Read Online Winter Be My Shield by Jo Spurrier - Free Book Online Page B

Valeria, a minor southern princess brought north to marry Queen Leandra’s brother. That sheltered and isolated life had come to an end — a fact for which he would be forever grateful — when Queen Leandra suffered another miscarriage and accepted she would never bear a living heir.
    Ricalan’s alliance with Mesentreia would never allow Leandra to adopt a sister or daughter to continue her line. So long as she remained barren, the throne was poised to fall into Mesentreian hands. In desperation, Queen Leandra turned her attention to her young nephew.
    Cam just barely remembered the day the Queen’s guards broke down the nursery door. The nursemaids had screamed and panicked, but they hadn’t been harmed. The guardsmen who carried him away had tried to reassure the frightened little lad, but as a boy Cam had never even heard Ricalani spoken. He knew only Mesentreian and had never set foot outside of the nursery.
    Looking back, he could see just how desperate Leandra must have been. Cam’s elder brother Severian took after their Ricalani father, with dark hair and northern features, but Cammarian had inherited his mother’s blonde hair and green eyes. There was only the barest hint of Ricalani blood in his features — it showed in the high, prominent cheekbones and wide-set eyes, with only a hint of the epicanthic fold common to his father’s people. At first glance most folk took him for Mesentreian and it would have taken some hard talking to have the clans accept him as Leandra’s heir.
    Queen Leandra sent the young prince to be raised by her most trusted advisor, Drosavec, Chieftain of the Owl Clan. The Owl was a tiny clan, neither rich nor powerful, but its chieftain was a man of uncommon intelligence and the queen valued him highly, even ratifying Drosavec’s only son as his heir despite the taint of power the boy inherited from his mother and against the objections of the priesthood.
    Drosavec had turned the bewildered prince loose into his clan’s flock of children and assigned his son, Isidro, to watch over him; and setabout turning the brat into a man the clans would consent to have as their king.
    It could have worked. Drosavec was a brilliant man and the queen was clever and shrewd herself. The pair had won the grudging support of the clans against the threat of a foreign ruler. But that all came to an end when Leandra miscarried once again and died amid blood-soaked sheets, along with her malformed child, when Cam was just fifteen and his brother, Severian, twenty. Leandra’s will was clear: Cammarian had been named as her heir, with all the clans and the temples in support.
    But somehow, Valeria had found a Blood Mage and smuggled him into Ricalan. Kell changed the game entirely. Where he had come from and just how long he had been hidden among Valeria’s retinue remained a mystery, but what was clear was that Valeria had no intention of letting the laws against sorcery stand in the way of securing power for herself. When Drosavec entered the Great Hall to place Cam on the throne, Kell was waiting for them.
    The rebellion, as Severian now referred to the events of that night, had ended in moments. In the aftermath Cam and Isidro had been smuggled out of the palace in one last effort by Leandra’s loyal men, while Drosavec and the other nobles involved were captured and publicly executed on the palace steps. The foster-brothers had been on the run ever since. The longest they had ever stayed in one place was in these last two years, when the Wolf Clan had offered their patronage and protection.
    In return, Cam and Isidro had infiltrated the Raiders who roamed the no-man’s-land between the Wolf territory and the settlements to the south, to spy on them and steer them away from the lands belonging to the Wolf.
    â€˜It was a game at first,’ Cam murmured to Isidro. ‘We were playing at soldiers, playing at spies. But you were