Chapter Eleven #2
“Servants,” Delauney said. “Leo and I probably spoke to our parents once a week for the first ten years of our lives.” It was an old joke, but instead of it being an amusing anecdote to laugh about with his friends, it sounded rather sad now.
Other noble parents took time out of their balls and engagements to get to know their children, but Delauney’s mother and father had seen so little of him that he was perpetually a child, trapped in their limited memory of him.
Wes grimaced. “We’re getting you out of here as quickly as possible, Delauney. I’m still sorry that I ruined everything.”
“You weren’t the one who implied that King Adrien is fucking his guard captain,” Delauney said. Wes groaned.
“A mental image I truly didn’t need.”
“Did you want to speak to your brother before we go?” Delauney asked. He drew back, adjusting Wes’ suit for him. “If either of you can relax enough to look at each other without turning to stone, that is.”
Wes ran a hand over his eyes. “I suppose I should. He tried to be diplomatic, and I threw it all in his face.”
“It looked more like you were defending him,” Delauney said.
“Yes, but that’s because...” Wes waved his hands broadly. “He’s still my brother. I can insult him, but if someone else does...”
“I might understand,” Delauney said. “Go find him, and I’ll find Ned and Peter. Between us, we might escape before my mother commissions someone to paint her sobbing into a mirrored fountain.”
Wes pulled Delauney in for a kiss. “I love you,” he said.
“The fact that you were willing to defend me in front of the king is proof enough of that,” Delauney said, kissing him back. “Go. We’ll meet at the carriage. Unless you want me to come with you?”
Wes hesitated as though he was considering it. “No,” he said at last. “I need to do this.” He pulled open the door to the hall, leaving Delauney alone, surrounded by hundreds of painted, unblinking eyes.
***
WES SLUNK THROUGH THE de Mazet ballroom like a well-dressed ghost, trying to avoid the gazes of the nobles laden with jewels, heavy gowns, and cloaks.
Delauney was a forgiving sort, but Wes hadn’t said more than a handful of words to Ferrin in years, and he wasn’t sure that Ferrin liked him addressing the fucking king of Staria in his defense.
Ferrin should have been easy to find. If he was near the king, that would put him with the thickest cluster of nobles, but Delauney’s childhood home was too full of eccentricities.
Nobles gathered around a fountain sprouting water from a nymph’s ample bosom.
They laughed over a massive painting of a Starian spirit of the harvest wrestling someone dressed as the spirit of winter.
A sizable crowd applauded a group of black cats jumping through a hoop.
By the time Wes had left the ballroom and reached a door to the gardens, he was too disoriented to see beyond the countless laughing faces of the nobility.
He slammed directly into a man on the garden path, sending them both sprawling.
Another man, a tall, pale fellow with violet hair and a dark blue velvet suit, leaned down and gently pushed Wes off of the man he’d stumbled into.
He proceeded to help the man up before giving Wes a look so brutally judgmental that Wes considered crawling into the bushes to avoid him.
“Laurent, don’t scare him.” Sabre de Valois, his hair rumpled after his fall, extended a hand. Wes took it warily. “You came here with Delauney, yes?”
“Ah, yes, I was just... just looking for someone,” Wes said. “Thank you.”
Sabre nodded, his gaze keen despite his pleasant smile. “If you’re certain.”
Wes smiled tightly and turned away. He understood why Ned and Peter seemed so unnerved by Sabre.
He was too submissive, with an instinctive, earnest kindness that might have been genuine, but felt strange coming from a member of the nobility.
He had the kind of manner that made people instinctively want to speak to him, which put Wes’ nerves on edge.
But if he was connected to the king somehow, then he might have been speaking to him in the garden, and Ferrin would be nearby.
Wes picked up his pace, disappearing into the high bushes.
After a few twists around the winding garden, Wes gave up. There was no possibility of a king voluntarily choosing to sneak away into a shadowy garden full of high hedges and dark corners. It was practically inviting an ambush.
Wes turned to head back to the ballroom and went still as a figure emerged from the path.
An ambush, he thought, as Peter de Burre emerged from the shadows, his dark red curls hanging over his eyes.
“I did try, you know,” Peter said. Wes took a step back as a pair of guards stepped out from behind Peter, wearing the de Mazet livery.
