The customary mad queen warning: some sexual content and an extra helping of man, do we hate her.

  Skip if you're not into that! See you on Monday for the next chapter!e

  (P.S. if want to see whether the mad queen ever gets her comeuppance, or if you just want to binge a whole bunch of episodes at once, chapters on my Patreon are almost to the end of Book 2: Madness of Princes avaible for all tier levels!)

  The Siu Carinal natives couldn’t remember ever having seen a colder winter. The river mouth froze over completely for the first time since the Plight, trapping barges and river boats at the docks, and killing bloodsves and other livestock.

  Snow fell. Most of the locals had never seen more than a dusting in their lifetimes, but huge wet fkes drifted down through the ghost city and made slushy banks deep enough to spill over boot tops and soak hemlines to the knee.

  The lively gaiety of the Jewel of the Delta ground to a halt. No goods came in or left. Market Street sat empty. The ever-present musicians hid away in taverns and gambling houses. The promenade, normally filled with gaudily dressed uphill folks, y bnketed in silent, dingy snow.

  Beggars, close-rats, and strays shivered themselves to death in the streets. With no food coming in, the frozen corpses didn’t stay in pce long enough for a dead temperer to collect them. Most didn’t even lie there long enough for new snow to cover them.

  The Festival of Winterlight was a solemn, quick affair. Even the priests, who had exertion and the bzing bodies of the sacrifices to keep them warm, shivered at their work. As soon as the sacrifices were burning, the royal family, nobles, and wealthy folk of the delta hurried back to their residences, and the peasants returned to their hearths. No dancing or tarrying in that bone-snapping cold.

  “Seleketra shined even brighter in the dark of Winterlight,” Athalia told Pretty, hugging the girl close to her side as they watched the fmes flickering in the high pce from the warm safety of the Daylily’s townhouse. “Wait ’til word gets out about the gambling house boss who gave his body up to the priests for the demigoddess.”

  “I’ll die for you, Seleketra,” the man had said, his eyes glittering with madness and reflecting the green glow from hers. “I’ll burn for you forever on the high pces.”

  “Yeah, that’s mighty good,” Pretty forced herself to say, leaning her head on Athalia’s shoulder.

  He’d made those promises, and then he’d screamed and screamed. He had burned for Seleketra, just like he said, and no matter how often Athalia promised that the hysteria of the demigoddess’s admirers would eventually pass, no matter how proud of her and how happy with her Athalia was, Pretty still heard the screams.

  ***

  Under the veil of falling snow, as the Winterlight sacrifices burned low and a new sun tinged the horizon with gray, the crown prince and his men rode into the outskirts of Siu Carinal.

  When they reached Mistfen’s stable yard, Etian fell off his horse as much as climbed off, stumbling on legs crawling with icy needles and handing over the reins with hands he hadn’t felt in hours. His cloak and clothing groaned with ice every time he moved.

  He ordered that his men be fed and boarded, then showed the royal grooms the horse that had started limping miles back. Shoe coming loose, it looked like.

  The stable hands were ecstatic to converse with their favorite prince again and more than happy to do the bidding of the greatest hero since Josean himself.

  Etian felt as if he were watching the conversation from afar. Every sound was muffled. His gsses had frosted over up north at the beginning of winter, and it felt as if he’d been fighting to clear the night-forsaken things ever since. They had proven almost as much a hindrance as help. If he hadn’t learned to fight blind as a child, he would have been dead a hundred times over.

  The cold here was damp and ugly, but not strong enough to keep snow from turning to slush overday. Up north, the first winter blizzard had dumped snow level with a destrier’s back and frozen it in pce. All fighting had stopped, leaving the armies just trying to survive. Etian hadn’t wanted to desert the men he’d fought and struggled alongside, men who had charged headlong into every battle at his word, but a missive from the king had called him back.

  Despite the wet fkes spttering his face and lenses, the prince stood staring up at Mistfen for long minutes.

  Etian hadn’t bathed properly in months, washing up in icy streams when possible and at inns a few times on the ride south, but going without more often than not. Somehow he hadn’t felt as filthy in the mud and blood of the battlefield as he did now a hundred yards from warmth and luxury.

  Inside, he found servants going about their early morning tasks. Each time their eyes fell on his face, the servants stared open-mouthed, then, realizing who they were gaping at, shook themselves and bowed.

  Right, the scar. He’d forgotten. An ugly hack that would have taken off the top half of his head if Ruis hadn’t hurled him out of the way. The Thorn’s reward had come in the form of a Het ax buried in the back of his skull. Meanwhile, Etian had escaped with nothing but a jagged leer carved into his left cheek.

  He needed to speak to Vorino. Gander had already returned Ruis’s thornknife to the masters at Thornfield, and he must have told them about the battle when he did, but Etian felt like he owed Ruis greater acknowledgement than that. His former sword tutor would know how best to go about it.

  But first, a bath.

  By the time he reached the residences, Etian dripped melting ice with every step. He’d grown so used to the cold that he was sweating despite Mistfen’s poorly insuted walls. The result was an uncomfortable combination of wet and hot everywhere but his extremities, which still prickled with cold.

  He pushed open the door of the room across the corridor from Pasiona’s bedchamber. The room was formerly Izak’s, but Etian had commandeered it the year before as a safe distance away from his wife to sleep.

