Chapter 31
Existing as nothing but a whole-body ache, Nic cracked open stinging eyes. One felt crusted, but he was too dazed to do more than note it and groan.
“Nicholas?” A hand rested on his shoulder, shaking him gently.
“But why is he here?” Lady Theresa shrieked. “He’s meant to be dead!”
“Please be calm, Aunt. Nic, are you all right?”
Hazy shapes hovered overhead, his sluggish brain sure this was something he ought to focus on.
“Nic? Can you hear me? Love, please say something.”
Dashiell’s voice was a siren song calling him through the mist. “I like it when you call me that,” Nic rasped, his throat raw.
“Oh, thank God, you’re all right. You had me so scared.”
Other voices babbled around him, as impossible to focus on as their faces or why he was lying on the floor in a pool of pain. He concentrated on Dashiell, his face the one lifeline. “I wish you would call me that again,” Nic said, wondering vaguely if he was drunk.
“Unwise in the circumstances, perhaps,” came Lord Francis’s murmur through the mire, and a tugging sense of wrongness made Nic blink, trying to bring the room into focus. Leaf knelt to one side of him, Dashiell the other, with Lord Francis hovering overhead. The wrongness deepened.
“What happened?”
“The chandelier fell on you,” Leaf said. “You’re lucky you weren’t killed. Do you think you can sit up? Or shall I send for Dr. Fanshaw?”
“What he needs,” Lord Francis said, “is to be helped into a chair and fetched some port rather than have everyone cluster around him. Here.” He held out his hands.
Port and less crowding sounded excellent, so Nic allowed himself to be helped up.
Every movement seemed to engender hisses at unexpected pains and the swimming of his head, but Lord Francis’s grip was firm as he guided him toward a nearby chair.
One end of the room was full of scattered glass lustres, the chandelier’s curled frame lying at a drunken angle where it had smashed off the end of the table.
“Lord Francis, you have a hell of a lot of explaining to do,” Lord Charborough said as the man poured Nic a glass of port from the miraculously unscathed sideboard.
“I’m not sure I owe you anything, Charles,” Lord Francis threw back and, returning across the debris-strewn floor, he held out the glass to Nic.
“Oh, don’t eat me, Master sa Vare,” he said when Dashiell gripped Nic’s hand to stop him from taking it.
“I’m not trying to poison him. See?” The man took a theatrical sip from the glass and held it out again. “Satisfied?”
Dashiell took the glass. “If it’s all the same to you, I’ll wait a few minutes and see if you die first.”
“Damn it, Francis,” Lord Charborough snapped. “What have you done with Val?”
A movement in the doorway caught Nic’s attention a moment before the duke’s low voice said, “I’m here, Charles.
But all this ends now.” Standing in the open door, the duke held one of his prize pistols, its barrel flashing silver in the candlelight as he swung it from guest to guest around the room. “We are signing the contract now.”
Lady Theresa gasped, shrinking back, but Lord Charborough just set his hands on his hips.
“Come now, Val, that’s not necessary.”
“Isn’t it, Charles?” His gaze seemed to take in the room, from an injured Nic to the shattered glass and wood spread across the floor. “Master sa Vare. The contract.”
For a moment it seemed like Dashiell would refuse—loath to leave Nic’s side—but with a lingering glare at Lord Francis he crunched his way across the debris to the sideboard.
He returned with the large but unassuming stack of paper, smithed with magic so fresh it still shimmered and sang.
He placed it on the unbroken end of the table, beneath the chandelier that still flared bright with its illusory light.
“Well, we’re ready to sign,” Lord Charborough said as Dashiell spread out the pages that required signatures. “You can put that damn pistol away now, Val.”
Every gaze turned to the duke standing between them all and the door. Behind his dark glasses his expression was ever unreadable, though there was a hard set to his mouth. And the hand holding the gun was remarkably steady as he swung it toward Dashiell. “Take out the audit clause.”
Nic’s heart leapt into his throat, his lunge up off the chair halted only by Lord Francis’s hand closing around his arm. “Careful,” the man whispered with a small shake of his head. “Calm.”
Nic swallowed. The audit clause. The audit clause Lord Ricard had forced on them the first night, the audit clause the duke had offered Dashiell a life with Nic to remove, the audit clause that would prove to the world just how poor they were—no money, no land, nothing.
