Was it urgency or anger I heard in his voice? I mentally prepared my answer for him, but as soon as he shut the chamber door, he turned and said something entirely different from what I was expecting. “You lied to me this evening.”
I was at a loss, and my mind raced trying to think what misstep I had made. Nearly everything about me was a lie. “I don’t know what—”
“You claimed you were absorbed with your food, but it was Zane you were absorbed with. You loathe him. Why?”
Zane. My skin crawled at just the mention of his name.
I shook my head and turned away, but in two steps, the king was next to me, his hand gripping my arm, but not in a threatening way. “Tell me,” he said quietly.
I couldn’t reveal the depth of my revulsion for Zane or the reasons why I hated him. Jase was the first and only person I had ever shared every ugly detail with, and even that had been painful. I had also made a bargain with Zane. A futile, empty bargain of silence, but that slim sliver of hope—I couldn’t let it go. “I have nothing personal against him,” I answered.
“It’s the Previzi, then? I witnessed your tirade against them at the arena
—just before you slugged the Patrei. Why do you hate them?” “Do I need a reason? Their activities are illegal.”
“And yet you were once an accomplished thief.”
“A thief who remembers starving on the streets of Venda. The Previzi never treated people like me kindly, or even with the slightest bit of compassion.” These words I didn’t have to invent. Every one was true. “We were beneath them,” I said. Vermin, crapcakes, nothing. “They paraded their fancy goods past us, then sold them all to the Komizar and rich merchants. They only offered the rest of us their moldy bags of grain
crawling with weevils—if that. More often, we were showered with their disdain. Their haughty sneers will always be burned in my memory.”
He studied me. “Hunger is what drove you to become a thief?” I shrugged. “Starvation can be quite motivating.”
His stare dissected me, the sly king who calculated every move. But a flutter and a fraction of a second revealed dusky eyes that were hungry. He held back, wary. He did not come by trust easily, and I was glad. I didn’t want that moment to come too soon. Tomorrow. At just the right moment. “I understand the sting of disdain,” he finally said, “but that was a long time ago and Zane is useful to me. He’s a comforting, familiar face at the arena. Merchants know him. I’d like you to bury your past grudges.”
I noted his use of the word like, instead of simply ordering me to bury my grudge. Patience, Kazi. He’s circling, swimming closer. I paused as if I was weighing his request. “If he’s useful to you, of course. I will do my best to bury the past.”
“Besides,” he added, “you’re not beneath the Previzi anymore. You work for the king. Soon to be the most powerful king on the continent. Remember that.”
“Yes, Your Majesty.”
His eyes rested lazily on my face. “In private, you may call me Montegue.”
Closer. But it wasn’t the kind of closer I was ready for just yet.
“You wished to speak about something?” I prompted, hoping to move on.
“Banques informed me you did a thorough job searching today. He was pleased with your work.”
“Really? He seemed disappointed when I spoke with him.”
“The general is not one to lavish praise freely. But he told me you uncovered a few hidden spaces we didn’t know about.”
“Nevertheless, I found nothing.”
“But at dinner this evening Paxton told me you had a moment, as he called it, in the main house. He said you hesitated as if you sensed something. Does this mean you have the gift?”
I frowned even as a smile lit within my chest. Well done, Paxton. I played down the abilities that Paxton had seeded, but the king responded exactly the way we wanted him to, like he was reading lines from a play that we had written.
“No,” I answered, “nothing like the queen, if that’s what you’re thinking.
But sometimes … I don’t know. I do get a feeling.”
“Paxton thinks we should return there tomorrow and do another search of the main house. I agree.”
I sighed as if unconvinced. Like everything else, it had to be his idea. “As you wish. I’m grateful to be in your employ and at your service, but I can’t promise anything. There was a wing, though, that I had a nagging sense about. I don’t know what it means, but I would like to try again.”
“It’s settled, then. We go back tomorrow.” He paused and looked down at my foot. “I noticed you’ve had a limp this evening. Paxton said you injured it today?”
“My leg?” I said, looking down like I hadn’t noticed. “Oh, it’s nothing. I caught my foot beneath a fallen timber today and twisted my ankle a bit. That’s all. I’m sure it will be fine by morning.”
“We’ll make a stop at Gods Pavilion on the way. You can soak it there.”