They weren’t built like ordinary servants.
They were taller, broader, with the deadened look of hired guards.
For the brother of a guard captain, Wes didn’t have a high opinion of guards on the whole.
They were little more than traitors in his opinion, hired dogs hauling commoners away on noble orders.
Wes started unbuttoning his suit jacket. “What were you trying, exactly?”
“I thought I was wrong at first,” Peter said, rubbing his arms as the guards approached Wes.
“I couldn’t be sure of who you really were.
There could be any number of Wesleys in the navy, after all.
And you seemed like a suitable valet. Even Alain likes you.
A little too much, perhaps,” Peter muttered, tapping the stones on the path with the toe of his boot.
Wes remembered the incident in the dining room and frowned, dropping his jacket on top of a hedge. “What did you try and make Alain do?”
One of the guards stepped forward. “No need to prepare for a scrap, Leonhart. Lord de Mazet wants us to be gentlemen about this.”
“I had to warn the de Mazets,” Peter said. “I had to tell them what you were capable of.”
“And what’s that?” Wes asked. He rolled up his shirtsleeves.
“Murder,” Peter said. The word burst out of him, hard and sharp. “You almost killed my uncle, and then you have the gall to come onto my ship and seduce poor Delauney, as though you won’t just whip him to death the moment he displeases you!”
Wes froze, staring at Peter’s grief-stricken face.
He’d thought Peter had seemed familiar when they’d first met, but he’d been thinking of his parents’ old woodcuts of noble faces.
In the darkness of the hedges, Wes could finally recognize the broad forehead, the sharp nose, and the grim twist of his mouth.
“Captain Lennox is your uncle,” Wes said, disgust twisting in his stomach.
He could have forgiven the person who left those messages if they’d been paid to do it.
Money meant a great deal more to an enlisted sailor than it did to an officer.
But Peter seemed to have done it all for the love of Lennox, which was far worse.
Wes took another step back as the guards tried to flank him, their hands upraised.
“He told me what you did,” Peter said. “How you attacked him all because he cut off his ship’s supply of ale.”
A horrified laugh burst out of Wes at that. “What? He was trying to flog a child to death.”
“You lie,” Peter said. “That’s what he told me you’d do. You lied to me, you lied to Delauney, and you lied to Ned, all with my uncle’s blood on your hands! Now, why won’t you lot stop dithering and do something?”
The first guard stepped forward, drawing his sword.
Wes grimaced. He’d expected fists and boots, not blades.
Sailors only used blades if a pirate ship boarded them, and by the time a ship was boarded, it was usually too late to fight.
He took a step back, spotted a stone on the path, and hauled it at the closest guard.
It slammed into the hilt of his sword, knocking it out of his hand.
He cursed loudly, and Wes reached forward to drag him closer by the tunic.
“I’d say sorry,” Wes said, slamming his fist into the guard’s jaw, “but you’re the one taking wages from a noble prick.”
Years of living on the sea gave him a small advantage over guards used to protecting nobles from imaginary threats, but not by much. The first guard crumpled like wet paper at his feet, but the next still had his sword, and he drove Wes back against the hedge.
“Did your uncle tell you that he starved children, too?” Wes asked, as the guard lunged forward to grab him by the neck. “He said they were so small that they didn’t need normal rations. Did he tell you that?”
“He’d never,” Peter said, but there was a quaver in his voice that hadn’t been there before.
“He broke a man’s jaw,” Wes said, speaking through gritted teeth as the guard held him against the hedge, ignoring Wes’ attempts to drag his hand away from his neck. “All because the man smiled at him.”
“No.” Peter clutched his arms tight. “No, he’s always been so kind. He isn’t like... he’s not like him.”
“Not like who?” Wes asked. He thrashed as the guard squeezed his fingers. “Like your father?” Peter blanched. “They’re the same, Peter. And look at you. A proud little protégé.”
Peter was breathing hard, hands shaking.
“Go on, Peter,” Wes said, as his vision started to go dark. “Try it. Hit me like Lennox beats his sailors. Hit me, Peter! Hit me!”
Peter gave Wes one last, terrified look, then turned on his heel and fled into the garden. The blackness swallowed him, then the hedges, then, at last, the dim light of the stars as Wes collapsed in the guard’s grip, falling into the dark.