He tried to yank his short sword free of the Invincible’s helm. The blade would not come loose.

Gaborn climbed to his hands and knees, gazed at Borenson, panting. Borenson rolled to his stomach, began vomiting onto the charred earth.

“Well met, my friend,” Gaborn said, smiling. He felt as if it were the first time he’d smiled in weeks, though he’d left Borenson only two days past.

Borenson spat on the ground, clearing his mouth, and smiled at Gaborn. “I really think you should get your butt out of here before Raj Ahten comes down the road.”

“Good to see you, too,” Gaborn said.

“I mean it,” Borenson grumbled. “He’ll not let you go so easily. Don’t you realize that he came all this way just to destroy House Orden?”

21

FAREWELL

In the Dedicates’ Keep, Chemoise grunted as she struggled to help her father from his bed of straw and dried lavender, dragged him out onto the green grass of the bailey so he could board the great wain for his trip back south. It was hard to move such a big man.

No, it was not his weight that made dragging him difficult. Instead it was the way he clutched her, grasping fiercely at her shoulders, his powerful fingers digging into her skin like claws, his legs unable to relax enough to walk.

She felt she had failed him years before, when she’d let him go south to fight Raj Ahten. She’d feared he would never return, that he’d be killed. She’d hoped her fear had been only a child’s concerns. But now, after his years as a prisoner, Chemoise imagined she’d had a premonition, perhaps a cold certainty sent from her ancestors beyond the grave.

So now she carried not only her father, but also the weight of her failure all those years before, a weight that somehow tangled with her feelings of inadequacy at having found herself pregnant. Her, the Princess’s Maid of Honor.

The western Great Hall in the Dedicates’ Keep was huge, three stories tall, where fifteen hundred men slept on any given night. Smooth walnut planks covered the floors, and each wall held a huge hearth so the room could be kept comfortably warm all winter.

The eastern Great Hall, on the far side of the bailey, held a third as many women.

“Where . . . ?” Chemoise’s father asked as she dragged him past the rows of pallets where Dedicates lay.

“South, to Longmot, I think,” Chemoise said. “Raj Ahten has ordered you to be brought.”

“South,” her father whispered a worried acknowledgment.

Chemoise struggled to drag her father past a man who’d soiled his bed. If she’d had time, she’d have cared for the fellow. But the wain would leave any moment, and she couldn’t risk being separated from her father.

“You . . . come?” her father asked.