Not for the first time this week, Freyrík wished his brother were here. Well, not right here, right now, in his bedchambers with—

"Oh, Highness!" Lord Jafri threw his head back, planted his palms on Freyrík's belly and sped his rocking across Freyrík's hips. He was lovely, Freyrík had to admit, with those dark round eyes and black hair, bronze skin slick with sweat, sculpted arms trembling with exertion . . .

Arms, Freyrík reflected, that had earned their beauty wielding the sword. Not even sons of Earls were spared from the Surge Wars. At least Jafri would command his own company this time—

"Just like that, Highness," Jafri breathed.

Freyrík wanted to comply but didn't know what that referred to, since Jafri was doing all the work. Oh, he wanted to want the man, to lose himself in the tight, eager body atop him and the silk sheets below. To forget, just for a moment, the darkness and death encroaching upon his people. Only in scattered skirmishes yet, but not for long—he would have to mobilize the army soon. And as if that weren't trouble enough, the contingent in Akrar had captured an elven spy, though not before the creature had single-handedly killed four-fifths of them. His men could barely hold one front against the darkers; if elvenkind meant to rekindle aggressions, Farr Province might not survi—

"Highness?"

Freyrík snapped back to the present and realized that Lord Jafri was staring down at him, worry pulling at his lips and creasing his forehead. He'd stopped moving. Freyrík's member had gone limp inside him.

"Are you well, Your Highness?" One hand slid up Freyrík's chest and settled hesitantly over his heart. "Is it . . . have I displeased you?"

Freyrík sighed and curled his hand over Lord Jafri's, giving it a gentle squeeze. "Of course not," he said. Then, because he could ill afford to worry about the easily-wounded feelings of someone who'd given their arrangement more meaning than it deserved, he tugged Jafri off his lap and said, "'Tis just the war. I find it hard to attend my own pleasure when so many lives will soon be lost on my orders." Or lost to my errors. He'd dispatched scouts and soldiers to the elven border, but he could scarce afford to divert them from the fight with the dark beasts. Had it been the right choice?

"You worry overmuch, My Prince," Lord Jafri said.

Freyrík shook his head. 'Twas impossible to worry too much when the entirety of his brother's kingdom—and all the Empire beyond—stood so very near the precipice of extinction.

Lord Jafri knelt at his hip and leaned in, looking up at him with dark eyes made darker by the low light and his desire to please. His breath ghosted over Freyrík's member. "If you would permit, Highness, I would ease your tensions . . ."

He bowed his head, mouth open, but Freyrík nudged him away and stood. "My thanks, Jafri, but I must rise and meet the day." He felt compelled to add, "Perhaps tomorrow," though he knew he shouldn't have. Tomorrow would be no less taxing.

Jafri bowed his head and stood. "Shall I fetch your groom?" he asked, sorting through his clothes and carefully avoiding Freyrík's eyes. Upset, then, though for wounded feelings or foiled ambitions, Freyrík knew not.

And what beneath the great shadow of the gods had planted that thought in his mind? Most people desired him for their own ends, true, but Lord Jafri had never shown . . .

Freyrík poured some water into his washbasin, splashed it across his face. "Yes, thank you."

". . . Shall I leave?"

"That might be best," Freyrík said, but kept his tone kind. "If you would summon my secretary on your way, I'd be most grateful."

Freyrík heard Jafri's footsteps on the carpet, and his bedroom doors open and close. Only then did he allow his worry to surface. 'Twould not do to air his fears in the presence of his people—not even a paramour. But he could share his worries with the Aegis. He could ask for an emergency recruitment from the inland provinces; he was certain the Aegis Exalted could draft at least a battalion for him. Or rather, for his brother.

He would write Berendil, then, and ask him to appeal to the Aegis in person. 'Twas why his brother spent so much time at High Court, after all; that it pleased his third wife, a daughter of the Aegis, was but a secondary gain. Yet on days like this, Freyrík wished he weren't alone in the outlands, with a regency on his hands and a Surge on the brink of cresting upon his borrowed lands.

