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horizon. Not fog, but the Shadow itself, encroaching now on Chesedhan shores as it had not in six hundred years. Her father and brother, neither of whom she’d seen since she’d returned, were there now, leading the effort to hold back the invaders as everyone else prayed for an early advent of the winter winds that would drive back the Shadow for a few months.
    “Ah, here you are, ma’am.” Jeyanne’s voice broke into her thoughts and drew her around. Her Kiriathan chambermaid stood in the bedchamber doorway. “You gave me quite a start when I woke to find your bed empty.” The auburn-haired girl stepped through the doorway. “I feared you’d gone for your morning ride and forgotten about breaking your fast with the Princess Ronesca.”
    “Plagues!” Maddie cried, leaping to her feet. “I had forgotten! Oh, bless you, girl! Bad enough I turned down her invitation to that prayer service last night. Being late this morning would really set her off.”
    “Shall I prepare you a bath, then?”
    “That would be good, Jey. Thank you.”
    But it was hard not to groan. The last thing Maddie felt like doing this morning was breaking her fast with her brother’s pious, prissy wife. Especially not after that dream. Especially since Ronesca was sure to bring up the baby, and Abramm’s death, and a host of other subjects Maddie was not interested in discussing.

    On the other side of the palace, Carissa Kalladorne Meridon, Duchess of Northille and Crown Princess of Kiriath, sat in the chair of her chamber’s bay window, six-month-old Conal nursing at her breast as she stared southward across Fannath Rill’s interior grounds. A wide promenade stretched away westward between opposing rows of date palms, cutting a swath through the hilly waterpark to either side, all bathed in the morning’s golden haze. Beyond it marched the crenellated western wall, shrunken with distance against the gleaming west branch of the Ruk Ankrill and the city’s smokeobscured western sectors.
    The multifarious creaking of the waterpark’s numerous waterwheels and the rumble of its fountain pumps mingled with the shouted cadence of the morning guard at their drills down in the central square—sounds she’d finally grown accustomed to. As she had grown accustomed to the dank, fishy river smell that permeated every wall and rug and piece of furniture in this great island palace. Today, in fact, she could almost ignore it under the spicy fragrance of the Chesedhans’ traditional morning shae’a, drifting in from the servants’ quarters.
    It was a beautiful morning. The sunrise had been glorious and now she felt quietly content, marveling as she often did of late at how thoroughly Eidon had blessed when she so thoroughly did not deserve it. All that angst, all that fury and frustration and hopelessness . . . yet here she was at the end of it all with more than she ever could have imagined, just as Abramm had promised.
    It seemed a lifetime ago that Rennalf had cornered her in Whitehill’s solarium the first time. He’d held her under Command and raped her very deliberately, chuckling as he did it, and had left her boiling with a fury directed as much at herself as at him, horrified that she’d neither fought nor cried out. The fact that she’d been under Command seemed no excuse. She felt defiled as never before. And ashamed.
    It had seemed not to matter that he had done the same many times when she had been his wife. Somehow that time had been different. He had taken her twice more, the last time in her own home in Springerlan. That had been the worst. And when she’d realized five weeks later that his seed had rooted and she was carrying his child, she had tumbled down a dark shaft of depression from which she’d feared she’d never emerge. For what man would ever want her now? Least of all one who was First Minister of Kiriath?
    She had tried to rid herself of the child, to no avail. Eidon had decreed her to bear it, though she wept