The Traitor’s Curse (Twilight Mages #3)

Chapter One

Across the courtyard, Benedict had been in unnecessarily close conference with Lord Clothurn for much longer than I felt warranted, both of them huddled away from the pelting rain in the narrow cover of an overgrown arbor. Their choice to stand three inches from one another with vines dripping on them, rather than under either of two spacious verandas that ran the length of the courtyard, confirmed that they’d rather be uncomfortable than overheard.

Talking about me, I had little doubt.

Very little. And that sliver of uncertainty included the probability that handsome, smirking Clothurn might be Benedict’s latest plaything, and that they’d ducked under the arbor to leer at each other while talking about me. The two weren’t mutually exclusive whatsoever.

Clothurn had recently taken over as the interim Councilor for the Treasury after his father’s apoplexy, and Benedict had long been the most beloved—although not by me, obviously—of Calatria’s military commanders, despite his two years’ absence after my father’s death. Upon his return he’d taken up his previous position as if he’d never left it, his charm and the force of his personality and the unwavering loyalty of the Calatrian army too overwhelming for the court to resist. He’d spent the summer and fall fighting our ongoing, simmering war with the nomadic raiders who infested our northern foothills, but in the two months since the year’s campaign ended he’d taken his seat on my council. Perhaps simply to annoy me, he’d faithfully attended every meeting.

In short, Benedict and Clothurn were two of my closest advisors, whether I wanted them or not, and they lived and breathed politics and power. They could plot against me either in or out of bed with equal facility.

And Benedict…well, most cursed twilight mages suffered from their afflictions. But he wielded his supposed weakness as adroitly as he handled a sword and shield, fucking his way through the court and somehow managing to leave his discarded lovers as well disposed to him as ever.

Benedict’s personality was more accursed than his bloody magic, and if I could undo only one of my late father’s mistakes, aside from the many unjust executions he’d ordered, it would be his lust-addled marriage to Benedict’s harpy of a mother.

As if he’d heard me mentally abusing her, Benedict’s head came up, gray eyes sharp like a wolf scenting prey. He couldn’t possibly see me here behind a second-story balcony column, could he? Vines hung all around the gap between columns, climbing from pots on the ground floor veranda up to the roof. In the gloomy light of this miserable, rainy morning, I’d be screened from prying eyes.

But I still ducked out of any possible sight, flattening my back against the column. I couldn’t hear anything anyway, and I’d seen enough: Benedict’s big, broad-shouldered body sheltering Clothurn’s elegant silk-clad frame, his wool soldier’s cloak and his mane of black hair gleaming with spattered raindrops.

So fucking picturesque, it made me want to gag.

I closed my eyes. The image behind them remained. That, and the others that appeared regularly in a nauseating rotation: my father’s white silk nightshirt stained crimson and black around the collar, the matching trickle from his slack mouth, the blue eyes so like mine bulging and glazed with surprise and shock and pain.

Or the thought that always followed: that I was living on borrowed time, and at any moment I could be next. I didn’t wear a nightshirt, so I’d stain my crisp linen bedsheets instead when I choked on poison or took a knife to the chest, but otherwise it would probably be much the same. My choice of clothing (or lack of it) to wear to bed didn’t have much to do with my subjects hating me, I didn’t think.

Not that I’d wear a stupid nightshirt to appease them even if it did. Being murdered would be preferable to giving in, not least because if I did give in, they’d jeer at me and then most likely murder me anyway.

They being nearly anyone, starting with Benedict and the rest of my council, and my temples throbbed with it, gods, my mind going around and around wondering who it had been who prepared that goblet of wine my father had drunk before bed, and whether that would be the same someone who came for me…the two and a half years that had passed since his death had blunted the sharp edges of suspense, but had done little to reassure me. I’d installed my own hand-picked guards in the palace kitchens and at the entrance to the private ducal quarters, paying them a wage nearly triple that of their fellows, allowing them perquisites no one else could boast, and praying to all the gods that it might be enough to make them impervious to bribery.

