He did the same to another three keeps, then rode back to his castle with a total of five thousand men, quietly encircled the large summerling camp around the tower, and waited until the summerlings launched their next assault, hundreds of them all launching themselves valiantly up the extremely tall walls and over the top. Inside the tower, his remaining men took down the bracing that was holding up those walls and fled out through the tunnel as the tower came crumbling down, and in the confusion, Father attacked and slaughtered the entire summerling force.
He then marched his men—they were all firmly his men by then—to the next besieged border keep, killed the summerlings there, absorbed the garrison into his force, and kept going. By the end of the summer, he’d lifted the sieges on seventeen keeps and had killed tens of thousands of summerlings. The king grimly madehiman earl in his own right, gave him still more lands in the north, and sent him home to rule them before he could become too powerful.
Argent was a healthy and promising one-year-old boy by then, toddling around. Lady Farria died along with a stillborn girl the next year, but Father didn’t mourn very long. Shortly afterwards, her father the earl and his onlyson both died in a slightly questionable accident. Father promptly claimed the earl’s lands in Argent’s name, doubling the size of his estate, and started negotiating to marry the sole heiress of another earldom next to his, which would have made him the greatest landowner in the north and a significant power in the realm.
That was when his mistress got pregnant. Mistress Perilla was just a common-born song-spinner that he’d picked precisely because she could be quietly packed off without offending anyone as soon as he could make a match with another noblewoman. Father still had no intention of marrying her, but when the local soothsayer came for the usual visit and put his hands on her belly, instead of just delivering the pro forma prophecy of good fortune and an easy birth, the man’s eyes went all white and he told Father that she would bear him a son who would be useful to his other children, and hold the door open for power to come flowing into his house. Another man might have tried to stick to his plan anyway, but Father was too sensible not to respect a prophecy. He married her at once.
There hadn’t been any summer attacks during those two years, but not long after the wedding, the summerlings appeared for the next season in massive force, united under the direct command of Summer Prince Elithyon himself. Instead of besieging the border forts, he brought them all across the Green Bridge, smashed through thedefenses there, and took the royal road straight for the capital of Prosper. He didn’t even let his lords and knights sack the castles and towns and villages on the way, unless someone offered them battle, which very few people did. The current royal palace—it had been built after the start of the summer war—was almost as far away from the border as you could get and still be in the heartlands of Prosper, but it looked very much like he was still going to make it there before autumn.
King Morthimer decided that, on reflection, he preferred having a dangerously powerful lord at his back to being slowly roasted alive on a spit or sliced into a thousand pieces one at a time with thin sharp wires—the summerlings grew very elaborate when they caught anyone of high rank to kill, as a gesture of respect, and they’d never yet had the chance to kill a king of Prosper—and yelled for help.
Father rode down from the north at breakneck speed to assume command of the army, and then proceeded not to do anything with it except wait. He did send men down the royal road to burn all the bridges and fill all the fords with caltrops to slow down the summerling advance, and also sent Elithyon several cartloads of sparkling wine and sugar candy as a token of respect, which delayed him by almost another week—the summerlings hadn’t had much of either during the war, and they immediately stopped to have a very enthusiastic feast—but otherwise Father juststayed camped right outside the capital until the summer army arrived, three solid weeks before the weather would turn at the earliest. The king was feeling extremely anxious by then, but he also didn’t have any better options.
Father met the summerlings on open ground right before the capital, at the head of a gloriously arrayed force—knights in full plate, flags and banners waving, horns blowing, presenting exactly the sort of dream of battle that every summer knight and lord longed to fight in—and marched straight towards them, with his own flags, emblazoned with red foxes, streaming at the front. Knowing who he was facing, the Summer Prince immediately split up his forces and sent companies into the woods on either side, trying futilely to find the extra men that Father had surely hidden somewhere, and backed away over the field until his army had almost reached the previous ford, putting themselves on much worse ground than they’d had and disordering their ranks.
While Prince Elithyon kept hunting for the secret trap that didn’t exist, Father sent dozens of knights riding forward to offer direct challenges of one-on-one swordfights. It was too much of a temptation to the summerlings, already sullen about the lack of battle along the way; the front ranks of their army started breaking up completely as summer knights and lords rushed forward to accept the challenges, in some cases quarreling amongst themselves about who got to have the fight. The summerlings wonmost of the duels, of course, but before they could return to their lines, Father blew the horns and sent off a massive flight of arrows, followed by a cavalry charge that smashed through the large gaps they’d left. Thousands of summer knights were slaughtered en masse in a perfectly straightforward battle, and Elithyon had to order a desperate retreat over the river.
Elithyon meant to regroup, but he was out of time on the clock he hadn’t remembered was running. Just as he finally got his army back into order, the rains stopped, the first cold autumn day blew through, and seven leaves turned yellow and fell off a tree in his camp. All his summerlings broke in horror and fled south down the royal road as fast as they could go, leaving him stranded in the middle of Prosper with only the tiny devoted core of the summer guard, and Father’s army on the march towards them.
But King Morthimer, perhaps fearing what Father might decide to do with the armyafterhe’d disposed of the Summer Prince, intervened at that point. He sent an envoy to Elithyon and offered him peace terms. Every envoy who’d been sent to the summerlings over the previous century had been sent back in pieces, with their head enchanted to declare the summerlings’ eternal determination to kill them all, but this time a chastened Elithyon finally agreed to negotiate, and at the Green Bridge heswore an oath of gold and silver to never again invade Prosper before he too fled the changing season.
And by the time Father rode back into the capital after his great victory, with frenzied crowds cheering wildly along every street, a messenger was waiting to tell him that the prophecy had come true: his second son, Roric, had been born, and his inconvenient commoner wife had conveniently died in the process, leaving the now Grand Duke Veris free to ask the king for the hand of his baseborn sister.
