Page 56 of A Dance of Shadows

The hint of hesitation in his voice suggests he knows exactly what’s most likely to be troubling me, but it isn’t something he’d want to bring up in possible hearing of the palace staff or the guards trailing behind him.

I smile up at him with a brief caress of his jaw. “Only that I’ve failed to offer you something of much benefit. Come with me to my rooms, and we’ll see to it quickly enough.”

I’m not sure if he imagines some more salacious meaning to my words, but as soon as we’ve entered my chambers, I go straight to my trunk that holds my tea box. “You’ve been plagued by a headache. I have a powder that mixed with a little water will ease the pain in a matter of minutes.”

Marc lets out a bark of a laugh. “So thisisall for my benefit. How did you know?”

I retrieve the packet of powder from the lower layer of the box and pour a glass of water from the carafe on my side table. “You seemed a tad distracted. My gift can work for diagnostic purposes too, as I believe you’ve witnessed before. By knowing the cure, it can be easy to recognize the ailment.”

I think Bianca will forgive me for not giving her credit in recognizing his shift in mood before I did.

Marc accepts the glass without protest and downs it in a few quick gulps. He trusts me at least enough that he doesn’t request a taster to sample it first. Or perhaps he simply realizes I’m not so stupid that I’d poison him in my bed chamber when at least four imperial guards know we’ve gone in here alone.

After he sets down the glass, he rubs his brow. “It’s something about the air in certain places. Too dry, perhaps? Itsets off the pain from time to time, but it’s not so bad I can’t tolerate it.”

“Better if you don’t have to tolerate it at all.” The corner of my mouth quirks upward at a wry angle. “Perhaps you should have joined me for the trip to the bog yesterday. Plenty of moisture in the air there.”

I mean it as a joke. I know sending me off to the swamp wasn’t Marc’s idea. But something shifts in his gaze, his gray eyes darkening alongside a flex of his jaw.

He moves to me, lifting his fingers to stroke them carefully over my upswept hair. His other hand comes to rest on the small swell of my belly. “Here you are curing me of my minor ills when I should be pamperingyou. That idiot, sending you off to trudge through the fucking marshlands like a desperate peasant…”

I suspect Linus didn’t even mention to him the part about dismissing my guards. But Marc likes me stoic and strong, not whining about my mistreatments.

I force myself to step closer, leaning my head against his shoulder. “I made it back with no ill effects.” We won’t get into the near-drowning or how Bastien saved me.

Marc lets out a derisive sound and guides me over to the room’s small sofa. As we sit, he tucks me against him with his arm around my waist. His embrace feels more like a binding chain than a reassuring hug, but I nestle against him as if I welcome the shelter. His smoky amber scent wraps around me in turn.

“I don’t know how to get him to let up on you,” he admits in a taut voice. “I’ve kept arguing on your behalf, kept pointing out all the ways he could be harming our authority and that of our future heir… He simply doesn’t care. The more people he’s terrorized, the happier he is.”

There’s a simple way to curethatproblem,I think but don’t say.Get rid of the twin, and you won’t have to share the rule any longer.

But Marc knows that as well as I do. He’s the one who proposed the murder. He’s either still unwilling to carry it out unless I’m as enmeshed in the crime as he is… or he isn’t as upset about his twin’s actions as he claims.

Not yet.

Perhaps reminding him of how much he’s given up for so long will prod him in the right direction.

“Has he always been like this?” I ask. “The wild ideas, the unwillingness to listen to reason?”

“It’s been decidedly worse since we took the throne. I suppose it’s not surprising that being emperor only exacerbated his inclinations.” Marc pauses. “He’s always gone to greater extremes than I have. Even as a boy, he wanted to see how far he could push the rules, push thepeople… It excited him to discover what he could get away with. He loved bragging about it to me when we’d have our conferences before switching off.”

“And then you had to deal with the people he’d pushed.”

“Yes.” Marc swallows audibly. “We were supposed to be the same person, and he was more… everything. So he set the tone, and I had to match it as well as I could, while fixing any catastrophes he made in his wake.”

I lift an eyebrow. “That hardly seems fair.”

“It worked for a long time. He can be excessively charming and entertaining as well as callous. Perhaps he earned a lot of the loyalty I needed to sort out the problems he caused.”

“Perhaps quite so much loyalty wouldn’t have been needed without the problems.”

Marc gives a rough chuckle. “Father said that was why it was good that there were two of us. Linus could stretch the boundaries and I could moderate him before he went too far.When we were younger, my role felt like the more important one. I liked that my father had so much faith in me.”

The melancholy that’s crept into his voice tugs at my heart despite myself. I draw back so I can see his expression. “And now?”

Marc’s whole expression has tightened. His voice comes out quiet. “Now it feels like nothing so much as a burden.”

He shakes himself and recovers his unnervingly tender smile as he cups the side of my face. “But I can bear that burden until you’re ready for us to shed it together. I know you have your principles… but even Elox would want you to protect yourself.”

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