But every time I lifted my fork to my mouth or swallowed a mouthful of wine, I wondered if it would be my last. And I never slept easily. A high wage didn’t protect against blackmail—and no matter how I tried to inspire their personal loyalty, there were others whose orders they might allow to overrule mine.

Most notably Benedict. If he wanted me dead, no one would protect me.

“Duke Lucian!”

When my eyes popped open, my father’s former and my current valet Fabian stood before me, his black livery as neat as ever—and his black scowl, too. The court had taken off our mourning clothes a year and a half ago, but you wouldn’t have known it. Our family’s colors had always been black and silver—possibly, now that I thought about it, to save on the costs of putting everyone in somber colors when yet another one of us met a sudden end.

The doctors who’d hemmed and hawed over my father’s body had proclaimed it a spontaneous seizure, the consequence of his excessive bile, and the blood the result of his bitten tongue. Some at court pretended to believe it. For his part, Fabian had made little secret of suspecting I’d been the one to kill my own father—a bit rich coming from someone whose entire job had been to remain within earshot of the late duke, and who had been mysteriously absent from his post when the duke’s lateness took place. Since then, he’d served me with even less zeal.

Still, I trusted him, more or less, and had kept him on rather than replace him with someone more pleasant. Fabian despised me, but he hated the thought of Calatria’s throne occupied by someone not of my father’s blood even more. Even a patricide of my dynasty was better. I didn’t understand Fabian at all.

“Speak to me before you approach too closely,” I snapped. “I didn’t hear you over the rain.”

The sour twist to Fabian’s mouth deepened, and he bowed. “I beg your pardon, Your Grace,” he said, and his gaze flicked to the side…to the arched gap between my balcony column and the next, through which he must have had a perfect view of Benedict and Clothurn.

And they, in turn, of him—speaking to someone to whom he’d been bowing.

Perhaps Benedict would’ve turned back to Clothurn, too absorbed in pressing him against the wall and seducing him to notice that his earlier instinct, that someone had been watching from the balcony, had been correct.

A quick hand through my wavy blond hair to smooth down any damp-induced curls, and a regal lift of my chin, and I stepped out from behind my column, as outwardly unconcerned about observers as any duke ought to be.

No, of course I hadn’t been lurking there like a pageboy getting his thrills from seeing his betters feel each other up under an arbor. Nor had I been paranoically following my courtiers about to try to catch them plotting to kill me and replace me with Benedict.

But when I shot a glance down into the courtyard, intending to allow my eyes to flicker over Benedict and Clothurn with total indifference—Benedict was the only one there.

My breath caught as his bright gray gaze snagged mine and held me as if I’d been pinned.

Leaning against the wall, hands in his trouser pockets and booted ankles casually crossed, glossy black hair like raven’s wings hanging loose down to his shoulders, crooked grin on his unshaven face, he almost could’ve passed as one of the lower town’s ruffians.

Almost.

The long sword at his hip, the fine wool of his clothing, and the thumbnail-sized ruby hanging from his left ear marked him as the officer and aristocrat he was, even if nature had fitted him for cutting purses and breaking heads in a stinking gutter.

That earring might’ve been more suitable for a ruffian, too, truth be told. A successful one, anyway.

Benedict’s grin widened like a shark’s as I stared down at him, his teeth flashing white.

He knew I’d been watching. And he’d find some way to use it against me, to insinuate that I cared which of my courtiers he dallied with rather than simply needing to keep ahead of who might betray and murder me first. Humiliation burned acidly in the pit of my stomach.

He pulled one hand from his pocket and made a subtle, small gesture, fingers flicking. His lips moved.

And I nearly jumped out of my own skin as his hot breath brushed over my ear, projected by his magic.

“I’ll be visiting his chambers tonight, if you want to try to find an open window to leer through,” came Benedict’s laughing whisper, as if he’d spoken from an inch away.

And then as I gaped at him, my face heating and fists clenching in rage, he winked at me, pushed off the wall, and sauntered under the veranda and out of sight.

“If Your Grace pleases,” Fabian said from behind me, “the council meeting is beginning momentarily. I am here to fetch you. My apologies for…interrupting.”

