Rohan never knew who began the chant—one of his own people, perhaps. But the cavern-dark Great Hall shuddered to the sound of it.
Azhei. Dragon Prince.
Sioned eased herself back onto soft pillows, the laces of her bedgown undone, smiling as Rohan placed their son to her breast. He sat beside them and stroked the baby’s blond hair with one finger.
“Andrade won’t soon recover from the way you upset her ceremony,” he observed mildly.
“It was our ceremony, not hers. She didn’t win us a princedom or gain us a son.”
He shared her lingering resentment. “I don’t see that she has anything to be unhappy about. We’re making her new manner of prince, after all.”
“Rohan. . . .” She hesitated, and he encouraged her with a caress to her shoulder. “If I’d been the one to carry Pol and give birth to him, then in a way he would have been Andrade’s, too. But this way, he’s ours. Do you understand? The things we did—they were for us, not to make a faradhi prince for her.”
He nodded, because for Sioned it was true. But it was also true that they had done it for the future Pol would make, the new manner of prince he would become.
The things they had done. . . . Rohan had killed in battle, where every barbarian worthy of his sword was supposed to do his killing. Irony of ironies, he had even had the law on his side, law he had always wanted to use to create peace. As an excuse, it was convenient and tidy—but it did not justify the heated joy he’d taken in his bloodied sword, in burying his knife to the hilt in Roelstra’s throat.
He had raped, too—but all good savages did that. Trapped into it, drugged, seduced? Perhaps the first time, but not the second. He wanted to believe that Ianthe had conceived Pol that first time, when he had thought she was Sioned. He wished he could believe that. But the fact that he did not was no excuse for allowing Sioned to claim the child for him. Circumstances had been against him—the war that dragged on, Ianthe’s early delivery—but there was no excusing himself for not killing her when he’d had the chance. He should have, but he had not. Every barbarian prince desired a son who would rule after him.
He had used the power won by his sword to make himself High Prince and take what had been Roelstra’s, establish his own people in positions of power, impose his will—all of it legal, all of it agreed to by the other princes. Was his excuse that he was more fit to rule than Roelstra had been? What right had he to do what he’d done, what he’d allowed Sioned to do, what Chay and Tobin and Ostvel and Walvis and all the rest had done on his behalf?
During his early youth he had struggled to learn all that was good in the world, all that he would use to make life better, more peaceful and civilized. He had wanted a life rich in dreams and the striving toward those dreams, not replete with death, deceit, and divisiveness. He had chosen to learn what he considered to be good, and had turned his face from the foul—not only in the world around him, but in his own soul. He had told himself that once he was prince, the things of the past that had made men war on each other would be swept away by his own dedication to honorable law.
But this year of war and anguish had taught him that the past lived inside him—all the impulses toward killing rage and rape that had governed his world for so long. They were all within him, all the acts that marked him as a barbarian, all the things said and done that made his soul writhe with shame. He knew what he was, and admitted it.
Rohan had looked into his own heart and seen Roelstra’s gleeful manipulation of one prince against another; he had seen Ianthe’s scheming need for power; he had seen his father Zehava’s warrior instincts victorious, the urges that had slain dragons even when he had known full well their importance to the Desert.
But had Rohan truly seen the worst of himself? Probably not—for all those things were nothing compared to what power could make of him.
Only Sioned knew how deeply he despised the princes and lords who had so cravenly handed