Chapter 6
six
George makes a bid.
Over a breakfast of breads and spreads in the villa’s triclinium, George broached the subject of the prisoner to her very hungover friends.
“We need to let him out.”
“What?” Hildy looked up, bleary-eyed, as she sipped her tea.
“Nope,” Dunstan grumbled.
Burke swigged his juice and shook his head.
“He’s on our side.”
“How do you know this, Georgie?” Hildy set her mug down and leaned in.
George steeled herself before she answered, “I spoke with him last night.”
“What!?” the men roared.
Hildred only chuckled and lounged on her sofa.
As with all tricliniums, the seating comprised large, wide benches arranged in a large U.
Hil had claimed the lectus medius in the middle, George took the lectus imus, typically the host’s sofa on the left, and they forced Dunstan and Burke to share the third sofa, the lectus summus.
Elio and Greta hadn’t turned up for breakfast, but no one was worried over their absence.
They’d told Hildy they planned to sleep in.
“He’s an earl from Selwas—”
“He spoke with you? What’d you do, show him a tit?” Burke interrupted.
Hildy chucked a grape at him.
With a snort, Dunstan asked, “You believe him?”
“Basically.” George offered a saucy shrug, answering all questions at once.
She couldn’t help but wonder if Lord Yaranbur was listening in on this particular conversation.
Last night’s revelation that her prisoner had gotten one over on her should have rankled, but it didn’t.
If anything, she chastised herself for not expecting this sort of outcome.
No stranger to spying, she hadn’t gotten as close as she was to wearing the crown of Domos without keeping her ears open and her face shielded behind a mask of indifference.
Life had taught her the art of reading people.
But knowing the likely-a-lord wasn’t going to harm her and determining whether or not he was a liar were two very different things.
“What did you learn from this lord?” Dunstan prodded as he plopped an olive tapenade into a pita.
Bemused, she explained, “He trailed his nefarious uncle up into Gramenia and wound up in Sorhaven. Isahn said—”
“You’re on a first-name basis?” Burke laughed.
“Are you seriously this gullible, Georgie?” Dunstan’s tapenade squirted out as he took a bite. How very un-lordly of him.
Hildy hummed in approval with someone, George wasn’t sure who.
“Shut up,” she hissed. With an inward sigh, she glanced over at the ventilation in the wall. “It’s gorgeous this morning. Come, we’re moving to the courtyard.”
“What?” Burke flipped his hands, looking around in confusion.
“Grab a dish and your drink, let’s go.”
“Why?” Dunstan frowned.
“Because I said so,” George barked. She did need to talk to them about the situation, but she was not willing to carry said conversation out in the triclinium.
“Beciss,” the men whispered with a shared look.
Though she didn’t ask for more information, Hildy saw something on George’s face and jumped in, supporting the plan to move outdoors.
Once they were settled around a low granite table with matching stools, the princess held court.
“Elio recognizes him from Selwas,” she announced.
“No fucking way,” Dunstan replied.
“He got back early last night and came looking for me. Laid eyes on the prisoner for the first time, and called me into the corridor to let me know.”
Hildy frowned. “Bullshit. When did Elio see him?”
“Two years ago, when he went south with my father’s delegation. He called him Lord Yardbird, but close enough. Elio says he was a fairly new earl then, and he saw him at their palace.”
Hildy, ever the brave one, spoke up, “Georgie, this is not me challenging you...”
George raised a brow.
“I’m skeptical,” she continued. “He looks like any other Selwassan I’ve seen in my life. Maybe Elio’s wrong.”
“How many Selwassans have you seen?” Burke asked, and for once, George wasn’t annoyed by the question.
“Fair,” Hil replied, giving up her initial argument, though her pinched brow and crossed arms said she wasn’t fully on board with the assessment. “If he’s an earl, we have a diplomatic disaster on our hands. You recognize that, right?”
“Right. Hear me out, Hil. His uncle met with Gianis and Marinos.”
“His uncle?” Dunstan scoffed, trapped in a perpetual state of disbelief.
“His uncle, whom he hates. What we have here is a potential new friend who happened to hear most of that conversation, as we suspected.” She took a big bite of bread and stared down each of her friends in turn.
“So you believe him, no questions asked?”
“No. I sent off missives last night. One went to the Djemirian, back in Sorhaven, where his signet ring and belongings were supposedly left behind.”
A gruff sound came from the back of Dunstan’s throat.
“Do you all know anything about Midlake, in Selwas? The current earl?” She knew the earldom was real, but she’d been rather wrapped up in her own kingdom’s affairs in recent years and wasn’t exactly invested in international politics. Her interest had recently become vested.