Gods-damned fucking Lord Zettine, the head of my council, and his childish tricks. The meeting had been set for two hours from now, but clearly he’d changed it and waited until the last possible moment to inform me.

Childish, but effective. Because now I’d be late to my own council meeting, looking like a careless fool, and if I were so stupid as to argue that no one had told me, I might as well admit to having no authority over my own government. I ought to be the one setting these meetings at my ducal convenience.

Forcing any expression out of my face had been a skill I developed in early childhood, learning to conceal my feelings at an age when most children, so I’d been told, were encouraged to laugh and play.

So when I turned to Fabian, my cheeks had cooled and I was fairly sure my eyes showed nothing.

“The council will wait on my pleasure, as is their duty,” I said. “And it astonishes me that you think I require your reminders to carry out mine.”

Fabian’s own mask showed only the faintest crack—the malicious glitter of his eyes—as he bowed, murmured his insincere apologies, and slipped away, leaving me alone on the balcony with the patter of the rain.

After counting to twenty to make it seem as if I’d been taking my time, I turned and followed, forcing myself to walk at a steady, regal pace. They hated me anyway. I might as well arrive at the meeting with my dignity intact, for all the good it’d do me.

Two years and nine months before, almost to the day, I’d woken up to Fabian bursting into my bedroom at dawn to tell me that the duke had been murdered.

And despite how much I’d come to hate my father over decades of watching him bankrupt, imprison, occasionally torture, and frequently kill anyone he suspected of treason, his death shocked me to the core. Seeing my own parent lying unnaturally still, claylike and bloated, eyes staring in horror at nothing at all, had left me in a foggy fugue through which I could hardly think, let alone hear or speak.

The first council meeting I’d attended as the Crown Duke of Calatria had been held within an hour following the discovery of his body. Lord Zettine had called it without consulting me, speaking over my attempt at a protest and assuming total authority, mouthing a few condescending and infantilizing platitudes about helping me through my time of grief: he’d served my father for decades and seen me grow up, and so on. On another day I’d have been able to think of a rebuttal, a way to outmaneuver him. But the words hadn’t come, and in the end, I’d attended and taken my father’s seat without comment.

By evening, a new rumor had joined all the others burning up the tongues of the court: that I’d laughed as I settled into the duke’s chair at the council table.

Benedict had been the one to bring me that particular gossip. I’d been breakfasting alone in the family parlor, a room only my father and I, plus the now-Dowager Duchess and her son, were allowed to use.

With my father dead and his wife in seclusion to “grieve,” that left me. And Benedict, who preferred interrupting my solitude to buggering off to dunk his head in a cesspit, an option I’d have suggested had he asked.

“I heard someone saying last night that you’d have left his council seat empty for a meeting or two if you had any decency,” Benedict said as he heaped a plate with bacon. I suspected his mother had kept to her rooms in order to carry on as usual, bacon and all, without anyone commenting on her hard-heartedness. Benedict had no such scruples. “I also heard you laughed when you sat down. I know that isn’t true, of course, since I was there.”

He dropped the tongs with a clatter, and I tensed up so as not to wince.

“I doubt you bothered to correct them. And you could set me a good example and leave that seat empty,” I said as he dropped into the chair across from me. “But then, everyone knows you have no decency.”

I set down my fork, resigned to getting through the day on the two bites of egg I’d managed to chew and swallow. The queasy slosh of my belly didn’t invite further experimentation.

“At least no one’s accusing me of murdering my own father.” Benedict stuffed a slice of bacon in his mouth, gray eyes gleaming, as if the topic of patricide dulled neither his appetite nor his sense of humor.

“That shows their lack of decency, not mine,” I snapped, clenching my fists on my thighs under the table so maybe he wouldn’t see how he’d gotten to me.

Gods, Benedict had always been able to bring out the worst in me. He made it nearly impossible to keep my temper. Five years we’d been unfortunately related through our horrid parents, and he’d been a constant irritation.

Of course, his mother’s entirely unsubtle efforts to convince my father to disinherit me in favor of her own precious son probably hadn’t helped matters. Six years older than me, an accomplished soldier and clever strategist, a strong mage, charismatic and popular. All well and good, except for the small problem of his having no legal or legitimate claim to the throne whatsoever—although that could be solved with a few signatures in council, and a ratification with a larger quorum of lords.

