CHAPTER 11
Clover’s brunch was a religious experience.
She’d made eggs and folded crepes that had some sort of cottage-like cheese in them and served them with smoked fish, green jam, fragrant tea, and slices of salted meat that looked but didn’t taste like ham.
The jam was sweet, tart, and refreshing, and I could’ve eaten my weight in that smoked fish.
I dipped a slice of freshly baked bread into my perfect over-easy egg, took a bite, and savored it.
Mmmm.
We sat in the kitchen around one end of a huge wooden table.
Clover and I had scrubbed this space to within an inch of its life.
In fact, we’d scrubbed so hard, we had probably made the room bigger by rubbing a layer off the walls and the floor, but we both wanted to eradicate any trace of the slavers.
We didn’t discuss it, we just did it in silent agreement.
The kitchen looked like an entirely different room now.
We had washed the grime off the walls, revealing the pale stone underneath, and exorcised the small piles of sticky debris accumulated in every nook and cranny of the floor.
The massive table, smoothed from years of use, was free of food stains and old spills.
The morning sun flooded through the open window, giving us a beautiful view of the courtyard and the wine tree.
This morning, I woke up, looked outside my window, and saw Reynald practicing swordsmanship in the yard.
He wore a simple loose tunic, pants, and boots, and he spun and moved like a whirlwind, slicing, stabbing, slashing, and thrusting, shifting flawlessly from attack to defense.
He held his sword as if he were fused with it.
It was just a sword, but in his hand, it became a dozen different weapons.
Sometimes it thrust like a rigid spear; at others it seemed to flow, flexible like a whip, slicing though unseen opponents; and then it became an axe, cracking invisible skulls with a single blow.
There was a line in The Thieves of the North I loved.
It said, “And the fighters clashed, writing poetry with motion and blade.” That’s what it was.
Poetry. The way he moved was oddly beautiful and almost superhuman.
Like watching an Olympic gymnast launch into an impossibly high jump, spin through the air, and perfectly stick his landing. It was mesmerizing.
And hot. The books had neglected to mention that part.
Ninety-nine percent of the time, Reynald was a study in control—calm, collected, even cold.
But you knew there was heat and violence inside, and there it was, burning everything in its path.
I’d stood there, just outside of his view, and watched the demon from the basement until he finished.
Now he was sitting across the table, chewing his crêpe, looking perfectly ordinary and relaxed. The scary, menacing Reynald from last night was gone. The graceful, powerful Reynald from this morning was gone, too. You wouldn’t even suspect that he could kill all of us in a blink.
Next to him, Kaiden was on his third helping.
We’d fed the younger girls earlier. They were playing in the courtyard now.
It would take time to get over Derog’s basement, but right now, their bellies were full, their hair was brushed, and they were having fun chasing each other around the wine tree.
“The food is delicious,” I told Clover. “Thank you.”
She gave me a shy smile. “You’re welcome.”
“Clover, you’re the best.” Kaiden stuffed another chunk of crêpe into his mouth.
That reminded me. “You don’t have to keep using that name,” I said to her gently. “You can go back to what your parents called you, if you would like.”
Clover’s mouth turned into a hard, firm line. I’d guessed right. Clover used to be a maid.
“Clover isn’t your name?” Reynald asked.
“Some noble households in Kair Toren have a custom of renaming their maids,” I told him. “Usually there is a theme. Months of the year, constellations, colors . . .”
“Flowers,” Clover said.
Reynald stopped chewing.
“It’s a way of dehumanizing,” I said. “They erase your past identity by giving you a new name. Whatever you were before doesn’t matter. Now you are Jade, maid of the Hreban Household.”
“It would be Sapphire, not Jade,” Clover corrected. “Lady Hreban names her maids after gems and semiprecious stones, but she doesn’t like the color green.”
“You’re right,” I told her. I had almost forgotten that part.
“Why?” Kaiden asked.
“Green is the primary color of Duke Everard’s crest,” I told him. “When the Sleepless Duke fights on the battlefield, he summons bright green Fatefire that coats his blade. He strides through the battle in his black armor, and his Fatefire burns so hot that it kills everyone around him.”
Reynald rolled his eyes. “It just means he isn’t man enough to trust in his blade.”
Unlike Everard, Reynald had no magic. I sniffed the air. “Is that jealousy I smell?”
He gave me a dark look.
“Why doesn’t she like Everard?” Kaiden asked.
