Page 137 of Settle Down, Princess

“If I could avoid it…”

My eyes found Silas’ then Roan’s across the table, remembering the meeting with the border lords.

“The Duke of Fallspire’s plan…” Silas said. “It was meant to be a feint, but what if it succeeded?” He turned to Bill. “You like to frequent the race tracks.”

“Only to watch the nags race.” He flushed, then shot Desiree a guilty look. “We don’t have money to waste on gambling.”

“I know my father fixes races, manipulates the results, but he’s never bothered to teach me how,” Silas said. “What mechanisms do they use to spur a slow horse to run faster, one that might result in them running out of control?”

Bill sighed, then shook his head.

“Depends. Do you want the horse and rider to survive it?”

“No,” I replied, “we don’t.”

Chapter 79

Roan

Arik thought himself a common soldier, but he walked down the halls of manors and palaces with far too much ease for that. Silas’ Guild training made sure he knew exactly what to do and which fork to use at a fancy table, masking that this wasn’t second nature to him. But me? If you wanted to meet up with a dodgy prick in the back of some shitty tavern to find a bloke that makes implements of torture for horses, I was your man and so I led the way into The Scold’s Bridle.

“Looks like a savoury place.”

Silas glanced up at the hanging sign, a caricature of a waspish woman painted there, wearing a terrible device about her head to stop her tongue from wagging.

“Says the son of a whoremonger and a thief,” I said with a smirk, before swinging the door open.

This was my kind of battlefield. Dukes and other lordlings rarely said what they meant, discussing the weather in some kind of code that when deciphered laid out their plans for each other’s destruction. Even middle class people were stifling in their attempts to eradicate all evidence of human nature from their too quiet homes, but the noise and stink that hit me, as soon as we walked inside. This I knew well.

Don’t get too close to corners, that was the first rule. Few men could be bothered to find a chamber pot or privy so they just pissed in the corners of the inn, leaving the place stinking worse than a tom cat in rut. Don’t make eye contact with the whores. They were just women trying to make their money in the only way they knew how, but they were just as likely to slip off the laps of their patrons and sidle up if they thought you were a better mark. You’d find yourself in a fight with some drunken prick, accusing you of stealing ‘his girl’, the woman in question wandering off to find easier money. Don’t drink the ale, because it was likely watered down and definitely do not walk up to a pack of bastards like this.

“And what do we have here?” His narrow face is where he got his name from, but Weasel was the leader of one of the shadowy factions that made their livelihood around the race tracks. “Three of the king’s finest?” He looked me up and down. “Been a long time, Roan.”

“Weasel.”

I held out my hand and his cronies all looked at me then the man himself, cackling as Weasel left me standing there. Not for long though. He rose, unfolding that lean frame, then looked me up and down before clasping my hand. He tried hard, I’d give him that, his fingers biting into mine, but he realised his mistake as soon as my grip tightened.

I wasn’t the lad I was, running the streets and getting into mischief. My da had tried to sell the idea of the army, saying it would make a man of me, and that made sense. Being forced to wield a wooden sword, practising striking out over and over, built muscle and sinew hard enough that I could’ve crushed the little fuck’s fingers.

But that wouldn’t get me what I wanted.

I let his hand go, grinning hard to make sure he knew that I could’ve broken those damn fingers, right before I focused on the business at hand.

“So what can I do for you?” Weasel flopped back into his chair, a doxy sliding onto his lap automatically. “Roan, son of Horace?”

I grabbed a nearby chair, the occupants of the table looking up to protest until they saw who was taking it. The chair was spun around and I straddled it, facing the lot of them down. Silas and Arik came to stand at my shoulders.

“Looking for a devil’s butterfly.”

“The Bastard Prince and his band is getting into race fixing?” Weasel’s expression shifted from one of shock to avaricious interest. “The Raven would be interested in that sort of information.”

“Not race fixing.” Silas flicked a gold coin into the air and each man at the table moved to catch it, but he was called Weasel for a reason. His hand shot out, snatching it from the air. “And seeing as I’m the Raven’s son and heir, who do you think sent us?”

“We usually deal with Gnasher and his crew–”

Weasel was barely paying attention to what he was saying, shoving the coin deep in his pockets, then silencing the protests around the table with a sharp look. The woman on his lap looked especially attentive then, stroking her hands through his greasy locks.

“And you’ll continue to,” I said. “This is a one off request and has nothing to do with the racetrack.”

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