But he would manage, as he always had. He had his brother's confidence, his people's confidence—befang it, if one listened to the clergy, he had a godly right. And Berendil would be home in another month and back on the throne where he belonged.

His groom returned from what Freyrík suspected was an interrupted breakfast to bathe, shave, and dress him. He felt poorly for having recalled the man so soon after dismissing him, and gave him 'til evening to spend as he wished. Then he settled into his private study to write the letter, but he had barely penned his opening salutations when his secretary interrupted: the elf-catchers had arrived with their prize and were awaiting his pleasure in the Great Hall.

Freyrík entered the hall through the antechamber behind the dais, his secretary in tow, and took a moment to compose himself in the private alcove. Even from there he could see the abandoned tables, still strewn with the interrupted breakfast of the court. The guards had cleared the room, or else his guests and relatives had retired to safety of their own accord. The flock of servants darting round the edges of the hall, removing half-eaten dishes to personal trays, seemed to vacillate between terror and awe. Freyrík's enmity for the elven warrior deepened at the sight of his court in such disarray, and he found himself eager to confront the creature. He strode out into the Great Hall proper.

And froze halfway down the dais stairs, nearly tripping over his own feet.

There beside the runner at the bottom of the stairs, shackled and flanked by two soldiers, stood a creature of stunning beauty, made even more so by the glow of elflight. Freyrík should have expected this—he'd seen his share of elven slaves serving at High Court and sold off in the markets—but nothing in his past could have prepared him to see, at this moment, a female elf.

Particularly one so young and small, a wispy maiden as light and lovely as dandelion down and surely no more threatening. She could not have killed sixteen of his men; the idea was preposterous.

A young sergeant stepped forward and clicked his heel in sharp salute. "The elven prisoners from Akrar, Your Highness."

Prisoners, plural? Yes, the elven woman's eyes were fixed upon a male across the runner, hanging bloody and beaten between two soldiers, his head slumped so low that all Freyrík could see of him was messy dark hair and a crossbow bolt jutting from his shoulder blade.

Freyrík turned back to the sergeant. "You call this one elf? There's no light about him."

The sergeant flushed but said, "He is, Your Highness." He grabbed a fistful of the elf's hair—nothing but cowlicks, Freyrík noted with amusement, for all the gravity of the occasion—and jerked the prisoner's head up. "Glow for your prince!"

Freyrík's breath caught as he looked upon the creature's face, so very like the female's: his eyes the same shade of green, his cheeks and lips and chin the same dazzling arrangement and shape. He was harder than she, in the lines about the jaw and brow, and darker as well—black hair to her red, bitterness and rage to her fear. And he stirred something within Freyrík that the female never could, that his sometimes-lover had just failed to, something immediate and hot and primal in a way he could never permit.

The elf blinked, squeezed his eyes closed, pried them open and turned them upon Freyrík. His exquisite face—too pretty by half to be human, surely—twisted into a sneer. He licked blood-caked lips and growled, "He is not my prince."

"Ayden, don't!" the female cried—apparently she had more sense than her companion—but it came too late: the sergeant slapped his open palm against the crossbow bolt and shouted, "I said glow!"

The elf threw his head back and screamed, and then suddenly he was glowing, much brighter than the female, so bright that Freyrík had to shade his eyes even as his personal guards rushed to shield him with their bodies. The soldiers holding the elf dropped him with startled yelps and cradled their hands to their chests. Freyrík smelled burnt flesh. Guards and soldiers trained blades on the creature, and one of the scalded soldiers kicked him hard enough to flip him onto his side.

"Enough!" Freyrík roared.

