Prologue
Fifteen yearsago
Mathos tippedhis head up and watched the sky, clasping his hands behind his back as he considered it. It was a perfectly clear, unbroken blue. The kind of blue that a boy could lose himself in, floating away on his thoughts until the world around him no longer existed. There was a name for that particular shade of deep, vibrant blue. Azure, maybe. Or was it cerulean? One of his tutors would know… if he still had tutors.
The monk started speaking again, and Mathos brought his gaze back down to the slightly hunched older man with his rounded belly and shaved head. His singsong voice droned on—detailing the baron’s illustrious noble heritage, his battlefield heroics, how beloved he was by the men he commanded. How honorably he’d died.
And with each further revelation, Mathos’s mother’s sighs grew more heartbroken and the monk more distracted.
Did any of it matter now?
The beast in his belly growled, twisting nauseatingly. Gods knew it hadn’t settled since the messenger had arrived with the news. Father was dead on the northern battlefields. And they were left behind.
The father he had hardly seen over the last two years, except for brief weeks of home leave. The father who had taught him to fish and ride and play cards. Who had pulled him into a rough hug and whispered in a low voice, “Be a good boy, Mathos. I’ll see you before midwinter.”
That was the last thing he’d ever hear from the man who gave him life.
His throat burned, tightening around the tears he refused to shed. Mathos blinked, swallowing against the jumbled mess of grief and loss and rage and guilt. Clenching his fist against the roiling churn of his beast.
How could his father have done this to him? How could he have left him? Left them all?
His mother was resplendent in flowing black mourning robes that shimmered as the wind tugged at the hems. Sophisticated and stylish, despite standing in the wind beside her husband’s grave. Her dark blond hair shone as it fell in artfully styled waves, while her face was a perfect alabaster streaked with elegant tears. She was being held up by her sister and one of her maids, somehow managing to look both beautiful and fragile.
The monk’s speech moved on to the family left behind by the loss of the baron—the fatherless children and the grieving widow. Hearing her name, his mother gasped out a choked sob, and then, whimpering gently, sank helplessly to the ground despite the best efforts of the women around her to hold her up.
Gods, she loved drama. And Father had always indulged her. He liked her soft and vulnerable and helpless, and she had played that role all her life.
And now what? Father was gone, and Mother was weeping on the cold ground.
Mathos’s two older sisters had been encouraged to be the same way since the day they were born. They stood side by side, their silk handkerchiefs pressed gently against their faces as they wept. While Crissy, three years old and only just past babyhood, stood beside her nurse with her thumb in her mouth, watching in wide-eyed confusion.
Who was going to look after them all?
Mathos had a horrible idea that he already knew the answer.
If only he had a gold coin for every person who’d told him he was the man of the family now, he would be able to pay someone else to bloody do it.
Gods.
He knew he was an arrogant little shit—his tutors reminded him daily—but he was still only thirteen. Yvaine and Lunette were fifteen and sixteen respectively, and yet they were both currently crumpling to the ground behind their mother, none of them even noticing the tears springing to little Crissy’s eyes, the way she burrowed into her nurse’s skirts in distress.
What was he going to do? He honestly had no idea at all.
He wanted to howl for the father who was gone forever. Anguish and misery churned through him, and he wanted to scream in rage at the unfairness of it all. Or maybe just scream. Scream and cry and fall apart. But if he started, he didn’t know that he could stop. And none of that was going to help now.
His aunt looked at him helplessly, his mother a porcelain doll swathed in black silk at her feet. He stepped over to them and offered his hand to the sobbing woman on the ground. “Come now, Mother, you can’t sit down there.”
She sniffled pitifully and put her cold hand into his, but made no move to stand, even as the monk’s voice trailed away unhappily.
A flicker of annoyance rose, but he immediately shoved it away. What was the point? Shouting at her would only make her cry more helplessly and leave him feeling like a brute.
After all, she had genuinely loved his father. And she was genuinely grieving. This was how she showed the depth of her pain.
He gave her an encouraging smile and lowered his voice. “Mother, it rained yesterday, and you look much too beautiful to sit in the mud. Let me help you up, and you can lean on me.”
Her eyes widened; she obviously hadn’t considered that she might have to walk around for the rest of the day with mud on the back of her dress. He gave her hand a small tug, and she allowed him to pull her back up, giving her skirts a surreptitious sweep with one hand while the other clutched an embroidered handkerchief to her eyes.
Thank the gods that his sisters followed her example and slowly stood, both still weeping loudly, as the monk cleared his throat and continued. The nurse picked Crissy up to rest on her hip, his sister’s small blond head tucked under her chin.