I knew he’d want to stop there anyway—Paxton said he almost always did on his way to Tor’s Watch—but my limp assured it. I feigned surprise. “Thank you. That would be helpful—and very kind of you, Your Maj— Montegue.”
I was about to excuse myself, thinking our business was finished, when there was a tap on the door. Dinah opened it gingerly, then entered with a tray holding two glasses and a small crystal carafe of dark amber liqueur. Though he wasn’t stumbling, the king was already well liquored up from a long night of celebrating. One more glass, and I was sure he would be tripping over his feet, and I was certain the second glass was for me.
Montegue released my arm and waved Dinah to a low table in front of a lush overstuffed couch with wooden legs that looked like claws. She set the tray down, then glanced at me, almost impatiently, maybe as a warning. Perhaps she thought I couldn’t handle the king—or the strong drink. Montegue dismissed her, but she looked over her shoulder as she exited the
room, her chestnut curls peeking from her cap. I nodded to reassure her, but her eyes lingered on Montegue.
“Anything else, Your Majesty? Attend to the fire in the hearth, perhaps?
I can stay and—”
“No. I’ll tend to it. You’re dismissed.” She closed the door reluctantly behind her.
The room was chilly, but the king digging logs out from the pile and getting his hands dirty? His expertise was in keeping his hands clean. He was anxious for her to leave.
“I can do it,” I offered and knelt on the thick rug before the hearth to pull kindling from the leather sling beside it. I stirred the hot embers with a poker and set the dry sticks on top. The small flames licked upward.
The clink of glasses sounded behind me. I glanced over my shoulder. Montegue was staring at me, a drink in hand. A second filled glass sat on the table waiting for me. I turned back to the hearth and grabbed a log.
There was a long silence, and he finally said, “So, none of your kisses with the Patrei were true?” My spine stiffened. I thought this conversation would happen in the morning. Not now. He should be with his guests, but I suppose the king did what he wanted when he wanted.
“I already told you. Anything you saw was only—”
“Yes, I know, part of your job. But you said it was a pleasant way to pass the time.”
I shrugged indifferently. “I suppose his kisses were passable, but nothing about them was lasting or really mattered. I’ve already forgotten them, to be honest.”
Forgotten. A word he valued when it came to Jase. “Tell me more … What was the Patrei like?”
It was always on his mind. He still battled Jase’s ghost. Killing him wasn’t enough. His obsession with the Patrei made me understand more than ever why Paxton had to produce a body. Even if I had to endure the horror of a dismembered hand wearing Jase’s gold ring a hundred more times, I was grateful for Paxton’s clever deception. It was all that kept Jase safe and gave him time to recover. I poked the coals, and sparks flew upward. Could I lie convincingly in detail to Montegue about Jase? Could I
say he was a greedy, arrogant coward when I knew Jase was the exact opposite of all those things? Simply saying I hated him was one thing, but having to go into the details of who Jase had been was another.
“You knew him longer than I did,” I answered. “You probably knew him far better.”
“But I was never a guest in his home. I never ate a meal with him, never punched him, held a knife to his throat, or arrested him and dragged him across the continent. You spent many intimate moments with him.”
I heard his emphasis on intimate, and the question the single word held.
Was there more than a kiss between us?
“Yet, in spite of the time spent with him, I failed in my ultimate goal— and the conceited ass reminded me of that fact every day. You, on the other hand, killed him. You beat him at his own game, and managed to do it without even getting your hands dirty. I’m the one who should be asking you questions. You achieved your goal, while I did not. And for a Rahtan, that is not an easy admission.”
I heard the wheeze of the couch as he settled into it. I stood and he motioned for me to join him. I sat on the opposite end. It didn’t take much to distract him from his original question. It always came back to the fantasy, the world a mark builds, the sense and value they make of their lives, the story they’ve invented that must be fed: You are shrewder, wiser, more worthy.
Let the illusion bloom. That was my job.
As I sat down, I had to toss only one small morsel to him, a simple query for him to tell me everything. How long have you been planning this? Because if I knew anything after engaging hundreds of merchants in the jehendra, it was that everyone had a story that they burned to tell, the true story they believed no one else could ever get right, the injustices they endured, the unserved accolades they deserved. As a thief on the streets, I had become proficient at listening to them, nodding, agreeing, prodding them along, watching marks lose sight of this world as they drifted into another. And with every word I listened to, I gained their confidence. At last, someone who understood them.
