Chapter Three
The rest of the day passed in a flurry of meetings with foreign ambassadors, a review of weary troops rotating home from garrison duty at our northern forts—and I had the pleasure of standing next to Benedict for that, pretending the soldiers weren’t directing their tired cheers and salutes at him instead of me—and the signing of countless decrees adjusting the taxation rates for various types of fishing.
It had to have been my imagination, but I could have sworn the papers carried a fishy odor with them. Fish had its place, preferably in someone else’s stomach, and I wanted nothing to do with it. The moment I reached my private rooms at the end of the evening, I instructed Fabian to draw me a deep bath and to use the fragrant oils with a heavy hand.
If he muttered, “Deep enough to drown in, Your Grace,” under his breath, I chose not to notice.
Anyway, the rain had given way to a wild, gusty gale that rattled all the windows and whistled through cracks in their frames to flutter the wall hangings and the curtains around my bed. It gave me the perfect excuse to be conveniently deaf. As long as he didn’t use some kind of fish oil in my bath I could ignore him.
Fabian oozed back out of the bath chamber and muttered something else about fetching me mulled wine, and I waved him off, shutting myself into my steamy, citrus-scented cocoon. My intense dislike of Fabian softened slightly as I lowered myself into the bath. The hot water came up to my chin, and he seemed to have used a pleasant mix of grapefruit, lemon, and orange blossom oils that completely eradicated any (probably imaginary) stench of fish.
Heat soaked into my tired bones. I leaned my head back on the edge of the tub.
Ah, bliss. I closed my eyes, letting the roar of the wind wash through my senses, a calming erasure of everything else in the world. Even the tickle of a cold draft on my face made a lovely counterpoint to the steam billowing around me.
The wind howled, a thud and muffled crash echoed from my bedchamber, and someone cried out, trailing into a low groan.
My eyes popped open. The variegated blues of the tiled wall across from me wavered in the steam.
Silence.
The wind wailed again, then subsided.
More silence.
My limbs had gone as stiff as boards, all the tension the bath had begun to melt away returning in redoubled force.
“Fabian?” I called out. Not loudly enough, though. He couldn’t possibly have heard me.
The hair had risen on the back of my neck, the air pressing in on me. If I called out to him again, another non-response might stretch my nerves to the breaking point.
I heaved myself out of my bath, wrapped myself in a soft dressing gown hanging on a hook without bothering with a towel first, braced myself, and opened the door to the bedchamber.
Somewhat to my surprise, no one shoved a knife into my chest.
In fact, nothing happened at all. There was no one.
I slumped against the doorframe, all the air whooshing out of my lungs at once. Gods, I’d heard Fabian…stubbing his toe on the door and breaking a glass in the corridor. And my paranoia had…
My gaze snagged on something sticking out from behind my bed.
Fabian’s practical black shoes, and a hint of stockinged ankle.
Rounding the bed brought the rest of Fabian into sight. I leaned a suddenly clammy hand on the bedpost and fought the urge to retch. He lay sprawled out, a tray by his outstretched hand and a spilled cup of mulled wine staining the cream and blue carpet beneath him a muddy pink. The scents of cloves and orange peel and spirits mingled horribly with the coppery reek of the bloody froth seeping from his mouth and trickling down along his cheek.
Fixed, glazed eyes. Not the faintest sign of life.
That groan I’d heard had been the last sound Fabian would ever make.
No matter how much I’d always disliked him, if I’d thought there could be the slightest chance of resuscitating him I’d have dropped to my knees and given it my best effort, shouted for my guards stationed day and night at the end of the corridor that housed the ducal family’s apartments.
But Fabian was dead. Unmistakably, completely dead, and his symptoms looked so much like my father’s…
I did retch then, hooking my elbow around the bedpost and aiming away from Fabian’s body as best I could. The meager supper I’d gotten down while my secretary organized the fish decrees rose up burning in my esophagus and spattered to the floor.
After I’d choked, coughed, and wiped my mouth with the back of my hand, I blinked the moisture from my eyes and forced myself to look at him again. He deserved that much from me, anyway, since I had no doubt whatsoever he’d died in my place. At least I hadn’t thrown up on his corpse.
In my place. I could’ve been right there on the floor…gods.