I turned back to Kaiden. “When Lady Hreban was twelve, her father took her to the Duke and Duchess of Selva, the current Sleepless Duke’s parents.
He wanted to form an alliance through betrothal.
The Duchess talked to the future Lady Hreban for half an hour and announced that she didn’t have the right temperament to be her daughter-in-law. ”
“Is she bad tempered?” Kaiden asked.
“She’s mean and arrogant,” I told him. “Her parents are even meaner and more arrogant, so they berated her for weeks over it. She has never gotten over that humiliation. Everard is out of favor because the king is scared of him, but he is still very powerful. She can’t openly hate him, so she chooses to hate the color of his magic instead. ”
I went back to eating my food.
“Why is the king scared of Everard?” Kaiden asked.
A loaded question.
“Decades ago, when Sauven was a little shit of seventeen, he thought he could do anything he liked,” Reynald said.
“He rampaged through Kair Toren every night, plowing his way through the brothels and drowning in wine. If a man looked at him wrong, he killed him. If he wanted a woman, he took her. He was the treasured crown prince, the favorite child, and nobody dared to call him on it.”
It helped that Sauven had traveled around with a pack of hangers-on eager to do his bidding, and his squad would attack anyone who even coughed in his direction.
“Every year, the royal family hosts the Winter Hunt,” Reynald continued. “The Eight Families always attend. That year, Lorest and Katorna vi Everard came down from the Selva Dukedom with their mother.”
“Lorest was the current Sleepless Duke’s father,” I explained. “And Katorna is his aunt. Back then they were fifteen and fourteen.”
“Sauven saw Katorna and decided he wanted her, so he put his hands on her,” Reynald said. “There was a struggle. She punched Sauven hard enough to blacken his eye.”
“She also kicked his legs out from under him,” I added. “He was embarrassed.”
I hadn’t expected Reynald to know that story. It wasn’t something people talked about.
“Sauven demanded that she be given to him to be punished as he saw fit,” Reynald said.
“Lorest told him that Katorna belonged to the Selva Dukedom. In the absence of his father, Lorest was the voice of Selva, and it was his duty to protect its people, so Sauven would need to go through him to get to her.”
He wasn’t explaining the context well. I turned to Kaiden. “Do you know why people call the Selva Dukedom the shield of Rellas?”
“Um . . .” Kaiden blinked.
“Because it shields us from the nations of the northwest and the Crimson Empire,” Clover said.
“Exactly.” I nodded. “Selva lies in the north, bordered by mountain ranges on both sides. It protects the kingdom from foreign invasions, and it’s a big territory, one-fifth of Rellas’s lands.
The Everards have ruled it for centuries.
Their armies are powerful and skilled, and their magic is devastating on the battlefield.
The Savaric royal family can’t afford to openly offend them.
When Sauven assaulted Katorna, it wasn’t just him violating her personal boundaries.
It became Savaric versus Everard and Rellas versus Selva. ”
Reynald speared another small slice of salted not-ham and cut it with surgical precision on his plate.
“If Sauven had just apologized, the whole matter could’ve been dismissed as a child’s squabble.
But Sauven was used to doing whatever he wanted.
Lorest had put his hand on his sword. He was fifteen years old, and at the time he was short and thin.
Sauven was seventeen, almost a head taller, and much bigger.
He decided he liked those odds. Sauven’s father, the king, saw where it was headed and ordered Sauven to sit down. ”
“Did he?” Kaiden asked.
“No. He drew his sword.” Reynald’s smile was devoid of humor. “Which turned the whole mess into a formal challenge.”
Formal challenges were the bedrock of Rellas’s martial culture. No matter how secure the Savarics were on their throne, going against that tradition would knock them right off it.
Kaiden leaned forward. “What happened?”
Reynald took a swallow of his drink. “The challenge was accepted. Lorest hit Sauven in the jaw and knocked him to the ground. While Sauven was trying to find his feet, Lorest ignited his Fatefire and drew a circle around them with his sword. When Sauven staggered up, he found himself in a ring of green flames nobody could cross. And then Lorest beat the shit out of him, while everyone watched.”
“Sauven was bedridden for over a month,” I added.
“A part of his soul died in that circle. Until that point, he’d thought he was untouchable.
He was a prince, and everyone was his father’s subject.
That day he learned that he was mortal and that some people do not bend to the throne of Rellas. He was never the same after that.”