I was still a child, but I’m nearly seventeen years old now, and in two nights, I’ll be a wife. If something were to happen to me while Your Majesty and I were apart—some unknown danger or a dangerous childbirth—and I couldn’t retire my Thorn before my death, his soul would be shattered and—”

  “Kelena.”

  She swallowed her rambling and dared a look at the king. Hazerial had Izakiel’s handsome features, with twice the prince’s age and none of his warmth. Where the ever-present channel-like dimples high on Izak’s cheekbones could make the prince look an ill-behaved rogue, on Hazerial they looked like disappointment in his idiot daughter.

  “Dear child, if we thought it wise to give you every desire of your heart, know for a certainty that we would grant this request without hesitation. If you were remaining in the Kingdom of Night, even. But the realm of the betrayers is a treacherous land. What would you do if a sneakthief came in the day and slipped off with it while you slept? Or a cutpurse on a crowded street? Suppose this has all been a ruse by the Helat, and just over the border they take you and your new husband hostage. They could make your Thorn do anything, simply by threatening your life.”

  Kelena frowned. It seemed as if the Helat could do that anyway. They wouldn’t need Alaan’s thornknife to exploit him if they had her as a hostage. But perhaps thinking that way only revealed what a fool she was. The king was right about thieves and cutpurses, anyway, of that much she was certain.

  Hazerial moved to perch on the edge of his chair and took her hands in his cool, long-fingered grasp.

  “A thornknife holds the soul of the man bound to serve you, Daughter. It would be frivolous indeed to gamble with such a valuable asset. Set aside your notions of pride and status for a moment and think of your Thorn. It is his soul you are asking to risk.” The king shook his head sadly. “For his good, and to protect you from learning a very dangerous, very painful lesson, we cannot allow it.”

  “But what if—” Kelena stammered as she grasped for a way to present the truth of her concerns without raising Mother’s name. “—what if I had an enemy, and that enemy wanted to exploit me by stealing Alaan’s thornknife? Surely the safety of his soul could be used against me in the same way my safety could be leveraged against him?”

  The king chuckled. “Daughter, where is a treasure safer? With a child sent out into a world she is ignorant of, or under the guard of the king with the Blood of the Strong Gods flowing through his veins? Tell us, sweet Kelena, what enemy can defeat the King of Night in his own strongholds? Men tremble at our voice. They melt beneath the glance of our eye. Do you doubt the strength of the Chosen of the Strong Gods?”

  “No, Your Majesty, never!”

  “Then you agree it cannot be safer than in my hands.”

  “Your Majesty’s power cannot be overcome, certainly, but—”

  “The matter is decided.” The king rose and pulled Kelena to her feet. “Rest assure that we will speak of this to no one.” The dimples on either side of his mouth appeared as he smiled. “Not even to your queen mother.”

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