Prologue

Evelynn Mardus followed the knight into a wretched little hut.

"You've come?"

A middle-aged man greeted her from where he sat astride the back of the knight sprawled facedown beneath him.

Even so, he is my father. He might have come to save me and the child. Her heart pitched and lurched, dread and hope snarled together.

She greeted him in a trembling voice.

"F-Father! Have you been well...?"

"Take off the robe."

"...!"

Her hands shook violently as she shed the robe from her shoulders.

He raked his eyes over the daughter he had not seen in so long, from the crown of her head to the tips of her feet, the cold appraisal of a man pricing merchandise.

"Leave the child here, and remarry. He is Azantis blood, at least. The little whelp will be of some use."

"What? Re... remarry?"

"After that business with your brother on the battlefield, the moment he comes home he'll move to divorce you first. They call him a war hero, and daughters are being thrust at him from every quarter."

That business, he calls it. Ha. My child and I did nothing wrong. You were the ones who betrayed him!

The words surged to the very edge of her throat, but she swallowed them. Instead she flattened herself against the dirt and begged mercy of her pitiless father.

"Father, I'll take the child and go far away. I'll live as though I were already dead..."

A sharp click—an ornate scabbard hooked beneath Evelynn's chin and lifted her face. Through eyes blurred with tears she saw him seated in his arrogance: her father, Ayatoll Mardus.

"Useless thing! You couldn't even hold a single man's heart."

"After we were married, we lived together for barely a month..."

The scabbard cracked across her before the words were finished. Pain stole the breath from her lungs. She could not even scream, only curl in on herself.

Through the stunned fog of her mind she groped for the man whose face had already gone faint. One month. They had met for the first time on their wedding day, and that was the whole of the time they had ever shared.

Three months after her husband marched to war, she learned she was with child. Married in the year she turned twenty, Evelynn bore a son at twenty-one. She sent several letters to him at the front.

Her domineering father had never allowed her to learn her letters. Even so, she studied with desperate care, wanting her husband to know that the baby growing inside her was well.

He sent no reply.

Not once.

She stopped writing letters in her crooked, uncertain hand, and she stopped asking every day whether any word had come from her husband. Through a long night she pored over books and named her son herself.

Liber Azantis.

The freest one of all.

Grow up healthy, and live as freely as your name.

She shaped her little son's name without a sound. Liber. My Ribe. The pain seemed to loosen its hold, if only a little, and Evelynn drew herself upright.

"Do you have any idea how much compensation I paid that man? Bastard-born, and insolent besides... You'll marry into the east, and you'll not say another word. For a wench with a child in tow, even a place as a fifth wife is more than you deserve."

Even through the pain, a hollow laugh escaped her. So that was where the vast sum had come from—the fortune paid to her husband to smooth over her brother's betrayal. He meant to sell her, soon to be cast off, to some lecherous old man.

I will survive. I will, together with my child.

She bit her lip so hard she tasted blood, sharp and metallic. The scrape of a dragging boot grew faint and far away. Evelynn rose, brushed the creases from her crumpled dress, and set her posture straight.

It was time to return to hell.