Every mouth in the hall fell still and every human head bowed in supplication. In the new silence, he could hear the female weeping "Please, stop!" over and over. Sometime during the uproar, she had torn free of her guard and knelt beside the male, who now lay curled as tightly as one could with his hands shackled behind him. He was bleeding all over the fine mosaic floor, his face twisted with pain so profound that Freyrík wondered if he even realized the female was there, focused upon him as though he were the entirety of her world.

He motioned his guards aside with a nod and added, calmer, "We are not brutes. There will be no more violence in this room today—" he looked pointedly from the soldiers to the guards to the elves and back, "from anyone. Is that clear?"

He was answered by a grudging chorus of "Yes, Your Highness" and a desperate, longing "Please!" from the female elf as a soldier dragged her back to her feet.

Another moment, and the struggle went out of her. She turned watery eyes to him and said in a voice watery to match, "Please, Sir Prince, he's badly hurt. He needs my help."

The female's distress seemed to rival even her companion's pain. "What is your name, child?" Freyrík asked, despite the distant certainty that this "child" had outlived him many times over.

"Ella," she said, and then with a little sniff, "Daell." Her companion shuddered, moaned, and her eyes darted back to his bloodied form. "Please, Sir Prince," she begged, "'tis my fault, all of it. Ayden was only protecting me. Please, let me go to him."

And truly, how anyone could ever deny this creature a single thing he had no idea, for he found himself nodding at the soldiers to let her go despite vague thoughts of sorcery and sixteen dead men.

The soldier holding her looked imploringly at the sergeant, who in turn looked at Freyrík. "Your Highness?"

It seemed his soldiers feared the same: lethal magic unleashed upon their heads. Yet if she were capable of such, would she not have struck already? A lifetime of war made it difficult to remember that not everyone had it in them to kill.

He looked upon Daell, so full of compassion, so very feminine in every way, and said to the soldier, "Let her go."

The instant the soldier loosed his grip, Daell threw herself to her knees beside her . . . brother? father? husband? Gods, does it matter? Ayden, she'd called him; beside Ayden. She coaxed him onto his stomach with soft words and shackled hands. For a moment, Freyrík wondered if she were a healer, but 'twas quickly evident from her wide-eyed faltering that she was no such thing. 'Twas equally evident that if love alone could mend bones, Ayden would be whole again in moments.

Daell closed her eyes, and the glow about her intensified. The soldiers retreated a step, and the guards who'd hastened to shield him earlier made to do so again. Freyrík stopped them with a curt wave. He would wager his life that the only harm on Daell's mind was the harm that she meant to undo.

She opened her eyes, the green half-lost behind a blazing silver aura, and wrapped trembling fingers round the blood-slicked bolt. Even through the elflight, Freyrík could see her blanch, and he stepped forward to catch her if she swooned.

She bent her head to Ayden and whispered, "Forgive me, brother"—well, that answered that question—and wrenched the bolt free.

Ayden screamed, and Freyrík shuddered in sympathy, wanting to hold him too, to silence his cries with a kiss and soothe away the blood and the hurt.

He stopped himself by main force of will, turned sharply, and took the throne.

Daell clamped her hands atop the gushing wound, her elflight growing brighter yet, and Freyrík could have sworn he'd heard . . . music? But then Ayden screamed again, and Daell cried out, "I'm sorry! I'm sorry! I don't know how it's supposed to sound!" She wiped at tears with the back of her wrist but still left a bloody smudge on one perfect cheek. "I can't . . . I don't know the bonesong, Ayden. I can't fix it if I—"

"Ella."

She fell silent at that single hoarse whisper, and no wonder, Freyrík thought, for though it brimmed with pain, he heard strength there to match. Ayden flexed his fingers behind his back until Ella—Daell—calmed slightly and grasped them in her own.

Freyrík, and indeed all his wary men, were held in such silent thrall by the unfolding scene that the elf's rasping voice seemed to echo through the hall: "Peace, Ella. Listen to the other one."