Montegue’s focus shifted from me to the fire, the fantasy alive in his gaze. He was pleased that I had asked, and leaned back, propping his feet up on the low table in front us and lifted the small glass of amber liqueur to his lips. He gulped it back and poured another.
The story unraveled seamlessly, as if he had told it in the darkest corner of his mind a hundred times, which I was sure he probably had. It was a story that held equal parts of bitterness and pride. That was what he wanted me to hear, the triumph of his cunning and patience, but there was another part to his story I knew he didn’t mean to reveal to me. His crippling need. It churned inside of him.
Disdain. Now I knew why he said he understood it. The word was a choking vine winding though him. I listened, nodding, even as I chilled at the depth of his jealousies. Their roots twisted deeper than I expected.
The plan had been forming in his head since he was twelve years old, and was revised as time passed. It became an obsession for him. For eleven years.
“You were practically a child,” I said, trying not to sound too shocked. “Successful plans take time,” he answered. “Of course I couldn’t
proceed with any plan while my father was king, but I always knew that one day Tor’s Watch, the arena, all of it—would be mine, but I couldn’t do anything about it until my father was dead.”
“Did you kill—”
“My father? No. That was just more good luck. It was how I knew the gods didn’t want me to wait any longer. They wanted me to have all this, and then when I met Beaufort, I knew the gods wanted me to have even more.”
The gods favored Montegue? How lucky for him. I wasn’t sure if even he believed it himself, but he had to paint the picture of his rightness, the sheer holiness of his plan. If he said it enough times, it would become true.
“You already ruled over Eislandia, and you had the fortress in Parsuss.
Wasn’t that enough?”
He chuckled. “Fortress is a generous word for a drafty, crumbling twelve-room citadel. You’ve never been to Parsuss, have you?”
“No.”
He said that his father split his time between three farms the Montegues had owned for generations, the one in Parsuss and two in the highlands not far from Hell’s Mouth that raised sheep and grew summer crops. The three together barely kept food on the table and paid the few laborers they employed. The meager taxes his father collected paid his small stable of officials who kept the kingdom running, the coffers always bleeding into red. I asked about his mother, and he said he had never known her—she died when he was a baby. It was always just him and his father, and the few laborers who came and went. It was a lonely life.
“And then, when I was twelve, I visited the Ballenger arena with my father. It was much smaller back then, mostly farmers, but it still looked enormous to me. I was a wide-eyed rube.” His nostrils flared as if his own naïveté repulsed him. He took another drink. Had he parodied himself? The green rube who played the bumbling king? “I’d never seen so many traders and so much merchandise in one place. Every corner was filled with noise and food, and possibility. It crackled through the air as alive as a whip. I was transfixed. The world was at everyone’s fingertips—except, that is, for the king and his son.
“Karsen Ballenger was giving my father a tour. I trailed behind, along with half the Ballenger brood. Jase was maybe seven or eight at the time, a runny-nosed little brat who didn’t even know how much he had. Karsen was orating on and on about the Ballenger history, trying to convince my father that they were the first family of Eislandia, here long before the Montegues. My father asked to see this vault with all the history written in it, and you know what Karsen said to my father?”
Montegue paused, his lip twisted at the memory. “No. He told him no. He said it was only for family. He told the ruling monarch of Eislandia no, without so much as an apology or blink.”
He repeated the word no quietly, but I still heard all the anger it held. “And then you know what my father did?”
I knew I didn’t need to reply. This was a story he had lived over and over again. The answer was ready on his tongue waiting to be spit out. “Nothing,” he finally said. “My father did absolutely nothing. He bought the seed and stock we had come for and we left, two cows trailing behind
us. I burned with shame the whole way home, and I decided on that ride back that I would not be a farmer like my father. I would not blister my hands on a hoe or break my back behind a plow, and most of all, I would not suffer the disrespect of underlings.
“By the time we got home, my shame bubbled over, and I screamed at him and called him a stupid farmer. And you know what he did?”
I shook my head.
“What he always did. Nothing.” He winced and swigged back the last of his liqueur, then grabbed the carafe and poured himself more. “I decided that day I wasn’t going to be the man my father was, the man who was the sniveling butt of all the kingdom’s jokes, the king no one listened to. Do you have any idea how hard it was to hear subjects say they had to check with the Patrei first when I gave them orders? My own magistrates in Hell’s Mouth deferred to Karsen Ballenger, and then to Jase. I will not be a nothing ruler.”