Several thoughts surfaced as I stared down at his body, coming in no logical succession, whirling through the frozen rictus scream that rang inside my mind.
One: Fabian had twisted into a strange shape, as if his last moments had been agonizingly painful. My spine shuddered with horror, both for him and for myself. In my place. Fuck.
Two: Fabian hadn’t been the one to poison the wine, because obviously he wouldn’t have drunk it—he’d handed off the job of preparing it to someone he trusted, wrongly, as it turned out, rather than following my strict instructions to do it himself. I’d overstaffed the kitchens so that there would always be several pairs of eyes on anything I consumed, with my hope being that at least one of them would be loyal. Which meant that I’d be looking for a conspiracy, with at least one of the perpetrators being someone Fabian knew well. Wonderful.
Three: The little bastard had probably been taking a sip of my very fine wine on the sly, and possibly—or even more probably—as a prelude to spitting in it. If all the wine I’d drunk on all the other evenings Fabian had served me hadn’t been long pissed away, I’d have thrown it up again. My regret over his death receded measurably. It occurred to me that he wouldn’t have drunk it at all if he hadn’t believed I’d been the one to murder my father, and that therefore my wine would probably be safe enough from the same poison. My regret faded completely.
Four: Whoever had set events in motion must be waiting, lurking, ready for Fabian to raise the hue and cry that the duke was dead—again. At some point, the palace staff might start simply rolling their eyes and keeping on with the mopping when someone started shouting about dead dukes. Honestly, I would.
And five: I had a dead body by my bed. The wind raged with renewed force around the palace and there was nothing but my own harsh breaths here within, and my spine had started trying to escape out through the base of my skull and run away shrieking.
A tapestry against the far wall flapped loudly, its motion…out of proportion to the draft?
There were a few hidden passages in these walls. I knew about some of them. My father had likely known them all, but he’d kept many of his secrets to himself—or had he? He could have told Benedict. Or the dowager duchess. Or someone like Zettine…
Benedict.
Benedict’s rooms opened out of a side corridor only a few yards away from my own door. His magic and his sword would be enough to handle an assassin if my guards didn’t trouble themselves. Or to handle my hand-picked guards, for that matter, if they’d fully turned against me too.
The visceral force of my urge to run to him left me flushed, fists clenched, desperately trying to root my feet to the floor. Or better, to seize the knife I kept beneath my pillow, cross the room boldly, and whip the tapestry aside to deal with whatever I might find. (I’d read enough classic literature to know one didn’t simply stab through the tapestry without looking, no matter how afraid one might be.) Surely I could hold my own in a fight, even against a trained killer, long enough for the guards to hopefully come.
Another glance down at Fabian’s contorted body and the black stains on his lips had the bile creeping back up my esophagus.
My viscera almost won. I nearly turned tail and bolted for the corridor.
But I had to think first. No rash actions.
My dressing gown flapping around my calves and my damp feet sticking to the tiled floor—gods, still wet from the bath, even though it felt like hours had passed rather than a few short minutes—I went around the other side of the bed and fished for my knife. I wouldn’t need it, because no one would be behind that hanging. If someone had been watching Fabian die instead of me, he’d have either come to finish me off in the bath where I’d be at a disadvantage and could be drowned to create the appearance of an accident, or he’d have disappeared into the walls again like a giant rat after seeing the miscarriage of the plan.
Pulling the tapestry aside still took all the courage I had in me.
The sight of bare stone nearly had my heart leaping out of my chest with shock.
I hadn’t really believed no one would be there.
A quick check of the room’s other corners and wall hangings revealed nothing but the normal furnishings. These rooms had been my father’s, long ago when he’d been the heir himself, and surely he wouldn’t have told anyone their secrets, would he? Anyone but me, his rightful successor. He’d shown me the hidden door in the dressing room that led to a tunnel under the palace, and he’d implied that was all. His rooms, the duke’s usual quarters, would surely have more. But he’d never told me anything about those.
The lack of clarity about who might be able to come and go from the ducal chambers had been my real reason for declining to move to them—that and nausea at the memory of his death. The reason I’d given had been respect for the dowager duchess. No one believed me, because everyone knew I didn’t respect her one whit. I didn’t particularly care.
