Chapter Four #2
He was very small, compared to Larz and had a slight, though fairly muscular build.
He was wearing a proper sapphire robe, belted around his slim waist, and he wore an elaborate golden necklace around his neck.
He seemed fragile, and I wasn’t sure why at first. I decided that it was maybe because of his eyes that kept darting nervous looks down the table at me and my men.
I’d seen that same look in the eyes of men that I’d wounded in battle—full of fear and desperation, yet still defiant.
I remembered that he’d suffered torture in Beatik and felt an unwanted twist of pity for him.
Larz, who was sitting on the same side of the table as I was, shifted so that I had a clearer view of both him and his little mate, and I saw him put a hand on Janos’s leg as if to comfort him.
I had read up on the disappearance of Prince Larz before I’d come on this mission, and I knew a little of the history of Laltana and Janos himself.
Over one hundred and fifty cycles ago, when the great galactic war first began between the Axis and the Alliance of Planets, the Herkon Kingdom of Laltana had ignored the conflict and resisted all efforts to be drawn into it.
Their king at the time, one of their Janos’s great grandfathers, I suppose, had refused to join either faction, preferring neutrality.
It wasn’t until the reign of King Leanor, Janos’s late father, that they had finally entered the conflict, siding with the Alliance.
Picking the wrong side was a fateful decision and a fatal error they came to regret.
Years later, King Leanor had been killed in the bloody battle of Helios, and his son, Janos, then only twenty cycles old, had been taken prisoner and put into a Tygerian prisoner of war camp.
No word came from him for a long time, and there had been strong rumors of his death, in fact.
His brother, younger by a year, had been declared Regent in Janos’s absence, and made plans for his own coronation, believing his older brother to be dead.
Then suddenly, the war was over and word came that Janos was still alive but had been held in a prison camp called Beatik until he signed the peace treaty.
Janos had refused to sign it, even to get out of prison.
It had made him a hero and a martyr to his people, but it was still another year before he finally came back home to claim his kingdom and his throne.
By that time, he was a broken man. What in the gods’ name had been done to him at the now infamous Beatik?
There were charges of torture and sexual abuse.
Officials on Tygeria covered it up, or so some said, until the King’s Consort Blake had investigated and finally discovered the truth of what had taken place there.
The changes that were then made were sweeping, but came too late for men like Janos, and some said he took his revenge by kidnapping the innocent young boys who had been taken along with Prince Larz.
Prince Mikos certainly believed so. It was a sordid, tragic story, with plenty of blame to go around.
Yet the Tygerian people hated King Janos and blamed him for the kidnapping of those young men.
A laugh came from the direction of the doorway, and I looked up to see the boy from the night before coming in with a young man, who looked a little like King Stefan and must have been another one of Stefan and Vannos’s sons.
I thought it was the eldest son Bryos. I wondered if the little shit who’d been searching my room the night before was wearing next to nothing under his ugly coat again, perhaps trying to drum up business for later.
I resented the fact that he looked so beautiful—no other word for it—with his glowing, golden skin and his hair lying across his shoulders and spilling down his back in elaborate braids that were traditional on his planet, or so I’d learned in my research.
He wore his hair in the same style as Janos did when I’d been observing the planet and seen him on the front steps earlier.
He looked up and saw me sitting at the end of the table, and his face drained of color for a moment before flushing dark pink. I gave him a little smirk and a wink. He surprised me by turning his head sharply away and then going immediately over to Janos to lean down and kiss him on the cheek.
That was surprising. Was he fucking both the prince and Janos? And this Bryos too? Larz leaned over and said something to him that made him laugh out loud, but he still glanced nervously back down the table at me. I pretended to ignore him after that first look.
A major named Kasavan leaned over and asked if that man sitting beside Prince Larz was Janos, the former Laltanan king. When I nodded, he made a face like he’d smelled something sour.
“Imagine one of our princes marrying that bastard. He could have had anyone. He still could. It’s disgusting.”
His remark was highly disrespectful, so I gave him a forbidding look.
“That’s enough,” I said sharply. He knew it was totally inappropriate to say anything insulting about members of the royal family, because we’d sworn an oath about that kind of thing.
I’d had to say something, and though I preferred to have a good relationship with my officers, I wouldn’t countenance disrespect to the royal family.
Larz was still one of Davos’s sons and Janos was his consort and a member of the family through marriage.
I couldn’t allow that kind of talk. It definitely wasn’t our place and unworthy of an Imperial guard.