Page 9 of A Game of Veils

I nod mutely and trail behind her as she leads me toward a side door. My gaze drifts of its own accord over to the four princes, Emperor Tarquin’s self-proclaimed foster sons.

They’re staring back at me with a venom I can almost feel searing into my skin. As if today’s horrors are all my fault.

Chapter Three

Raul

It’s no surprise that Bastien and Lorenzo took off for the library the moment our blasted “foster father” dismissed us. As if burying themselves in a heap of books is ever going to make our shitty lives any less appalling.

I hung back in the audience room long enough to check whether I still had Baronissa Dalbina on the hook—under the peevish glare of her husband, whose impotent seething is my real reward. So when I stalk into the sprawling room with its maze of bookshelves, my two princely foster brothers are already pawing through some old tomes they pulled off the shelves.

As I head over to them, I wrinkle my nose. The imperial staff keeps every inch of the palace polished clean, but this room always smells sour to me. All those aged papers are ever-so-slowly decaying around us.

It’s a mass graveyard of fanciful ideas and histories no one ever bothers to learn from.

But it’s also my safest bet for finding Bastien and Lorenzo, especially if I want them together.

At my approach, Lorenzo looks up from his book immediately, his deep brown face and gaze turned even darker by his mood. Bastien takes his time even though he can obviously hear my footsteps.

He wants me to know he has other things he’d rather do than talk to me. Too fucking bad.

When he does raise his head, his messy auburn hair drifts forward to shadow his pine-green eyes. At the moment, they’re as sharp as pine needles too, his frustration echoed in the slant of his mouth.

Good. These two had better be just as pissed off as I am. Great God knows we’ll get farther if we work together for once.

The thought sends a sudden twinge of loss through me. A memory flickers through my head from when there were four of us gathering together in quiet corners of the palace, tossing out ideas like logs we were heaping into a pyre for the empire.

But it wasn’t enough. We weren’t enough. I?—

I shake off the gloom I don’t need and swipe my hand through the air to beckon the two men toward the workshop.

In the far corner of the library lies a much smaller room no one bothers with unless a noble stumbles on a crumbling book. Jars of glue, spools of flax cord, and slabs of pasteboard and leather for rebinding line the shelves against one wall. A long desk stands against the other.

It smells even stuffier in this cramped space, but I’ll take old leather over dying paper.

As the door swings shut to cast the room in darkness, Bastien flicks on the lantern—a magic-blessed one, of course, since flames and books don’t mix well. A wavering amber glow washes over us, yellowing his sallow skin.

“What?” he demands, as if he doesn’t know.

I glower at him. “What do you mean, ‘what’? She’s even worse than we thought. You heard that Accasian bitch gushing over Marclinus like she’d want him and the damned empire to take her from both ends.”

Lorenzo makes a brief gesture that basically amounts to, Fuck her and her whole accursed country. At least he agrees with me.

Bastien simply shrugs, though his jaw has clenched tighter. “She’s hoping to marry into the power. What did you expect?”

“She’s a spoiled brat who wants to sit on a high horse shitting on the rest of us!” A growl creeps up my throat. “She got to loll around in the wild north while the empire shoved us around, and now she’s going to sweep in and stomp on us side by side with the imperial prick?”

Lorenzo’s mouth twists. He twitches his hand past his throat. Or maybe she’ll die.

I don’t know if some additional communication passes between the two of them that I can’t hear, but Bastien nods. “Lore’s right. His Imperial Majesty decided to orchestrate a bloodbath.” He says the emperor’s title with a sneering tone. “Eleven-to-one odds now, and she’s the odd one out. Not much chance she’ll survive to see her wedding day.”

I grimace. “There is still a chance. And you know if she hitches herself to Marclinus, anything good she arranges for Accasy will be taken from our countries, not his precious Dariu. The empire already has our kingdoms on a leash tight enough to choke, and she’ll cater to hers at our expense.”

Bastien narrows his eyes at me. “What exactly do you think we should do about that?”

I can tell from his rigid stance and the tautness of his voice that he’s as angry as I am. He just thinks I’ll be stupid about it. As if he’s the only one capable of keeping a clear head just because he’s a year my and Lorenzo’s elder.

As if he’s been accomplishing anything more than I have in the past decade, burying himself in books and pretending “research” will somehow fix the crap we’re mired in.

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