Adrian had hoped to never have to experience this kind of cold again. He had wrapped his boots as tightly with furs as he could but the mud and slush were still filling them and making his toes burn as he shoveled. Sweat had soaked through his first layers even though he was warm otherwise.

  The only part of shoveling that was tolerable was that it kept you warm longer. That didn’t help how much his back ached from being half bent over in the hopes that the shield strapped to his back would keep any arrow that surpassed the third trench ahead of them from killing him, or how heavy his arms were from wearing his armor while doing it, or the fact that no matter how many times he adjusted his scarf or undercoat or gambeson, the cold metal of his pauldron scraped the underside of his chin. If only his beard would stop growing so patchy!

  Thraiden was ahead of him in the trench. He was getting tired, gauging by those shovel throws of his that would spray his face every so often. His shoveling was slower, too. He was resting more between them. Adrian didn’t blame him. The snow was waist deep and he was the front of it all, lifting his knees to break at the sheet of ice covering it for the others to get the rest. At least they were nearly done.

  They were trying to clear the supply trench between the second and third. It was wide enough for two men to stand shoulder to shoulder, and about chin deep, but the bottom had filled with slush as the sun peeked through the smoke once the blizzard passed. They had gone out in the early morning with volunteers on empty stomachs and worked through most of the day. It was nearly sundown by the time they reached where the arrows and bombardments from the hill were striking. The melted snow poured into their trench and froze nearly as soon as it reached them, making their jobs harder. Most of the volunteers turned back because of it. A few remained for a while. Not many. When two were wounded, the last of them went with the wounded back to the castle.

  The closer they got, the sight became more familiar. Black and red snow and ice. Arrows and javelins mixed with debris in every load they lifted from the trench. The slush around their boots rose higher. Thraiden wasn’t the first one to find a body. It was someone behind Hassan, which meant everyone ahead of him, including Adrian, had walked and cleared over the poor soul. It became commonplace after that. Nina and her helpers, whom the knights had begun calling the Coroners, were becoming regular visitors, bringing the dead back to where they could be buried in the mass grave that had been dug somewhere in the village. No one this far out knew where, but the rumor was that it was beneath the pub as the Clevlan family’s vengeance for some crime that was done before Draka had become King. That didn’t sound like something Draka would do, not to Adrian. But then again, it also did in a way, the more he thought about it.

  Really, with each heavy, wet shovelful, Adrian’s mind wasn’t on Draka or the dead that they were unburying while trying to clear the supply trench. It wasn’t on the arrows that were periodically pelting the shield covering his back and shoulders or the roars of the battle they were working towards. Even the cold gripping his hands and feet, the shallowness of his breaths that were beginning to burn his straining throat, were secondary in his mind. None of those things were prevalent in his thoughts.

  He was thinking about Maud.

  Green eyed fiend. Shovel. Kissable lips, if ever he saw a pair. Shovel. Their children will be the envy of Christendom. Shovel. Definitely don’t want to be on her bad side, though. She hunts, so will have to find another way to escape her wrath. Shovel. Wouldn’t give me back my book! How dare she! I’m glad she didn’t, but still. She stole my thunder, that mad woman! Shovel. Shovel. She was so warm. I like being greeted that way. Will definitely take lots of trips if that’s the way she’ll greet me each time. Shovel.

  “Hey!” Hassan growled from behind him. “Watch where you’re tossing! You just got me in the face.”

  “Sorry,” Adrian called over his shoulder.

  Thraiden turned back. In front of him, the snow was clinging to corners like a gateway into the third trench, revealing a blackened wall between knights whose armor was covered in clumps of matching grime pressed against it. They were rising to shoot their crossbows and throw canisters that made loud popping sounds whenever they landed somewhere beyond. Their boots were sloshing through ground that was puddled mud and congealed blood around corpses.

  “We’re here,” Thraiden said as he lay his shovel on the corpse closest to him before grabbing his arms. “Give me a hand. I’m taking at least one back with me. Adrian, grab his legs?”

  Adrian nodded and maneuvered around him. The others from behind them rushed to get others the same way, doing their best not to impede the fighters. There were flashes of red and blue light from the Paladins along the trench around them. Smoke billowed over top of it from fires they couldn’t see. The stench was a mixture of burning wood and dead. Familiar. He held his breath as long as he could as he and Thraiden carried the dead Knight into the trench they had cleared back toward the castle with their shovels laying over top of him.

  When they reached the last trench before the bridge, the Coroners waved for them to lay him where they had made a ramp out of it. They set him down with heaving breaths.

  Thraiden didn’t say a word. He only took his shovel and went to the bridge. Adrian stood there for a moment with his arm propped on the shovel while they hefted the corpse into a cart of others.

