Anyway, he still didn’t know what his mother’s status was. For all he knew, she was a prisoner, her life in peril constantly. He couldn’t trust his cousin Hemell with the knowledge he was here.

It was slow going, making sure of his footing on each step before moving to the next. The girl clung to his back, her nervous breath gasping in his ear. He set her down when they reached the top, giving her a nod. Then he made for the hallway, going straight to the second door on the left. It had been his father’s bedroom when his father was alive.

A woman sat at the desk against the outer wall, back to him. A tall, slender figure, posture upright. She turned at the faint sound of his caught breath, eyes flicking only briefly onto the girl partially eclipsed by his shoulder before settling on his face. She was as beautiful and cold as an ice sculpture, her features delicate. Eyes the same blue as his.

He stepped into the room as if drawn on a string. He felt his mouth open but had nothing to say. He crossed the room to her with his head floating, and she rose defensively from her chair as if she feared attack. There was another breathless moment when she didn’t see her son in the face of the man he had become. Then she frowned, drawing back from him. “What are you doing here?”

There was some part of him that knew even then that something was awry, but he was too keyed up to pay it heed. Taking her hands, he said, “I’m here, Mother. I made it home at last.”

She pulled her hands away. “To what end?”

“To… save you. To set our country right.”

She sighed as if he had annoyed her. “Yes, well, Hemell is my heir now, honey.”

He was terribly disoriented, by her words, by her manner, and couldn’t find a place in the conversation to grasp in order to steady himself. “Your heir? What about Jonet?”

“Your uncle is well. He’s in Callon, keeping things running for me while I take a little break.”

“You took the throne after father died.”

“It made no sense to crown his brother when there was a wife to hand. Inheritance does pass first to the spouse before ever the law looks to the next of kin. A custom I believe we owe to the Empire,” she added with a nod to Qanath, who was watching them.

“He’s still around, though? You get on with him? Made his son heir?”

“Are you trying to ask if I married him? I did not. He’s a spineless weasel, no woman would be able to sink to that level after having your father in her life.”

He looked at her with his mouth gaping, confused by the casual tenor of her voice, her prattling talk. Then he licked his lips as a monstrous thought occurred to him. “But you took his throne. The healers said it was his heart that killed him…”

His mother closed her eyes and pinched the bridge of her narrow nose. “Which was the literal truth, not some figurative nonsense from a fairy tale. Honestly, honey, you haven’t changed at all. Every day I wake up missing him, but I can’t deny it was a relief he died while you were still young.”

Havec stared at his mother while his own heart stuttered in his chest and died, in a totally figurative and nonsensical fairy-tale way. “You did this to me.”

She only looked back at him, and there was nothing but coldness in her face, no hint of sorrow or regret.

“Do you have any idea what I went through?” You would have thought he would be screaming, but the rage just wasn’t there.

“I stipulated that you weren’t to be harmed.”

“Weren’t to be harmed,” he repeated, tasting the words.

“The man I communicated with assured me, if I could get you to the border, he could provide you with a life more suited to your temperament.”

“Cheers,” he replied. He knew it was a strange thing to say, but what did you say to the woman who had carried you in her body for nine months, her heart beating to keep you alive, when you learned she’d handed you over to a bonding-broker knowing he would turn you into a whore? Lots of things, probably, but still the anger wouldn’t come.

His mother seemed to see this and uttered a weary sigh. “Do you see what I mean, honey? A man with the right kind of instincts would have thought to wonder sometime in the last six years, and no one would have been above suspicion. I sent you to the lake house without me the moment we got home from the funeral. It was the first time we ever let you travel without one of us, and I didn’t even give you an excuse.”

“I guess I was too busy surviving to give it much thought.”

“Survival shouldn’t have been enough. You should have wanted more.”

“I was a kid.”

“You were fifteen years old,” she corrected. “Unless time passes differently in the south, you should have grown up since.”

“To be clear: you sold me into bonding because I didn’t distrust you enough.”

His mother sighed again. “I didn’t sell you.”

“No, you threw me away.”

She didn’t answer, and he decided she was right: what else was there to say? Shrugging unconsciously, he turned around and left.

***

Qanath watched Havec go, mouth hanging open. She had expected tears and hugging, everyone overwhelmed by joy they could scarcely contain. Instead: this tense, unhappy scene. “Didn’t go as expected, I guess,” she said under her breath.

“This often happens when one mistakes daydreams for reality.”

She spun back to his mother, startled to be addressed. The woman’s accent was heavy, nothing like her son’s easy mastery of the Empire’s tongue. “Daydreams?”

“I gather he has been fantasizing all the time he was away about skipping in the doors one day and reclaiming his birthright. He never did understand it is a birth privilege.”

This sentiment emerging from the mouth of someone’s arrogant mother wasn’t calculated to win her admiration, but even so, the suspicion taking shape in her mind was hard to accept. Havec hadn’t been angry or frustrated, as if life had moved on in his absence when he wished for nothing to change. He had been horrified. His entire world had flipped upside down. He was in freefall plummeting toward the infinite sky, and it was his mother who cast him loose.

“You cannot mean to tell me you knew where he was all those years and chose to leave him there.”

The woman made an ambivalent sound and looked away.

Qanath took a step back. “No.”

There was a fleeting pause, then the queen’s gaze returned to her, upper lip pulling back to expose her teeth. She was an attractive woman in an austere way, handsome and composed, with a carriage that would have inspired a touch of envy even in her mother. Qanath found her repulsive, though, too cold to be completely human. The pride that gave her that enviable poise grew from the soil of resentfulness.

“I love my son, whatever you may believe, but he has no place here. I could not leave him at home, frolicking about, a ready tool for anyone seeking to take our future for themselves. Unlike the fortunate existence your people enjoy, nothing gets handed to us. My kingdom is small and impoverished, and we need leaders willing to fight for it.”

She didn’t bother to correct this wildly mistaken impression of daily life in her homeland. “You have no idea what he’s become, and finding out how wrong you are is probably going to be the last thing you ever do.”

“What are you, anyway?” the woman asked irritably. “At first I thought he brought you along as some weak attempt at disguise, but now I wonder if he realized he needed one.”

“Disguise?”

The queen raised her narrow eyebrows impatiently.

Qanath wasn’t sure what they were talking about but didn’t care enough to go on asking. “My mother is a Senator, she sits in the Second House of the Illiumate that’s governed the Empire for the last thousand years. The first thing I plan to do when Havec and I get home is tell her your country is a festering plague-sore that needs to be stamped out.” She made the most obscene gesture she knew, poking the tip of her thumb out between her splayed middle and index fingers. That done, she walked away.

She went next in search of Havec, although she knew it was a dangerous move. Attempting to offer him sympathy was a great way to get slapped. When she found him, he was at the front of the chalet, sitting on a second-story balcony with his legs dangling between the posts, gazing upon the frozen lake. He gripped an upright in either fist and his weight was forward, body resting listlessly so his face would be framed by the wooden bars. From the other side, it must look like a man looking out from his prison, and she wondered if he was doing it on purpose. She basically never understood what was going on inside his head.

He stirred when she stepped onto the balcony. She knew he knew who was standing behind him, although he never looked. After the length of a minute, she said, “What now?”