The meaning of this conversation was lost on Freyrík, but it seemed that Ella—Daell, befang it—understood, for she nodded and laid her head against Ayden's uninjured shoulder, closed her eyes and breathed deep for several long moments. "I hear it now," she whispered, her lips curling into a soft, secret smile that Freyrík suspected most men would kill to own. "I hear it."

Then she sat up and placed her hands atop Ayden's wound, and the both of them blazed so brightly that Freyrík saw spots clear through his clenched eyelids.

When he felt it safe to open his eyes again, brother and sister were sitting side to side, Ayden hunched over Ella's lap and Ella leaning upon his back, each looking for all the world like the only thing keeping the other from falling. Freyrík startled at the sight of Ayden's shoulder through his rent shirt, smooth skin lying whole atop sculpted muscle.

His gaze turned disbelievingly to Ella's hands, then to her face, where it stuck and would not come loose. She seemed too exhausted to speak, but she made known her gratitude with shining eyes and a graceful nod.

It occurred to him for the first time to ask, "And what of you, child? Are you hurt?"

Even as she shook her head, the sergeant stepped forward and bowed his own, saying, "No, Your Highness. I took great care to see her unsullied for you, though 'twas quite the test of forbearance, if one may say."

Freyrík clenched his teeth, and Ayden tensed in his sister's embrace, but Ella herself showed no signs of dismay. The innuendo seemed to have sailed right past her, gods be thanked for small favors.

He relaxed his jaw enough to say, "You showed wisdom, sergeant," and bit back the following Else I would have extracted payment in flesh and blood and seed.

The sergeant grinned wide beneath the perceived praise. "She's of fine stock, Your Highness, and never to grow much older. If one may be so bold as to wish you many a year of her pleasurable services, or the joy of the healthy coin she'll fetch at High Court . . ."

"One may not," Freyrík said curtly. He knew the man was angling for a reward, but that didn't stop his anger from rising, nor Ayden from sitting up and turning horrified eyes upon him.

"Sir Prince?" Now Ella was looking at him as well—not with fear, but with the shocked uncertainty of someone who'd not considered their future. "You mean to hold us in your service?"

The word, polluted by the sergeant's innuendo, sounded profane upon her lips.

Freyrík shook himself and set to explain that no, of course not: they were to be sold to the midlands, where the nobility had time for such frivolities as elven slaves; he had a war to fight, you see.

But somehow, the word "Yes" fell from his lips.

Ayden's stare felt as sharp as a blade at his throat.

"I understand," Ella said—except she obviously didn't—"You have spared our lives, and shown mercy. I would show my gratitude—"

"Ella, quiet!"

Ayden's voice, low and whip-crack sharp, drew Freyrík's gaze to him. The elf gazed back, his eyes clear and nearly free of the pain that had crippled him before. Freyrík shuddered under that stare as a warm, buzzing trickle formed in his chest and sank deep into his belly, where he stopped it by sheer force of will. But he knew that Ayden had seen through him; the revulsion on the elf's face was shadowed only by his desperation.

"Please, Prince," he said, and Freyrík heard how much it had cost him, to address him with such respect. "She doesn't know what she's saying. Please, let her go. She has done you no harm."

"No." Freyrík shook his head, more to clear it than to deny the request. "That is beyond my purview." And beyond his will, truth be told; ah, but he could tell the elf was seeing through him again.

"Then I beg of you," Ayden said, anxiety giving way to resignation, "whatever service you demand, demand it of me. If you—"

The elf paused, swallowed hard and dropped his gaze to the floor. Freyrík waited, spellbound, with a patience he'd never afforded his own men. When Ayden looked back up, there was steel in his eyes of a kind Freyrík knew well:; the a warrior's commitment to a hopeless battle.

"If you keep her safe," he continued, "I will do anything you ask of me. Anything. Do you understand?"

"Yes," Freyrík breathed, his head bobbing of its own accord despite all the blood fleeing from it in a rush. His hands clenched on the armrests of the throne. "Yes."

