Page 5 of The Traitor's Curse
No, not home, because this wasn’t his palace and he wasn’t welcome. But back, anyway. Popping up again like a boil you thought you’d lanced and gotten rid of.
For more than two years, he’d abandoned me to thecircling, snapping wolves: the council, the court, the army. Within a few days of his defection, there had been a wave of officers resigning their commissions, giving excuse after excuse for no longer wishing to serve me. Their elderly parents needed their help, the family farm had fallen into disrepair, an old injury troubled them in the winter. Anything but the truth: that they’d respected my father’s leadership, no matter what a vicious bastard he’d been, and they’d loved and trusted Benedict, and without either of them at the head of the army they’d as soon not risk their lives, thanks.
I’d let them go. What choice did I have? They’d either desert or mutiny. Or transfer their loyalty to whichever one of my council had the wit to spread gold and brandy and dissension among them. Benedict’s departure had removed the most likely usurper of my throne. But that didn’t mean some other lord wouldn’t eventually grow more ambitious, more ruthless, and more daring.
Someone, after all, had murdered my father. And I didn’t think that person had done it out of any great love for me.
Another lusty, roaring cheer broke out down below as more soldiers streamed out of the barracks, surrounding Benedict and filling the courtyard.
My stomach twisted into a sick, hard knot.
I’d spent my reign so far trying to straighten out our trade agreements and diplomacy, set aside a grain surplus, actually administer the duchy in a way that benefited us all, and not only the council. My father had been decent enough to the common folk of Calatria. But he’d spent more and more of his energy rooting out “traitors” amongst his courtiers, and that had left precious little time for more than paranoia and executions. I’d been the one to pick up the slack then, too. Years I’d spent putting every spare moment into doing my duty.
And yet when I reviewed my troops or rode out amongthe people, I got sullen mutterings and polite, perfunctory bows. Their rightful duke!
But Benedict, who’d abandoned all of these people for more than two years without a word of explanation, received a hero’s welcome on his return.
I strode away from the window before I vomited out of it, mind buzzing with something akin to panic.
I’d have to welcome him. Without joy, obviously, because even if I could bring myself to fake it everyone would see right through it. But with regal and possibly even familial graciousness, at the very least. Because yet again—and this had formed the depressing, overarching theme of my life thus far—what choice did I have? Given my army’s enthusiastic welcome, if Benedict wanted to step right back into his role as my Lord General, I’d be suicidal not to grit my teeth and pretend it had been my idea all along.
Besides, the rest of the court would be doing the same thing. Many of them, usually the ones he’d fucked into some bizarre state of starry-eyed compliance, genuinely liked him. (Sometimes I wondered if he used magic in addition to his cock when he took someone to bed. No one’s cock alone could be quite so persuasively mesmerizing.) And the ones who didn’t, who saw everyone as a path to power or wealth or one-upmanship, would either plot to use him or pretend to support him so as not to piss off his partisans.
They’d be pissingmeoff, of course. But no one seemed to care much about that.
Leaning my fists on my desk, I closed my eyes and forced myself to breathe evenly, to allow my cheeks to cool and lose their flush, to show nothing.
When I stepped out of the study on my way to receive Benedict on the steps of the palace, as everyone would expect me to do, no one would’ve known that my teeth ached from theforce of their grinding, or that the bland neutrality pasted on my face covered a mental image of my hands around Benedict’s muscular neck.
After his triumphant entry to the palace courtyard that morning, it had taken all of five minutes for Benedict to step back into his former role as Lord General of Calatria, two days for him to have the council eating out of his hand, and apparently no time at all to have every pretty young lord at court in his bed.
Twilight mages, born at dawn or dusk and bearing the sun god Ennolu’s curse along with the magic gifted by his brother Dromos, god of the night, dealt with their tainted powers in different ways. Some drank a potion that protected them from the effects of the curse but also prevented them from accessing their magic.
Not Benedict. He embraced his curse—so to speak. Dawn mages had to yield to another man the way night yielded to day, the gods being given to obnoxious metaphors that tended to ruin their followers’ lives. Dusk mages, on the other hand, took the other role in the magical coupling Ennolu demanded, fucking another man and spending inside him to relieve the pressure of their power at regular intervals. Twilight mages all had varying cycles, more or less time between when their curse would rear its head and cause them pain, fever, mania, and eventual death, sometimes only a day and sometimes a week or more.
I’d tried to work out the timing of Benedict’s magical cycle, but even after years of observing him I had no idea. He never ran out of available men, either at court or in one of the several highly selective brothels around the city.
Or the less selective ones. For all I knew, he fucked a poxy dockside whore every night, whether separately from fops likeLord Clothurn or all in one filthy heap.
Making my way from that blasted balcony to the council meeting on that rainy winter morning, a long and exhausting eight months since Benedict’s return, I should’ve been strategizing for the council meeting.
Instead, I contemplated Clothurn’s likely reaction if Benedict showed up at his rooms with a whore in tow. Clothurn seemed the type to expect to be gallantly complimented, enjoy a fine wine, and be taken in the dark in a gentlemanly manner. Not groped by some grinning bit of rough from down the hill.
Of course, Benedict himself wasn’t actually a grinning bit of rough from down the hill, but he could convincingly play one on the stage. Clothurn might have a rude awakening.
Not that I’d be following Benedict’s repulsive, mocking suggestion that I watch through Clothurn’s window to find out.
A shudder passed through me as that image, unbidden, flashed through my mind. Benedict bearing Clothurn down onto his bed, his broad shoulders gleaming with sweat, his offensive grin, the grasp of his big, callused hands on Clothurn’s pale flesh. Clothurn’s head thrown back in mingled moaning ecstasy and shame as Benedict spread his legs and knelt between, huge cock rampantly flushed and erect…
My fists clenched, and I strode faster down the hallway that led to the council chamber, more rampantly flushed myself than I wanted to admit.
It’d been too long since I had anyone in my bed. Who could I trust, for one? Any courtier’s motives would be suspect at best, a servant was out of the question, and unlike Benedict I had no taste for paid company. And any of the above might try to murder me.
Besides, my physical desires had been sublimated to my duty and the stresses of my position for so long I hardly remembered how it felt to want.
If imagining Benedict and Clothurn in the throes of passion had me flustered, clearly I’d spent so long without a bedmate that I’d become not only celibate but a prude. Or desperate.
Or worse, a desperate prude. Gods help me. I’d shrivel into a vinegary prune before I reached thirty in a couple of years.