  “Thank you, ser knight,” one of them said, a woman with a scarf hugging her sharply featured youthful face. He recognized her. He couldn’t remember from where. There was a curl of brown hair peaking from her fur cap that had frost clinging to it. Her cheeks were smeared with dirt and…dark blood. She had been working with the dead for some time, he knew.

  “Of course,” Adrian nodded.

  His stomach grumbled. He was hungry. Hopefully, the cooks saved him some of lunch or breakfast, whichever happened last. He rolled his eyes at himself at that unlikelihood on his way across the bridge and into the bailey.

  “Hey, Apple,” Nina greeted him from checking the harnesses to the cart while her horse tried to bite at the thick quilt that was draped over its back.

  “Spider,” Adrian grinned halfheartedly. “We cleared the way for your people to reach the Vorner-Greshon line.”

  “Much appreciated,” Nina tugged on the cart and nodded to herself that it was tight enough. She turned to him. “After their assault yesterday, we have our work cut out for us. You have no idea how much you helped.”

  “Glad we can at least do something,” Adrian tried not to show his embarrassment.

  Three hundred, he had commanded into the Clevlan fields, and barely a tenth of that remained. His men weren’t capable of anything more than manual labor without being distributed into another army’s ranks, which he knew Jasmine was biding her time for the right moment to throw in his face. The more public, the better, and he was bracing himself for the humiliation. Hopefully, Thraiden and Hassan will rise to his defense when it happens, but it was unlikely. They had their own reputations at stake in court as well.

  “What you’re doing is…amazing, yourself. Wish we had someone like you in the eastern campaigns.”

  Nina shrugged it off. “You charmer,” she dismissed him with a wave, “It’s really just an excuse to keep away from those stuffy monks. You know how they get. And, I’m not exactly what you’d call their favorite pupil.”

  Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  “No, but the friars will love you,” Adrian smiled. “They always welcome a former devotee.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Of course they would.” She nodded toward one who had that Clevlan fellow—the one that had made his oath the night of the festival—kneeling in prayer in front of him at the stables while chickens flapped in their cages beside them, “That one is being pretty insistent about it, too. Says I’m already being prepared by the Lord to be a disciple, I just need to give myself more fully to the cross.”

  “They have their ways,” Adrian shrugged at it. “Take up your cross and follow me,’ and all that. Might make you into a true disciple, yet.”

  “Hard to be a disciple and do my job,” Nina eyed him. “You and I both know there’s a fine line that I have to cross from time to time. It’s why I’m not a nun.”

  “You and I both know that’s only true because you allow it to be,” Adrian eyed her back. “That line doesn’t have to be crossed if you never cross it. Your heart is what it is. A good heart is incorruptible.” He turned toward the Hall, “Do they still have any warm food left from the last meal, do you think?”

  “They’re serving supper in about an hour,” Nina said after a thoughtful pause. “You’re something else, Prince. He raised you better than I give him credit for. She’s lucky to have you.”

  “Speaking of her,” Adrian turned back to her. “What’s going on with Maud? Where has she been? I haven’t seen her in days.”

  Nina regarded him for a moment. “She’s being kept hidden. The Olgas are targeting her, so we’re not letting anyone know where she is, not even the King. You understand? So, don’t ask anyone or go looking, or you might give them exactly what they need to find her.”

  Adrian drew in a breath. “I understand. She’s safe, though?”

  “She’s safe,” Nina softened. “And she misses you. Keep fighting, she’ll see you when we know she’s safe to. Trust me, we’re doing this for her safety. They infiltrated us to the core and nearly took her life.”

  “Who is protecting her, that’s all I’m asking and then I’ll drop it,” Adrian held up his hands.

  “I don’t know,” Nina shook her head. “Someone the King appointed personally from the Holy Sepulcher. Don’t, Apple, I mean it. You’ll get her killed, if you do. Ask the King, if you don’t believe me, but keep it to yourself otherwise. Not even your family.”

  “I understand,” Adrian crinkled his brow at her. “It’s that serious? How close did they come to killing her? Why?”

  “I really shouldn’t have said as much as I did,” Nina shook at herself as she began lifting packs from a pile stacked beside the cart into it. “But I thought, of all people, you’d trust your Guardian’s decision. What I will say is that it took two Paladins to save her and the Holy Spirit intervened in full force to make it happen, blinding myself and sixty-four others to do it, putting an additional eight Paladins out of the fight until this morning. Talk to the King, if you have to, but only him. Anyone else and you compromise her.”

