Chapter Fifteen #3
By the end of the investigation, Bryos confessed to being involved in the plot to kill Janos and told investigators everything he knew, even providing lists of names of the other conspirators.
According to Bryos, it had all begun with the group who had called themselves the Coalition of Planets.
King Davos had informed King Stefan of their treasonous efforts months ago, and the king had ended his involvement with the group, but Bryos’s father was still going to allow Bryos to marry the king he’d promised him to.
Bryos thought he was deeply in love with the man.
It was young King Karial, from the small but wealthy planet of Balwain.
Apparently Bryos had been more involved with this King Karial than his parents had known or suspected.
He had been, in the words of the Consort Blake, thoroughly compromised by the man during his visits.
King Karial happened to be part Tygerian, from an arranged marriage many years earlier.
He was distantly related to one of the victims of the training ship that Larz had been on, years ago, but that hadn’t been the reason he got involved.
The parents of the lost boys were all wealthy and willing to pay very well to have Janos killed to get their “justice.” Karial had been only a young boy when it happened, and I thought he’d involved himself in the Tygerian plot out of greed.
It was difficult to say why he needed to involve Bryos, other than as a useful tool.
The fact that Bryos agreed to become involved would be something for his doctors to figure out, other than perhaps he thought it was a way he could get back the attention from Karial.
We knew that Karial had secretly renewed his offer of marriage to Bryos for his cooperation and sweetened the pot with a large sum of money and jewelry for the young man’s help.
For Bryos, who still claimed to have been heartbroken over losing Karial initially, and resentful of his family for not backing him, it proved to be too great a temptation.
I still struggled to understand why he would throw his life away on such a man, but again, motives could be strange things, and sometimes only fully understood by the people who held those views.
Bryos had been encouraged by Karial to approach Luc Dimitri as soon as he arrived, who he somehow knew was always willing to speak to attractive young men.
He offered him a life-changing amount of gold for killing Janos and keeping Bryos’s secrets.
It was, of course, Dimitri who hit Prince Larz on the back of the head and who had stabbed Taran when he mistook him for Janos in the dark.
Later, after the failed attempt, Dimitri had been encouraged to switch tactics and go directly to Janos’s room when he knew the former king of Laltana would be alone.
Bryos had sworn that he hadn’t killed Luc afterward, however, and that the human soldier must have slipped and fallen off the roof on that stormy night he’d tried to murder Janos in his room. It was plausible enough that the investigators decided not to pursue it.
As for the collapse of the bridge, the investigation into that incident had finally been concluded, and the result of it was that erosion had been the cause.
The storm and the torrential rain had caused the bridge to pull away from its moorings and collapse, nearly killing us.
I was highly skeptical, but I read through all the reports of the engineers, and finally, I agreed the storm could have been the cause.
It was all a little too targeted and convenient for my liking.
The worst charge the investigators could make stick against Bryos was the attempted murder of Larz and his family and the sabotage of the shuttle, not to mention the attempted murders of the innocent pilot and the guards.
Those charges were unforgiveable, and King Davos declared that Bryos would be punished for them.
However, King Davos was taking his time about deciding on what that punishment would be.
I knew he was understandably torn, but too much time had already passed while his father’s investigators dithered over this thing.
This was a royal princeling and one of Davos’s beloved grandsons after all, and up to now, the heir apparent of Moravia.
The young man had a breakdown after everything came out, which delayed the final judgment even farther down the road, and he had been confined to a hospital on Tygeria.
There he was receiving intensive care and counseling.
The rest of the family on Moravia, not to mention the ones on Tygeria, were in so much distress over the situation that it really did inspire pity.
In some people, that is. Not in me. I couldn’t forget how close Luc Dimitri, who had been approached and paid by that young man, had come to killing Taran and Janos, and I was in no mood to forgive the fact that he’d almost murdered so many innocents on the shuttle either.
I didn’t think I’d ever be ready. In fact, I still wasn’t sure I fully believed in his “breakdown.”
I kept coming back to who killed Luc Dimitri?
Because I didn’t believe he jumped or fallen off that roof top.
He was pushed off, and by someone much stronger and more ruthless than that callow young prince.
It takes a lot to kill someone in cold blood, and Bryos had already proven he didn’t have it in him.
Why hadn’t he gone after the victims himself and left Luc Dimitri out of it in the first place?
Not only that, but how was Bryos supposed to have rigged some kind of sabotage on that shuttle?
He was certainly no engineer or mechanic in any kind of way, and how would he have had access anyway?
He’d never even visited the ship. Whenever the investigators asked that question, he refused to speak or pretended to faint or get sick or go into some kind of “trance” state, and Vannos would call for a halt to the proceedings to let him “rest.” Davos suggested the conspirators paid off someone on the ship to do it, but a thorough investigation had so far turned up nothing.
I still believed there had to have been accomplices who were as yet unnamed.
And they had to be Imperial conspirators—probably both on Prince Mikos’s ship and on Moravia with us.
That meant one of my most trusted guards and ones that I, myself, had brought with me down to the planet.
I just had to find out who they were and make them talk.