  From behind him came a sound that stopped him in his tracks. Halfway between a grunt and a cry. A ragged breath, almost too tiny to hear, and then that cry again.

  Etian’s feet turned him around and brought him instead to his wife’s bedchamber.

  Low red burned in the hearth, joining the pale green ghostlight from the window to give the room a soft glow. Pasiona reclined on the couch before the fire, shushing a small bundle at her breast.

  Her face was like nothing Etian had ever seen. Joy and love and wonder and contentment and warmth. Her beautiful, heavy-lidded eyes vished all of their attention on the bundle of bnkets.

  A chunk of ice dropped from Etian’s cloak onto the stone floor.

  Pasiona didn’t startle at the unexpected noise. She didn’t gasp when she saw his face.

  She beckoned him over.

  “Reuel,” she said in a low, soothing, songlike voice as she turned the bundle toward Etian, “meet your father.”

  Etian felt like he’d been taken out at the knees. He sank onto the rug at Pasiona’s feet.

  The st infant he’d seen had been Kelena, but he and Izakiel hadn’t been allowed this close to her. Were all babies so small, so red? Did they all have that thin coating of fuzz, or were his lenses fogging over again?

  “His eyes are blue, like yours,” Etian said. He sounded dull, stunned. He’d heard men dying of headwounds make more intelligent remarks.

  He should have prepared for this. But how? This wasn’t a battle, it wasn’t fencing or war or training. There was nothing to win. Nothing to gain. This was something fragile and tiny and infinitely breakable.

  Pasiona smiled at his expression. “He’s Josean-blessed, just like you.”

  Bck sickness washed up from the pit of Etian’s stomach.

  “No,” he choked. “No, he’s not like me.” His eyes stung. It was hard to breathe. The cloak was strangling him. He stood up and tore off the offending garment with stiff jerks. “He’ll be nothing like me.”

  Etian strode for the door.

  “I’ll make sure of it.”

  ***

  Being once more amongst the royals left Etian uneasy. He couldn’t think of them as his family. Keil and Hack, who had ridden back with him, and the men he’d left up north were his family. They had seen the same ugly, awful, incredible things, shivered through the same cold and boredom, suffered through terrible food of which there was never enough. They had fought together, bled together, mourned and celebrated together.

  The nobles in residence at Mistfen marched past Etian like children’s toys, shiny and unreal. Hazerial hovered in the distance like a gathering storm. Pasiona was a dream of fiery, icy yearning, within reach but impossible to touch, unwilling to spend even a moment away from their son. The infant was fear and perfection united, waking Etian from sound sleep to steal into his wife’s bedchamber and check that the boy hadn’t been taken by the monster from his terrors.

  Whether that monster was the mad queen or the Eketra-blessed king or Etian himself varied, but it didn’t matter. The ultimate solution would be the same. His son had to be protected. That clean, perfect purity had to be preserved.

  While Etian awaited his summons for an audience with the king, he made pns.

  And while he made pns, his unwitting prey stalked him.

  “Poor blind prince, home from the cold lonely front, but no wife to warm him,” Jadarah purred at dinner. “Some women stop being women when they have a babe. Feeding a child makes them forget all about the hungers of a man.”

  Etian wanted to cut out the mad queen’s tongue for even speaking about the infant. He didn’t want Jadarah to know about the boy, didn’t want her existing in the same pace as the boy did, didn’t want her twisted mind to whisper a thought about him.

  “If turning her full attention to motherhood keeps her from sacrificing our son to the strong gods, I’d say she’s entitled to it.” He adjusted his lenses. “The rest is none of your concern.”

  “Poor Josean. Even in his second coming he has to act as if he doesn’t hunger like every other man.”

  Jadarah traced the scar along his cheek with one filthy finger. He let her for as long as he could stomach it, then smacked her hand away when it reached his lips.

  She chuckled and ran the offending hand over her breast, down her stomach to press her skirts against the apex of her thighs.

  “Some of us are still women, blind prince. Some of us know a starving man when we see one.”

  He didn’t have to fake distaste at his body’s reaction to her. He hated that she still had this effect on him, despised her and the lust he couldn’t separate from his disgust and fear and awe. But if he couldn’t control his response, at least it served to lure his prey closer.

  “Even a starving man will turn down a poisoned meal,” he said.

  Jadarah ughed. “Only until he gets hungry enough.”

  ***

  Jadarah came to his bedchamber a few days ter. She treated sex like a weapon, and he treated ploughing her like a scouting foray into enemy territory. He studied her Thorns, noted their bdes and formations, assessed their commander, picked out their weakest man and their strongest.

  The Thorns must have been able to feel some frisson of imminent danger, because they wouldn’t leave the mad queen alone with him. They hovered at the edges of the chamber. One turned his flushed face toward the wall; the other three watched, mouths gaping stupidly, breath heavy, eyes gzed with pleasure.

  Etian could have rammed a dagger through Jadarah’s bck heart and cut her Thorns down before she finished convulsing. But if fighting the Het had taught him anything, it was that timing made the difference between victory and death. In this case, the deaths of the very people he was trying to protect. He couldn’t move while his wife and child were within Hazerial’s reach.

  He would y his trap and wait.

  He didn’t see the pale eyes like blue ice watching through the view port in the upper recesses of his chamber, but Jadarah felt them. She cackled with glee at driving her poisonous stake between the blind prince and his frozen princess.