The king agreed with much relief: he’d been expecting a demand for the hand of his actual daughter, despite her young years, with real concerns about the future of his own son, Crown Prince Gorthan, who was only ten at the time. Father wasn’t having to commission song-spinners to get songs written about him anymore, and it was a settled matter among the common folk that he was the savior of the realm.
But Father had known exactly what to do then, too. He’d known that putting himself too close to the throne—or on it—would stir up enormous resentment among the great lords of the realm, who were already resentful of him, and make him a target of conspiracy. So instead he asked only for Lady Cecily, and as a dowry, the great royal castle of Todholme along with its rich lands, to make an appropriate home for her. He brought his newwife and his two young sons there, and settled in to get what he very much hoped would be a daughter of royal blood.
He meant to marry that girl to the grand duke who was his new neighbor, and breed up grandchildren who’d be rich and of ancient lineage and have just enough of a claim to the throne so that when Crown Prince Gorthan grew up and had children, he would accept a betrothal to one of them for his own heir, and give Father a royal princess to be Argent’s wife. And at that point, the fortunes of the crown would be tied to his so securely that Gorthan would just do whatever Father told him.
So that had been Father’swell-laid plan: a steady two-decade conquest of the throne by a penniless boy from the back of nowhere, which he meant to accomplish without fighting a single battle against anyone in the kingdom, and putting an end to the wasteful summer war while he was at it. He didn’t care if he wore the crown or not; he only wanted to put himself in charge. Mostly, Celia felt, once she’d worked out just what Father was doing, because he couldn’t stand how many stupid mistakes other people made.
But now Father was the one who had made the stupid mistake. Celia knew that Father didn’t care that Argent liked boys; nothing like that ever mattered to him. What he did care about was that if peopleknewthat Argent liked boys, it would give the king an excuse to refuse to give him a royal princess for his wife, and maybe even to disinherit him. Father had just been trying to teach Argent not toget caught,and it had never occurred to him that Argent wanted love more than power.
It had thrown him completely off his stride. At first he didn’t even seem to know what to do about Celia, even though that was perfectly obvious. At the breakfast table the very next morning, he said to her, remotely, “I mean to write to Grand Duke Preine today, to discuss a betrothal between you,” and she stared at him out of her red-rimmed sandy eyes and said, “What?”
Father actually began delivering her a lecture that he must have had ready for many years, to quash her anticipated objections to the match, in his most cold and unyielding tones. “His Grace is lately widowed, and has no sons—”
“But I’m going to marry Gorthan now,” Celia said, bewildered. It didn’t make any sense to her. They didn’t need to wait for another generation anymore. She was asorceress.The king would instantly snatch her up for Crown Prince Gorthan, and it wouldn’t offend any of the greatlords of the kingdom in the slightest. She was surprised that Father hadn’t already sent to tell him. “Aren’t you going to write to theking?”
Father paused and stared at her, his cup halfway to his mouth—so did a shocked Unter and the table servants and a frozen, wide-eyed Roric, who didn’t even know what had happened with Argent last night, and had been hunching over his plate and shoveling in food in his usual way—and then Father put down his cup, his face rigid, and said very shortly, “Yes. You’re right,” and got up at once to go and send the letter to the king, and Celia only then realized how badly off he was.
She was badly off herself, too, but she hadn’t made a stupid mistake, at least. She’d made ahorribleone, but that wasn’t the same thing at all. And she wasn’t sorry to be marrying Crown Prince Gorthan instead of Grand Duke Preine, even if she didn’t for an instant believe any of the spun-sugar tales of how handsome and clever and brave the prince was; she’d only ever learn anything about him once she’d actually met him. But at least hewasn’ta cowardly old man of forty-five who’d avoided ever fighting in the summer war with an excuse of bad knees, and who always fell asleep directly after eating too much dinner, the handful of times he’d come to visit, and snored.
Celia even ended up having to tell Roric about Argent herself, and that he was now the heir of their house, because three days passed and Father still hadn’t done it.And then Roric only stared at her and said, “I don’t believe you.”
“I’m not lying,” Celia had said coldly.
Roric was silent, working it through, and then said, “Argent’sgone? He just—left?” Celia was half ready to stab him with a dagger, or cursehim,as soon as he fully grasped it and she had to watch the glow of gloating joy rising through him, but instead Roric just got up and went away, his narrow weaselly face gone blank, and later that day, he came to speak to her in her chambers and said flatly, “No one’s ever cared about me. Not Father, not you, not even the servants. Argent’s the only one you cared about.”
“Yes,” Celia said, because that was true.Shewasn’t going to be a liar, and pretend otherwise. She didn’t care about Roric, but he was still her brother. He deserved that much honesty from her—that least little thing that Argent had refused to give her.
“And now he’s gone away and left us,” Roric said. “But Father still doesn’t care. He won’t even look at me at table. I’m his heir now, and I had to find out from you.” He swallowed, the lump moving visibly in his skinny throat. “He didn’t even put me in the register of nobility when I was born. He only wanted me to beusefulfor Argent.”
“For Argent and me,” Celia agreed. That was true also.
Roric nodded. “Well, I wasn’t going to be,” he said. “Ihad to pretend I didn’t mind, because I couldn’t do anything about it yet, but I knew I wasn’t going to be useful for anyone who didn’t care about me at all. Who wasn’t going to do anything forme.”
Celia blinked. It didn’t make her angry; that seemed fair enough. It just hadn’t ever before occurred to her to wonder what Roric was thinking, or what he wanted. “Why are you telling me now?” she asked. It didn’t seem like a very good idea. If she went and told Father that Roric meant to be troublesome, he’d probably go and get himself a fourth wife, and try to have another son.
