Chemoise backed completely out the door of the great wagon, tried to find her footing on the ladder behind. The guard shoved her.

She fell hard to the packed dirt of the bailey.

“Ees military. For just military,” the guard said, with a chopping motion of his hand.

“Wait!” Chemoise cried. “My father is in there!”

The guard stared impassively, as if a daughter’s love for her father was a foreign concept.

The guard rested his hand on the hilt of the curved dagger in his belt. Chemoise knew there would be no reasoning, no mercy.

With a shout and a whistle, the driver of the huge wain urged the horses from the Dedicates’ Keep. Guards ran before and behind the wagon.

Chemoise couldn’t follow the wagon to Longmot. She knew she’d never see her father again.

22

A HARD CHOICE

As Borenson smiled at Gaborn, watched the Prince suddenly reach the realization that Raj Ahten had come primarily to slay him and his father, a blackness came over Borenson’s mind—a cloud of despair.

He saw King Sylvarresta, told himself, I am not death. I am not the destroyer.

He’d always tried to be a good soldier. Though he lived by the sword, he did not enjoy killing. He fought because he sought to protect others—to spare the lives of his friends, not to take the lives of his foes. Even his comrades-in-arms did not understand this. Though he smiled in battle, he smiled not in glee or from bloodlust. He did so because he’d learned long ago that the fey smile struck terror into the hearts of his opponents.

He had an assignment from his King: to kill the Dedicates of Raj Ahten, even though those Dedicates might be his lord’s oldest and dearest friends, even if the Dedicate was the King’s own son.

Borenson saw at a glance that King Sylvarresta had given his endowment. The idiot king no longer knew how to seat a horse. He leaned forward, eyes wide with fright, moaning incoherently, tied to the pommel of his saddle.

There, Borenson assumed, beside the King rode Iome or the Queen—he could not tell which—all the glamour leached from her, skin as rough as cracked leather. Unrecognizable.

I am not death, Borenson told himself, though he knew he’d have to bring death to these two. The thought sickened him.

I have feasted at that King’s table, Borenson told himself, remembering past years when Orden took Hostenfest with Sylvarresta. The smells of roast pork and new wine and turnips had always been strong at the table—fresh bread with honey, oranges from Mystarria. Sylvarresta had always been generous with his wine, free with his jokes.

Had Borenson not thought the King too high above Borenson’s own station, he’d have been proud to call him friend.