He cleared his throat and turned to his guards, fixing his gaze upon them lest it wander and lead him astray. "Take Daell to the north tower. See to her needs. She is to be accorded every hospitality as befits a lady."

Ella startled and sought out her brother's eyes, even as a palace guard tugged her from the floor. "Ayden?"

"It's all right, Ella. Go."

The bleakness in his tone made Freyrík glad he'd taken care not to look at him. He made the mistake of looking at Ella, though, and found her pleading eyes fastened upon him.

"What of my brother, Sir Prince?"

"He will fare well as long as he honors his promise," he said, keeping his tone deliberately soft to mitigate the harshness of his words. "And as long as you mind your conduct."

She seemed to believe him, for she nodded, and made no objection as the guard saw her off. Two more guards peeled away from their posts to follow. Freyrík bit back an imprudent chuckle: an escort of three was at once insufficient and far too cautious.

The sergeant reclaimed Freyrík's attention by clearing his throat. "Apologies, Your Highness, but . . ." He hesitated, bowing deep. "Isn't that a terrible danger?"

Freyrík exhaled sharply through his nose. Patience. Not everyone had the benefit of High Court education. "Those rooms were built of cut stone centuries ago," he said. "She cannot work her sorcery within their walls. 'Tis nature that answers to elven magic, not that which has been molded by human hand."

And oh, how the High Court gentry reveled in that fact.

"Besides," he added, "she would not risk her brother's life. And you—" he turned to Ayden, quenching his desire with an iron fist. "Soldier-killer. Your sister's life lies in your hands. Do take care not to murder anyone else if you can help it."

"Then do not give me a reason," Ayden growled, and though still he was slumped on floor, he reminded Freyrík of nothing more than a darker wolf.

Freyrík chose to ignore him, turning instead to the guard at his right. "The elf and I have much to discuss. Bring him to my chambers. See my attendants removed to safety, and post guards. I'll be along shortly."

He turned back to Ayden, taking measure of the pride in his eyes. "There will be no need for irons now; am I not right, elf?"

He'd meant it as a challenge, a test—one he'd expected Ayden to fail. Yet to his surprise, Ayden merely nodded.

The guard clicked his heel and hauled Ayden off the floor, much less gentle than his counterpart had been with Ella. Ayden winced, and Freyrík snapped, "Careful. He belongs to me now; I am the only one to decide if he is to be harmed."

"Apologies, Your Highness," the guard said, deferential but grudging. This once, in memory of the sixteen dead, Freyrík overlooked his tone.

Lord Commander Hákon entered the Great Hall with fresh guards in tow. Had Freyrík truly been so enthralled that he'd failed to notice the Captain of the Guard slipping out? Regardless, he was grateful for the reinforcements; with a flick of his wrist, he dispatched four of them to escort the elf.

With both elves gone from his sight, he once more deemed himself in full possession of his faculties. He nodded to the waiting soldiers, who were clearly disgruntled by the turn of events, and called forward his secretary.

"Lord Lini, see to it these men are rewarded for their courage: six months' pay, and a year from their conscription. Find out which of the dead had wives, and send two years' pay to the widows, along with my condolences."

Lord Lini acknowledged the order with a slight nod of the head and a "Yes, Your Highness." Beside him, the soldiers' bitterness gave way to elation: they chorused their thanks and clicked their heels in salute like a herd of stomping bulls.

Freyrík pressed his hand to his forehead, hoping to still his thoughts in the ruckus, but 'twas not to be. Finally he said, "Leave, all of you. Lord Lini, I would not be disturbed until morrow."

He retreated to his public office off the Great Hall, nodded to the attending page to shut the door, and sank into his chair. Thank the gods, solitude at last. He poured himself a glass of wine and peered into its depths, swirling it round and round without drinking.

What beneath the great shadow of the gods had he just gotten himself into?