Fuck. Fabian’s body still lay there, catching my eye every time I turned my head, weighing on my consciousness. Not my conscience; I hadn’t been the one to poison the wine or tell him to drink it. But heavy all the same.
And inconvenient as all fucking hell.
My feet had started to freeze to the floor, so I moved to the fireplace and stood on the hearth rug, letting the warmth of the blaze heat the backs of my legs as I surveyed the shambles before me.
Thank the gods Fabian had his face turned away from me. I couldn’t stand looking at his fixed eyes, but I equally didn’t think I had the fortitude to close them.
All right. Someone had tried to kill me. My wager would be on either whoever had murdered my father, since the method appeared to be the same—or on Lord Zettine, given the way I’d stood up to him today. And of course Zettine might be the original murderer. Nothing ruled him out.
Could Zettine have some kind of alliance with Benedict? Zettine would be too canny to destabilize Calatria without a plan to bring it under his organized thumb and profit off of it. He wouldn’t murder me without someone to install in my place. And so many of my relatives had come to sticky ends, almost entirely deserved, that I really couldn’t think of anyone else with a claim. My remaining cousins were on my mother’s side. They didn’t count.
Or the murder attempt could be far less calculated than that. It could be anyone. And I had no practical way of finding out—at least not immediately.
And no matter who had coerced or bribed the kitchen staff to poison that wine, I had to hide that the attempt had even occurred. With three visiting ambassadors in the palace, all of whom I’d been trying to convince of the stability of my reign, I couldn’t afford to show weakness.
Fabian’s death needed to appear to be an accident to the world at large. If he’d fallen, hit his head, dropped the wine before anyone could drink it…
He’d need to be moved. Arranged. I shivered, either from the thought of touching his corpse or from the chilly draft that swept about my ankles. When I turned my head, I almost thought I could see him breathing. The smell of death had begun to permeate the room.
At least one other full-grown man would be needed to stage the body.
If he had powerful magic, so much the better.
Gods, I couldn’t really imagine that Benedict would use poisoned wine to try to kill me. If he wanted me dead, he could use his magic to do it in a hundred subtle or unsubtle ways, and he wouldn’t need to depend on an accomplice.
Besides, he might not want me dead at all. Even though they’d been spoken years ago, his words to me the day he’d left Calatria had never left me, as if he used his magic to whisper them in my ear whenever I let down my defenses.
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?
My shiver that time had nothing at all to do with the draft. No, if Benedict meant to take the throne eventually, he had more plans for me than a quick, if painful, death.
He might hate me enough to make me wait and wonder what his move would be. But he was also the only person I could be fairly certain hadn’t made this attempt on my life—and also the only person with enough power, influence, and strength to prop up my wobbling throne. The next assassin would succeed, unless someone more diligent than my overpaid guards and servants—or guards and servants made diligent by orders from a man they actually respected and feared—protected me.
Once again, I had no choice.
With one last glance at Fabian and one last shudder, I drew my dressing gown more tightly around me and arranged its folds of heavy black cotton-lined silk. I could at least look composed when I knocked on Benedict’s door, and no one would see me dressed so informally on the way there. Both suites were in the private ducal quarters.
Oh, gods, he might not be there. Clothurn. He’d meant to have a rendezvous with Clothurn. If he’d already gone…
Feeling as if all the assassins in the world nipped at my heels, I prayed to the gods as I’d rarely prayed before, slipping out of my rooms, shutting the door behind me, and making my way down the dim, paneled corridor and around the corner as silently as any ghost. Only a few small alchemical lights occupied tiny wrought-iron sconces along the top of the wall. Silence reigned. The dowager duchess had left a month before to make an extended visit to her sister’s estate in the south of Calatria, where the winter weather would be milder, and all of her servants and ladies had gone with her.
At the end of the passage lay Benedict’s door, looming at me like the gate to hell.
I raised my hand, meaning to tap softly and then try the door if he didn’t open for me.
I jumped a foot in the air as the door wrenched open before I could touch it, Benedict standing framed in the doorway, bare-chested and bare-footed, wearing only half-buttoned trousers and a ferocious scowl and with all of his muscles and scars on full, intimidating display.
Hell might have been the safer choice after all.