“It changed hands around three years ago,” Dunstan offered.
“In line with what Elio said,” George commented.
Dunstan continued, “With Selwas’s weird names—”
“What’s weird about them?” Burke cut in.
Hildy humored him with a reply, “Boys are given their father’s name, girls are given their mother’s. Titles down there can go to men or women, so the surnames associated with them change all the time.”
“I wish I had my mamma’s surname,” George mused as that familiar pang of loss plopped into her chest, sending ripples of grief outward. “May the gods carry her to the stars.”
“To the stars,” her friends murmured.
“I know the title stayed in the Yaranbur family,” Dunstan continued. “Could be a cousin of the prior earl who took it on, but I think the new earl is his son. Probably fairly young. Don’t know anything about it beyond that.”
Eyeing Dunstan incredulously, George said, “You knew all that, but when I said ‘Midlake’ you said ‘gullible.’”
“I said gullible later, actually.”
“That wasn’t a question.” She threw a balled-up bit of bread at his head.
“Where do we stand?” Burke asked as Hil pressed a thumb into her temple.
“He showed me how to disarm him.”
“Disarm him? He attacked you?” The whites of Dunstan’s eyes stood out like two moons against his brown skin. Frustrated, he stood from the table and paced the courtyard.
George waved off his concerns and went on to tell them about Isahn’s watercoursing, how he showed her he could feel through it, and how to cut off his magic. Then, she oh-so-casually dropped in that he’d been listening to them for days.
“What?!” her friends shouted at the same time, scattering a gathering of birds from the branches of a gnarled olive tree.
After much, much cajoling, she brought them around to her perspective: He probably wasn’t a liar, and he might be helpful.
“How do we know that Peros guy is even his uncle? Why should we trust he isn’t a double agent?
You really don’t think this could be some sort of trap?
Listen in for days, show you one way to disarm him, lull us all into a false sense of security, and then attack!
?” Burke’s bevy of questions grew progressively more frantic.
“No.” George was resolute.
“To...?”
“Burke, shut your mouth. Georgie has a well-formed gut. She’s rarely wrong.”
The princess smiled. “Yes, I can trust my intuition—better word there, Hil—but that doesn’t mean I have to trust him.”
“So you don’t trust him?” Dunstan scowled.
“I trust him enough that I think we need to let him out. If he is the earl, we’ve taken a foreign noble hostage. If he’s not, he can have a few days’ reprieve until my correspondence gets replies, and we’ll handle things from there.”
“You mean we’ll mindmold him and send him back to his homeland?”
George sucked her teeth. Burke wasn’t wrong, but she really didn’t want to consider that option.
“Well...” Hildy chuckled as she produced a pair of keys from her pocket and tossed them over.
Even though Georgie wasn’t expecting it, she only flinched the slightest bit as she caught the flying metal.
“Go free your lord.”
Grinning at her best friend, she bounced to her feet. “Anyone want to come with me?”
Both men looked tense. Dunstan, usually relaxed, had his hands balled into tight fists as he worked his jaw.
Burke’s knees bounced with anxious energy, and Hildy worried the hem of her short tunic with frantic movements.
The three of them kept sharing glances that spoke of a private issue.
It didn’t have to do with her. If it did, someone would have said.
They were close, with bonds forged over many years, through many shitty situations.
Whatever was going on here wasn’t her problem.
Raising his brows, Dunstan said, “If he’s as safe as you say...?”
George rolled her eyes. She’d be fine. Plus, they clearly needed to talk to one another. They wanted her gone, and she had places to be.
Pausing in the doorway, she turned back to them. “We’ll all speak over cena this evening.”
“Really? With our new friend? With Elio, and Greta too?” Hildy’s forehead wrinkled.
“You’re that ready to trust him?” Burke’s knee stopped jiggling for a moment.
“What did you do? Kiss him?” Dunstan’s question was for George, but his gaze landed on Hildy, who blanched.
Burke cleared his throat awkwardly.
She could’ve cut the tension in the courtyard with a knife. George would need to get the full story from Hildy as soon as possible. “No, I don’t trust him. But we’re not going to let him get away, anyway. And if he tries, we’ll shackle him again.”
“You came back for me, George.” Isahn’s voice was low and gravelly as she entered the dark cell. He lay on his side upon the flimsy cot, eyes closed tight.
A pleasant shiver trickled down her spine. “How’d you know it was me?”
“I can smell you.”
She frowned, setting her candle on the shelf. “And what do I smell like?”