My father had grown colder to me in the months before his death, snapping at anything I said, interrogating me about my movements and my friends, and excluding me from council meetings. It wasn’t hard to imagine what the topic of discussion had been at those.

Benedict chewed, swallowed, and leaned back with a shrug of his absurdly broad shoulders. “I suppose you’ve been impatient for the title for a long time, so if you did get him out of the—”

“I’m not the one who’s been impatient for the title. That would be your bitch of a mother!”

Silence fell, my words ringing and ringing in it. Benedict stared at me, eyes steady, but with something gathering in their depths, a darkening storm. He didn’t move, but the air around him swirled heavily, his magic palpable even to someone without a shred of magic of his own.

Fuck. Fuck me. My father had been dead one day , my grip on the crown was tentative at best, and I’d just told my rival claimant that I thought his mother had murdered her husband on his behalf.

He’d kill me right here and no one would care. They’d have him legally on the throne before some unfortunate servant had finished scrubbing my blood out of the parquet flooring. I braced myself for the blow, magical or mundane, it didn’t matter—he could take his pick. Gods, no one at all would miss me except my cousin Tavius, and he might not have cared either except for the fact that we’d grown up together.

One of Benedict’s eyebrows rose slowly, and some of the tension dissipated, the pressure in the air dropping enough that I could let out the breath I’d been holding. Perhaps he wouldn’t kill me today after all.

“There hasn’t been a duchess reigning in her own right for at least a hundred years, I believe,” he said at last, “and never anyone who became so by marriage.”

I blinked at him in confusion and growing disquiet, almost wishing he’d simply slit my throat. His choice to willfully misunderstand me, or appear to do so, didn’t have any possible beneficent motives I could see.

Which meant he’d be toying with me in order to slit my throat later. And in the meantime, he wanted me alive either to serve as a source of amusement or to be used for some purpose I couldn’t yet see.

Wonderful.

“I didn’t realize you’d added historical scholarship to your many other accomplishments,” I said, making my voice as snide as possible to hide any betraying tremors. “What’s next? You could take up fine needlework. Then perhaps you’d be able to attract a husband at last. Although you may need to go easy on the bacon. The palace seamstresses are going to run out of fabric for your tunics.”

True as far as it went, actually, but Benedict didn’t have a spare ounce of flesh on him, as far as I could tell. Pure muscle strained his woolen sleeves.

The air thickened again, though, his magic pressing on me from all sides.

Benedict’s scowl twisted his handsome face into something almost ugly. Terrifying, anyway.

At least I had the satisfaction of knowing I’d angered him as much as he had me.

The screech of chair legs on the polished wood floor as he shoved roughly to his feet echoed through the parlor like a crack of thunder, and his magic crackled around him and raised the hair on the back of my neck.

“I should marry you , you’d put me off my feed for the rest of my life,” he snarled, his composure gone at last, something raw and frightening gleaming in the depths of his eyes. Benedict loomed over me, massively strong and wreathed in the aura of his menacing power. I couldn’t have so much as twitched if my life depended on it, frozen like a rabbit. “Not to mention, that’d give me a claim to the throne, hmm? A legitimate one. Unassailable. I could keep you locked up in your bedchamber day and night, waiting to service my curse. Do you think anyone would fucking stop me? You and your army, perhaps?”

Ice trickled along my veins. I stared up at him, aghast, breath starting to rasp, with eyes that had to be as round as my coffee cup.

Marry me. Use me. Take my crown.

Gods, could he do it? Probably so. The law forbade a union between us, despite our familial relationship being through marriage only, but convincing the council to make an exception for the man my predecessor had preferred in the first place would be easy enough for someone who controlled…

“Your army would follow me, not you,” he went on, with complete, humiliating accuracy. “Your father was a right fucking bastard, but they stayed loyal because he used to be a hell of a soldier himself. He led from the front, whatever his other faults. Most of the men he executed were lords, courtiers, who’d never picked up more than a dueling rapier, and they didn’t care that much. You’re one of them, from any common soldier’s perspective. A courtier. Useless. Dressed in silk, not a scar on you. I could bend you over your throne and mount you like a bitch in front of the whole army and they wouldn’t intervene.”

