Chapter Four #2
He held out a tray of food, and from his forbidding expression, she didn’t argue with him. Instead, she took her tray and ate in silence while he paced outside her cell like he was the caged one instead of her.
After she finished eating, Kestrel set the tray near the balls and then went back to her cot to lie down.
The Wolf wouldn’t let her have any peace, though. “If you keep acting like a condemned woman waiting for the executioner’s axe, they’ll find you guilty for certain.”
“I’m not,” Kestrel protested tiredly. “There’s nothing I can do here but wait for investigation to finish and for them to find Father innocent.”
“Innocent?” The Wolf laughed. “You are so na?ve.”
“Father had nothing to gain from such a crime!” she protested. “Why would he have risked everything when my betrothal to Gerard meant a closer connection with the Lord of Wurrakia and even more benefit when I became the lady of Wurrakia.”
“The Lady of Wurrakia has no power. Therefore, your father would have had none through you.”
“But Lady Calla—”
“Aylmer’s wife only holds sway over him because of his love for her and her position of High Healer.
Gerard only loves himself. No one can influence his decisions aside from his father, and only rarely then.
You would have been nothing but a pretty ornament at his side and a broodmare for his heirs.
” The Wolf spoke with cold indifference.
“I’m certain Mephistopheles had more to offer Lord Cregan. ”
Kestel recovered from his cruel picture of her future with Gerard enough to defend her father. “But he’s evil and steals from worlds. I can’t see my father siding with evil.”
“Our whole country sided with evil when we backed the Winter Prince,” the Wolf countered.
Kestrel frowned at that uncomfortable reminder of how everyone in her country, including her had been fooled by the Winter Prince. Some were still fooled. She remembered the one conversation she and Sir Gerard had the day after Mephistopheles’s attack.
“Sometimes I wish Prince Stefan had been crowned instead of Zareth,” he’d said as they walked the battlements of the castle.
“He was more civilized, more manly, and fully human. Our world should be ruled by humans, as we’re the majority.
A faelin half-breed can’t possibly have our best interests in mind.
The faelin are matriarchal, for fate’s sake!
And he hasn’t even deigned to visit Wurrakia. Instead, he sent his bard of a queen.”
Kestrel had been stunned into silence at his passioned defense of the Winter Prince after they’d all seen him bring out Xochitl in chains, and then learned that he’d been the one behind thousands of disappearances of people all over the world.
He’d enslaved them, then after they’d been worked to death, he’d used them as blood sacrifices to strengthen the mortar in the tower the enslaved were building.
Gerard had to have somehow missed that information, she’d told herself.
There was no other logical reason he’d call a man capable of such evil “civilized and manly.” And referring to the Queen as a bard?
Yes, that had been her occupation on Earth, and apparently still was, but Xochitl’s voice and music was powerful.
She’d made a diplomatic effort to educate Gerard on this, but he seemed displeased with her. They never had the opportunity to finish that conversation, for Gerard was called back in because his brother Artavian, who’d been wounded in battle, had regained consciousness.
The Wolf’s voice pulled her back to the present.
“And even the high and mighty Keeper of the Prophecy allowed himself to be taken in by the Mephistopheles. If he could offer something a faelin high sorcerer couldn’t get for himself, a magic-less lord of a small, remote estate would be helpless in the face of temptation. ”
Kestrel’s heart shrank at his logic even as his claim that Sir Gerard wouldn’t love her stung like a fistful of nettles.
Delgarias, the Revered One, and Keeper of the Prophecy had recently confessed to allowing Mephistopheles to turn him into the first vampire in exchange for immortality so he could marry a luminite princess.
But it had been all for nothing because the princess had vanished centuries ago.
What did Mephistopheles offer her father? Riches? A larger estate? A cure for his leg? A son ?
She reached for the last bit of reasoning that made this treason not make sense. “Then why did he betroth me to Sir Gerard in the first place if he knew he was going to betray them?”
The Wolf’s scar-bisected eyebrow rose contemplatively. “That is one of the most pressing questions. Hopefully that will be answered in the inquest.”
“When will the inquest begin?”
“It’s already begun.” The Wolf’s raspy voice was foreboding, with an edge of tiredness. “And with a plot of this scale, it could take months.”
“Months?” Kestrel’s heart sank in despair. “I don’t think I can take it, being locked in here for so long.”
“The feeling is mutual.” He glared at her. “There are so many better things that I could be doing.”
“Like torturing someone?”
“Like killing someone,” he snarled, then suddenly strode toward her.
Kestrel shrank back against the wall of her cell.
But he was only retrieving her empty food tray.