“Pathetic, Val.” Lord Ricard laughed. “You think we don’t already know that you’ve been scraping the bottom of the barrel for years.”
“No small thanks to you,” Lord Francis said, letting Nic go to scowl across the room.
“And with no small thanks to you,” Ricard retorted, bowing back. “So desperate for money you would sell out your own family. Ridiculous, the lot of you.”
“More or less ridiculous than being willing to pay through the nose for a decades old grudge?”
Lord Charborough stared from his brother to Lord Francis and back. “What are you both talking about?”
“I think you already know, Papa,” Leaf said, looking almost sadly up at her father.
“That’s why we’re here, isn’t it? You found out Uncle Ricard has been ruining His Grace for years, so you offered a ridiculous sum of money for this contract in reparation.
What you might not have known was that Uncle Ricard paid Lord Francis for help to do it.
Lord Monterris’s valet stole the ledger page that proved it. ”
While they spoke, the gun didn’t so much as tremble in the duke’s hand, its barrel still aimed right at Dashiell’s head.
“And then Lord Ricard pushed Rowerre down the stairs to get it back,” Nic said, not taking his eyes off the pistol. “Before trying to murder me.”
“What?” Lord Charborough cried. “Ricard, did—?”
“Don’t waste time being shocked,” Nic snapped. “Just order Master sa Vare to take out the damn audit clause. Now.”
There was a horrible pause while all attention dragged back to the vowsmith standing tense and motionless in the face of the duke’s silent threat.
“Yes, by God, just take the clause out, Master sa Vare,” Lord Charborough said. “Damn stupid thing was never needed in the first place.”
At the table, Dashiell turned over the first few pages of the contract, his hands shaking.
And still standing in the wreckage of the chandelier, Nic felt the racing of the vowsmith’s pulse as though they shared one heart.
The urge to step forward and put himself between his father and Dashiell was almost overwhelming, but Lord Francis was right.
The situation needed calm. So Nic held his breath while Dashiell found the clause, held his breath while he took up a quill and crossed it out.
Sigils followed—ankh, tep, dor, et, each a whisper, though Dashiell’s hands were tense, leaving the command emerging stuttered.
Even so, the words so recently smithed into the paper were disconnected from the whole and, eventually, Dashiell stepped back.
He swallowed hard. “It has been removed, Your Grace.”
“Now you can put that damn thing down,” Lord Charborough growled at the duke. “And we can sign it.”
“Indeed.”
The duke lowered the pistol, and at last Nic drew breath.
Trying to look merely like a stiffly outraged professional and almost succeeding, Dashiell invited them to the table. “If you please, Lord Charborough. Make yourself known, then your signature is needed here.”
Rolling back his shoulders, Lord Charborough approached the table to hold his hand over the presented page. And while Dashiell formed sigils, the man said, “I make myself known as Charles William Algernon Serral, the Most Honourable Marquess of Charborough.”
Within seconds he was signing and it was Leaf’s turn.
The duke followed, and while Nic stared at the shimmering air and felt the scratch of magic against his mind, he couldn’t stop thinking about the gun that had pointed at Dashiell’s head.
And the duke’s unquavering demand that he remove the audit—an audit which had been in the contract since the very first night.
An audit that would have brought down the attention of the royal accountants had it been signed.
And like the gears of a long dormant automaton, Nic’s mind ground into action, that single spark soon sending his thoughts whirring.
From that very first night all the way to the chandelier that had been destined for his head.
At the table, the duke put down the quill, and all eyes turned to Nic.
“Lord Monterris?” Dashiell’s tense tone cut through Nic’s thoughts. “It awaits only your signature.”
Their eyes met across the room. Nic had thought this moment would be easy, simply signing in the knowledge that it would soon be undone by the death he still carried in his pocket, but he made no move toward the table. Instead Nic turned to stare at his father.
“You hid that ledger page in Lord Francis’s room because you were holding it over him, didn’t you?” he said. “Because you were making him help you—not just with the illusions. What better killer than a man everyone thinks is dead?”
“Sign the contract, Nicholas,” the duke said, the words quiet and hard.