Page 37 of Traitor Son

The maddening thing about assassins was that they were like a bolt of lightning: impossible to anticipate, impossible to track back to their source. The dead man was not going to be carrying anything that identified his client. His knives were simple steel, without decoration or even a maker’s mark.

Remin had been set upon by everything from paid local thugs to—once—a painted journeyman of the Dream Flower Guild. That was the one that tried to spit poison in his face. The blond man in the alley had stabbed himself in the heart with a stiletto rather than be captured, which demonstrated considerable dedication to his client. Bertin had already stripped him naked and was going over his clothing an inch at a time, searching for any concealed pockets.

“Here,” said Tounot, kicking the dead man onto his belly. The moon was as high and full as the tinker had promised, clearly illuminating a tattoo between his shoulder blades, a clock with many spokes and an eye in the center, slit-pupiled and lividly red. “That one’s new to me.”

It was new to Remin, too. It might not mean anything, or it might be another one like the Dream Flower guild, who rubbed dye into their eyelids and lacquered their fingernails.

“Drag him inside,” he said. “Make a copy of that tattoo.”

“Innkeeper won’t be happy.”

“We’ll pay him extra.” Remin scowled. “Though he’s the one with assassins creeping through the windows of his establishment trying to murder guests in their beds. Get Bram to have a quiet word with him. Maybe he knows something.”

“No one’s getting any sleep tonight,” Tounot observed sourly, and gave the dead man a kick on the strength of that alone.

This was Granholme, in the duchy of Firkane, whose duke was fanatically devoted to the Emperor. It would have been surprising ifsomeonehadn’ttaken a chance to curry favor by eliminating the perpetual thorn in the Imperial side.

And of course, no one knew anything. The innkeeper threw a small fit about having a dead man sprawled on one of his dining tables, but after Bram explained things, he elected to retire back to his own room, with the courteous request that they knock if they needed anything else. With no other evident threat, it didn’t seem dangerous enough to warrant leaving town immediately, so Remin sent everyone back to their beds to try and get a few more hours of sleep before sunrise.

He himself sat downstairs, watching as Tounot painstakingly reproduced the tattoo and contemplating the grisly possibility that it might be better just to slice it off and take it with them.

No. It would just curl up and go black. And stink.

It was a silent company that left Granholme later that day, after receiving a very large order of women’s clothing from a yawning Mistress Courcy. The clothes were packed along with the princess’s books in the supply wagon, though the princess herself showed little interest in either. She was silent, with red, swollen eyes, and she sat so stiffly in the saddle that Remin wondered if he’d hurt her after all. The pleasures of the night before felt like a distant dream.

“Are you hurt?” he asked wearily.

She shook her head.

“Do you want wine?” He was going to make a drunkard of her at this rate, but he didn’t know what else to do. Shelookedhurt.

When he gave her the wineskin, she gulped it down like water.

Chapter 5 – An Imperfect Creation

Ophele was never drinking wine again.

It might have surprised her husband to know it, but she was seldom ill. Spring colds and flus came and went in Aldeburke without ever touching her, and she had slept in the forest in all but the most bitter cold without so much as a sniffle. But she was unquestionably weak to wine, and by the time the duke realized how much she had swallowed, it was already on the way back up.

She had never been so sick in her life.

Throughout the many miserable hours that followed, she remembered being both mortified and terribly, terribly sorry for something. She remembered clinging to a tree as she vomited, and someone holding her hair back, and then blackness, and then more vomiting, even though there couldn’t possibly be anything left in her body to eject. The periods of blackness and vomiting went on for a very long time before it was just black.

When she finally swam back to consciousness, it was afternoon, and she was buried in a pile of furs and cloaks. Why was she sleeping in the afternoon? For a dazed moment, she thought she was back in Aldeburke, napping in the long grass by the stream, but then the sun struck her naked, defenseless eyeballs like a hammer and she squeezed them shut, shutting her mouth against a swell of nausea. Her mouth tasted disgusting. Everything stank of wine. She felt like she wassweatingwine.

“Princess?”

The voice sliced into her brain like a rusty saw, but she slitted her eyes open. The eclipse looming over her could only be one person.

“Do you still feel sick?” The duke’s voice was softer than usual as he knelt beside her, pressing his cool fingers to her cheek. And she couldn’t lie. If he’d asked her to stand up, her head might have exploded.

“Yes,” she whispered.

“Drink some of this. It’s water,” he added, when one of her eyes cracked open in alarm. “Slowly.”

He had to help her sit up. And when she saw the camp around her, and all the knights with their backs politely turned, and the horses grazing on their pickets, she realized with a horrible shock that all that vomiting hadnotbeen a dream. She had gotten drunk. She had gotten so drunk, she was too sick to travel. She had gotten drunk in front ofthe Knights of the Brede,and made them sit by the side of the road and wait for her to stop being drunk.

If she could have died right there, she would have.

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