" A dangerous, extremely aggessive Jeweled male; in status, slightly lower than a Queen ."
Status and Temperment[]
A Warlord Prince is a caste of Blood male that is arguably more predatory than most of the Jeweled castes. He has strong instincts that are easily brought to the fore regarding protection, sexual interest and aggression. He rises easily to the killing edge as a result of these heightened instincts and senses, and a great deal of Protocol involves methods that a Warlord Prince can use to curtail their instincts and move in polite society, and methods for other Blood or landen (should they be familiar with Protocol) to handle them.
Protect, Serve, Obey[]
All Blood males possess the instinct to serve a Queen. There is a 'right' Queen for every Blood male, for better or worse, and there is a specific reaction on both sides that dictates this. Though not every Queen causes the instinctual response -- perhaps a psychic connection on some level -- it is regular for Blood males to sign a contract to serve a Queen that is not his. When a Warlord Prince feels this pull and surrenders to it, he submits his power, abilities, and his temper over to the Queen. This helps to center the Warlord Prince and ground his temper. This desire to serve the Queen is so strong that the Queen's will is usually put before everything and anything, including a lover, in the Warlord Prince's life. This serves a few functions, the most important being that it helps to keep a Warlord Prince from doing damage to the court itself. Of course the pull of service to a Queen can only go so far. It doesn't change his nature, it simply centers him. It is for reasons such as this that Warlord Princes are feared and respected as valuable aspects of a court.
Protocol Concerning Warlord Princes[]
A Warlord Prince, despite his power, is always second in status to a Queen. Though there are exceptions to the rule, in general they do not wish to utilize their power to rule over others, instead they wish to serve and protect making it their honor and privilege to work with and for a Queen.
The Rut[]
Like the mating season of ruminant animals, or a male elephant's musth, the rut for Blood males is a mating season, though it can be appeased by either sex or violence; Lucivar resolves his before he becomes involved with Marian by spending time with Jaenelle in grueling physical labour. It lasts for several days. Though it is not confined to Warlord Princess, as per Jared's example in The Invisible Ring, they are affected the most extremely, and it is fairly rare for other Blood males to go through it.
- "Rut. That time when a Warlord Prince's sex drive eliminated everything else. Every male was a rival to be eliminated. Every female but the one he'd chosen scraped a temper turned wild and unpredictable. [...] Warlord Princes were always violently passionate and passionately violent, but the rut drove them to a savagery that bordered insanity."
It is explained in The Prince of Ebon Rih that during a Rut a Warlord Prince will have enough sexual drive to service an entire coven to exhaustion and still keep going. The stated problem, however, is that he has a tendency to focus on only one woman for the entirety of the Rut.
Their judgement appeared to be impaired during this time: though Lucivar gives Marian an opportunity to leave, showing that he still has a degree of control, his memory of the experience is cloudy. Their behavior is more animalistic than usual, a Warlord Prince's always volatile instincts at peak level. Marian describes graphic horror stories of violence that can happen to witches involved with a Warlord Prince in rut, but Lucivar is not at all violent with her, nor coercive; it is likely that the root of the stories lay in the fact that she came from Terreille , and are caused by the extremely unhealthy social dynamics of Terreilean culture.