“Farming is an honorable profession. The Ballengers have farms.”
“The Ballengers had farms,” he corrected. “The Ballengers had everything, but now it’s mine, as it should have been all along. A mistake was made three generations ago. The border should have included the arena and Tor’s Watch. Then maybe my father would have been a proper king I could have been proud of. Now I will be that king. The greatest ruler the world has ever known. When I have a son, he will be proud of his father, and I will get respect the Montegues always deserved—from all the kingdoms.”
My breath pooled in my chest. The way he said all, the way his jaw clenched, the way the haze from a night of drinking vanished and his eyes turned to hard glass—it reminded me of someone else.
I recalled standing on the edge of Blackstone Square, hidden in the shadows listening to the Komizar speak as he rallied forces for his growing army. All of them, he had shouted. His voice was strong and seemed to reach to the mountains. All the kingdoms will bend a knee to Venda—or be slaughtered. I was ten and immune to swaggering talk by then—except from the Komizar. His words always contained a chilling promise in them, unlike anyone else’s. Some had thought he was a god. I had thought him a
demon. I remembered slipping deeper into the shadows as if he might spot me from afar, as if he had some special power, and maybe even now I still wondered if he did.
All. That’s what I heard in Montegue’s voice now.
His hunger ran deep. Eleven years deep. So deep he was willing to use children as a shield and hang innocent people from trees to ensure obedience. Willing to pay labor hunters to steal away his own citizens. Willing to murder the rightful ruler of Hell’s Mouth and confiscate his holdings. How many things was he willing to do that I didn’t even know about yet?
Imagine the possibilities.
I was afraid to.
His feet dropped from the table to the floor, and he rose abruptly. “It’s getting late,” he said. “You should turn in. We’ll be leaving early.”
I was caught off guard by his sudden dismissal and was surprised by how deliberately he stood, no sway or stumble to his stance. He didn’t seem drunk at all. “Of course, Your Maj—”
And then he took hold of my wrist and slowly pulled me close, firm and sure.
“Do you want to kiss me? Compare a Patrei to a king? See if it could be more than passable?” he asked.
I gaped at him, searching for an answer. I had thought his mind would be more consumed with the missing papers and my supposed premonition than on the small matter of a kiss, but after hearing how long he’d been planning this invasion, I guessed that maybe there was no such thing as a small matter when it came to the Ballengers, especially the Patrei. I weighed my answer carefully, knowing a no could send him into a sullen rage, but a too- eager yes could spike his suspicions and make him think I was using him the way I had used Jase. And he very much wanted me to judge him differently than I had Jase because he was a king and was different, better, smarter. He had to best the Patrei I had rejected, the Patrei who had wanted me. My pause made his fingers tighten on my wrist.
I blinked, as if embarrassed. “I admit, I am curious.” “Of course you are.”
His other hand slipped behind my back, and he pulled me closer, lowering his face to mine, but before our lips met, I twisted free and stepped back.
“Curious,” I said firmly, “but cautious.” I wrung my hands and tripped over my words. “I will not deny there’s a strong attraction, but—” I shook my head. “I’m not sure exactly what I’m trying to say. But I’ve seen the women circling around you. I don’t want to be one of them. I don’t want—” I gasped and looked at him as if horrified. “It’s not that I—What I’m trying to say is I’m certain your kisses are more than passable, and I admit I’ve wondered about them, but I want more than—” I sucked in a long, shaky breath. “I need to stop. I’m afraid nothing is coming out quite the way I intended. May I sleep on this?”
He regarded me for a long while, his black eyes fixed on mine. “You want something more than what you had with the Patrei. Something true.”
I blinked, certain he could hear my heart pounding wildly. “Is that foolish of me?”
Of course it wasn’t. Because he was more worthy. More beautiful. More of everything. My words made complete sense.
A faint smile lit his eyes. “Go. Get a good night’s sleep. We’ll continue this conversation in the morning.”
And with that, he dismissed me to return to my room. Without an escort. Because a soldier in his employ confessed her strong attraction to him.
She wanted more than what she had with the Patrei, and with all her fumbling, he imagined that she even blushed when she said it. She was certainly someone trustworthy enough to walk to her room alone. She would be back. She wanted him, after all. As she should.
