Page 101 of Fortune's Blade

Regin made a gesture and one of his men came forward, a tall, powerfully built blond. He was clothed in green like his lord and the chief of the guards, only in his case that meant a long, loose-fitting tunic with open sides and nothing on underneath. He had the air of a dragon who’d just turned, a musky, teeth clenching sharpness that I was beginning to know well, and his eyes were still a little wild, as if he’d been in his altered state just minutes ago, and hadn’t quite settled back into his human brain.

“While you were searching the village, we found a man cowering in the forest,” he informed Louis-Cesare, before turning those disturbing eyes on his lord. “He’d stayed when others ran, to strip the dead most like. But he said he’d been in the arena, that he saw it all.”

“Saw what, exactly?” Rathen said, as if he still didn’t understand. I wasn’t sure that I did, either, although I was starting to have a glimmer of an idea.

“What Lord Regin said. That the woman was introduced as part of a match, during which she defeated a giant—”

“A giant?” Rathen repeated, his brow knitting.

“Yes. Or so the witness said,” the blond added, as if he wasn’t sure that he believed it, either. “It was the queen’s current champion, or former champion now, I suppose. The crowd reacted . . . badly . . . to the loss—”

“Likely cost some a lot of money,” another man, this one a redhead, said. The little ties on his tunic were also undone, and he had that same wild, musky odor. They must have been some of those who fought Antem in his dragon form, after he’d been found spying, and tried to get away.

He’d failed, as the blood on his body attested, some of which had splattered the redhead’s muscular thigh, like extra-large freckles.

“If it’s the bastard I’m thinking of, that is,” the redhead added. “Most of the recent betting has been on how long any opponent will last against him, not whether or not he wins. He was a bruiser, even by their standards.”

Lord Rathen nodded, but his focus remained on the blond. “She killed a giant, then, not Lord Steen’s men?”

“No, she killed both,” the blond said. “Lord Steen’s people showed up afterward—”

“How many?” Rathen demanded.

“Half a dozen, possibly more. The witness wasn’t sure; I believe he was cowering out of sight for most of it.”

“Wise man,” somebody quipped.

“But he managed to see some of the action, and from what he told us, the human woman transformed into a duplicate of Lord Lissan-Dor and, well, ate him.”

“No, she ate the others,” the redhead piped up, who I guessed must have been part of the same scouting party. “She just broke his neck and took a few . . . bites . . .” He suddenly noticed the expression on his lord’s face and trailed off.

“Why was I not informed of this?” Louis-Cesare demanded, ignoring the tension in the air with aristocratic disdain. “You had plenty of time after my party returned from the village that you were so intent on having searched, a village which yielded exactly nothing!”

Regin didn’t bother trying to deny the implication, but answered with his usual calm placidity. “My men wished to report to their lord first, as well they might. But he had already left to return here, to greet some important guests.”

“And yet we have been back for hours!”

Regin regarded him cooly, aristocrat to aristocrat. “He was still greeting them.”

Louis-Cesare did not like that answer, but Rathen interrupted. “We know about it now,” he said, the green eyes intense, and this time, they were on me. “Can your sister do as they say?”

“I—maybe.”

“Maybe?” It was polite, and he hadn’t raised his voice. So why did all the hair on my body suddenly stand on end?

“It . . . might be possible, under certain circumstances,” I admitted. “There was this . . . incident . . . with a demon lord a while ago—”

“A demon lord cursed her?”

“Uh, no. She, that is we, killed him—”

“You killed a demon lord?” Rathen still did not change expression, and his voice hadn’t shifted tone. Yet his complete skepticism couldn’t have been any clearer.

I really needed to learn how to do that.

“Are you speaking of Hong Kong?” Louis-Cesare asked. He had missed the incident in question, arriving only after the fighting was done, much to his displeasure. He had been filled in later.

“Yeah. The first trip, not the second—”

---