They wouldn’t. They’d cheer him on, I had no doubt. Not to mention leer and jeer, and now apparently my mind had decided to gibber rather than take any more useful action.

My stomach churned, my meager breakfast threatening to reappear.

With an effort, I forced my dry lips to form the words, “I ought to clap you in chains for that. Let you rot for a few months before I put your head on a spike over the palace gates.”

Benedict went still for a long moment, face unusually pale under a tan baked in by years of campaigning, the corners of his mouth creasing.

He couldn’t possibly be afraid of my threat, could he? I couldn’t believe it. Not when he had to know that I probably, almost certainly, very likely wouldn’t carry it out even if the council and the army would let me get away with it. (The head on a spike part, in any case. Locking him up and letting him molder in a cell for a month or two, yes. I would do that. Gladly. Asshole. And his mother with him.)

And yet the bleakness in those wintry gray eyes, the clench of his fist where it rested on the breakfast table…some strong emotion had him in its grip, and it wasn’t only anger.

Finally he shook his head, pushed off the table, and said, in a tone I couldn’t interpret at all, “Looks like you bid fair to follow in your father’s footsteps, Lucian. Maybe he was right about you after all. That’s irony for you.”

And before I could muster a response to that, he’d strode out of the room and shut the door behind him with enough force to rattle the painting of my grandfather that hung on the wall beside it. The old man glared at me out of his gilt frame, as if the door slamming had been my fault.

Benedict’s footsteps faded away down the hall.

Later that afternoon, my equerry braved the grim, stuffy silence of my father’s—my—study to usher in a nervous servant in Zettine’s livery. The man stammered through the information that Lord Zettine wished me to know that Lord General Rathenas had departed Calatria.

“What do you mean, departed?” I demanded, startled into being unable to hide the sudden, heavy sense of dismay that started to creep up from my gut to my tingling scalp. Benedict had left? He commanded my army. He wouldn’t simply leave . Where the hell would he go? “How do you know he’s left Calatria, and not just the palace?”

“Lord Zettine wished me to tell you that he had a note from the Lord General, Your Grace. Lord General Rathenas has resigned his post as the commander of the Calatrian army, and has departed. He did not leave any word of his intended movements, Your Grace.” The man swallowed hard, and sweat trickled down his temple. He bowed jerkily. “Forgive me, Your Grace, I don’t have any more knowledge than that. Please excuse me, Your Grace.”

Oh, he ought to sweat. Coming to me with a message like that—Zettine had gone too far, overstepping his authority, sending me some lackey as if I were his subordinate rather than his master. I’d dispatch a party of armed guards after Benedict, haul him back by his toes, have them all—

Looks like you bid fair to follow in your father’s footsteps, Lucian .

A wave of dizziness had me gripping tightly to the arms of my chair, the world tilting around me and making me feel as if I might topple onto the floor.

“Get out,” I rasped, and the servant bowed again and fled without another word, probably with a few more gray hairs than he’d had when he came into the room.

I dropped my arms onto the desk and rested my clammy forehead on them, sucking in air.

No, if Benedict wanted to leave, he could leave. He couldn’t usurp my throne if he wasn’t here, could he? So why did it feel like the most profound betrayal, as if I’d been unconsciously leaning on a support that’d been kicked out from under me?

Maybe he was right about you after all .

Benedict hadn’t bothered to explain his meaning, of course, and now I wouldn’t have the chance to ask. Right about me? It didn’t make any sense. My father had seemed to think me unfit for the throne, too weak to hold it. But what Benedict had said first, that I was like my father, suggested my father had also seen a resemblance between us. And if he had thought me like him, he’d have considered me fit. Wouldn’t he?

My head throbbed.

Maybe Benedict would be back tomorrow, or in a week, and things would be…awful.

But he wasn’t. And two years passed without my hearing so much as a single word of him.