  She hefted the last pack of the pile and let her elbows dangle from the rail of the cart to look at him with a seriousness in her expression, “They have three people left on their roster to use against him. You, her, and her mother. They know that God’s not going to let them get at another Paladin without a fight, but you and the Princess are fair game. They took a shot at the Princess. I’d watch yourself, if I were you. They’re going to come for you next and this just might be the pull they use. Remember, it isn’t necessarily the message…”

  Adrian flicked his brows and rolled his eyes at the lesson Draka had drilled into him for as long as he could remember, “It’s the messenger, too. I’ll be on my toes, then.”

  The Clevlan man stood after the friar did a crossing over him. Having finished his prayer, he took up the spear that he had leaned against the stacked chicken cages. He was headed to the ferry gate and the pontoon bridge that was a constant flow of wounded and soldiers across it, falling in with other such villager volunteers, to join the fighting in the trenches.

  “Be careful, whatever you do,” Nina climbed up onto her cart, “And don’t die.”

  Adrian chuckled. What a thing to say! “You, too,” Adrian shook his head at her.

  “Come on, New Wives, we got husbands to bring back!” Nina shouted toward the Bridge Gate. She slapped the reins to make her horse move her cart forward to where the Coroners were making their way through.

  The one he had met was among them. They leapt into the cart, filling it until some of them were sitting on the back with their legs dangling, and Nina slapped the reins harder to spur her horse into a gallop across the pontoon bridge towards the battle raging at the third trench up the hill. Each of them had the same looks on their faces that Adrian had seen on soldiers’ when headed into battle. In their own way, he knew, this was how they were fighting the war, by running into the trenches to grab the wounded and the dead and bring them back. He didn’t know who was braver, the soldier or them. Either way, they headed toward where the battle was raging the hardest at that moment, where the booms of Holy and unholy light flashed against a horizon of scattered fires raged into billowing smoke that rained ashes and arrows, without shields or armor to protect them.

  Well, Adrian decided, he might as well see if he can get some hot food, if there is any yey. Fighting made him hungry. Seeing wounded made him hungry. To be honest, even shoveling snow seemed to make him hungry, let alone carrying the dead man.

  Most of the Hall had become one large infirmary whose earthquakes from the bombardments, which had started back up during the night, had become nothing but background to those inside. The shields that were smelted together by the smiths and draped over the outsides were holding, though cracks here and there were forming from the vibrations. Pillars as wide as a man and nearly as tall as the Hall itself were leaning against the walls almost randomly to brace them with cots of wounded haphazardly set all around the wide space. Mats were laid out, filling every space between. Not a spot was empty, not even against the walls, except where a steaming barrel of stew was being stirred by Alexandra at the end of the platform. She was the one who had given him the cider he couldn’t get enough of at the festival. Bits of ingredients and spices were set on the platform behind her. The platform itself had been emptied of the king’s throne and table to be replaced with an altar and cross draped with ceremonial cloth for communion. The Hall had become a cathedral for the departing.

  “Not ready yet, Prince, but I’ll send a bowl to you the moment it is,” Alexandra winked at him before he got too close. He snapped his fingers in disappointment but nodded his thanks.

  “No need,” he called to her, “I’ll come back.”

  “Like the humble common wish-to-be you are,” he hissed at the sound of his sister’s voice from behind him. When he turned around, she was looking him over smugly, her hands behind her so that her back was arched in a fur lined dress more akin to walking in a wintry park than a siege if not for the steel bodice. “You smell like shit.”

  “Coincidentally, I was about to say the same thing about the way you look, but you beat me to it,” Adrian let out a disappointed breath. He sniffed, “No, piss. I’m pretty certain that’s piss I smell.”

  She glared. “Don’t poke fun. You’re not the one having to help with those monsters all day and night. Especially the new prince. I swear he does it on purpose.”

  “He’s a baby, Jasmine,” Adrian shook his head at her, crinkling his brow. “You’ll make such a wonderful mother someday. I envy your children already.”

  Jasmine cocked her head at him with a huff. “Oh, ha-ha.”

  “Of course, you could always join your subjects in helping with the siege,” Adrian grinned widely at her, fluttering his lashes. “I’m sure Thraiden is looking forward to seeing you again. Something about a pair of socks.”

  “The Queen Who Took Their Boots can answer for that, not I,” Jasmine glared. “I’m surprised they’re still following you after you killed so many of them.”

  That didn’t take half as long as I expected. Adrian returned the glare, “Watch your mouth. You weren’t there. Is there a reason you’re bothering me?”

  “Mother wants to speak with you,” Jasmine shrugged her shoulders. “Don’t see why. Michael’s clearly going to be the heir, now that you’ve become the embarrassment of the family.”

  “I’m the embarrassment?” Adrian choked a laugh. He walked past her with a sideways, “I think you’ve gotten that backwards, dear sister. Right now,” he stopped long enough for her to glaringly look into his eyes as he said darkly, “You’re the coward hiding behind mother’s skirts.”