Page 1 of The Traitor's Curse
Chapter One
Across the courtyard, Benedict had been in unnecessarily close conference with Lord Clothurn for much longer than I felt warranted, both of them huddled away from the pelting rain in the narrow cover of an overgrown arbor. Their choice to stand three inches from one another with vines dripping on them, rather than under either of two spacious verandas that ran the length of the courtyard, confirmed that they’d rather be uncomfortable than overheard.
Talking about me, I had little doubt.
Very little. And that sliver of uncertainty included the probability that handsome, smirking Clothurn might be Benedict’s latest plaything, and that they’d ducked under the arbor to leer at each otherwhiletalking about me. The two weren’t mutually exclusive whatsoever.
Clothurn had recently taken over as the interim Councilor for the Treasury after his father’s apoplexy, and Benedict had long been the most beloved—although not by me, obviously—of Calatria’s military commanders, despite his two years’ absence after my father’s death. Upon his return he’d taken up his previous position as if he’d never left it, his charm and the force of his personality and the unwavering loyalty of the Calatrian army too overwhelming for the court to resist. He’d spent the summer and fall fighting our ongoing, simmering war with the nomadic raiders who infested our northern foothills, but in the two months since the year’s campaign ended he’d taken hisseat on my council. Perhaps simply to annoy me, he’d faithfully attended every meeting.
In short, Benedict and Clothurn were two of my closest advisors, whether I wanted them or not, and they lived and breathed politics and power. They could plot against me either in or out of bed with equal facility.
And Benedict…well, most cursed twilight mages suffered from their afflictions. But he wielded his supposed weakness as adroitly as he handled a sword and shield, fucking his way through the court and somehow managing to leave his discarded lovers as well disposed to him as ever.
Benedict’s personality was more accursed than his bloody magic, and if I could undo only one of my late father’s mistakes, aside from the many unjust executions he’d ordered, it would be his lust-addled marriage to Benedict’s harpy of a mother.
As if he’d heard me mentally abusing her, Benedict’s head came up, gray eyes sharp like a wolf scenting prey. He couldn’t possibly see me here behind a second-story balcony column, could he? Vines hung all around the gap between columns, climbing from pots on the ground floor veranda up to the roof. In the gloomy light of this miserable, rainy morning, I’d be screened from prying eyes.
But I still ducked out of any possible sight, flattening my back against the column. I couldn’t hear anything anyway, and I’d seen enough: Benedict’s big, broad-shouldered body sheltering Clothurn’s elegant silk-clad frame, his wool soldier’s cloak and his mane of black hair gleaming with spattered raindrops.
So fucking picturesque, it made me want to gag.
I closed my eyes. The image behind them remained. That, and the others that appeared regularly in a nauseating rotation: my father’s white silk nightshirt stained crimson and black around the collar, the matching trickle from his slack mouth,the blue eyes so like mine bulging and glazed with surprise and shock and pain.
Or the thought that always followed: that I was living on borrowed time, and at any moment I could be next. I didn’t wear a nightshirt, so I’d stain my crisp linen bedsheets instead when I choked on poison or took a knife to the chest, but otherwise it would probably be much the same. My choice of clothing (or lack of it) to wear to bed didn’t have much to do with my subjects hating me, I didn’t think.
Not that I’d wear a stupid nightshirt to appease them even if it did. Being murdered would be preferable to giving in, not least because if I did give in, they’d jeer at me and then most likely murder me anyway.
Theybeing nearly anyone, starting with Benedict and the rest of my council, and my temples throbbed with it, gods, my mind going around and around wondering who it had been who prepared that goblet of wine my father had drunk before bed, and whether that would be the same someone who came for me…the two and a half years that had passed since his death had blunted the sharp edges of suspense, but had done little to reassure me. I’d installed my own hand-picked guards in the palace kitchens and at the entrance to the private ducal quarters, paying them a wage nearly triple that of their fellows, allowing them perquisites no one else could boast, and praying to all the gods that it might be enough to make them impervious to bribery.
But every time I lifted my fork to my mouth or swallowed a mouthful of wine, I wondered if it would be my last. And I never slept easily. A high wage didn’t protect against blackmail—and no matter how I tried to inspire their personal loyalty, there were others whose orders they might allow to overrule mine.
Most notably Benedict. If he wanted me dead, no one would protect me.
“Duke Lucian!”
When my eyes popped open, my father’s former and my current valet Fabian stood before me, his black livery as neat as ever—and his black scowl, too. The court had taken off our mourning clothes a year and a half ago, but you wouldn’t have known it. Our family’s colors had always been black and silver—possibly, now that I thought about it, to save on the costs of putting everyone in somber colors when yet another one of us met a sudden end.
The doctors who’d hemmed and hawed over my father’s body had proclaimed it a spontaneous seizure, the consequence of his excessive bile, and the blood the result of his bitten tongue. Some at court pretended to believe it. For his part, Fabian had made little secret of suspecting I’d been the one to kill my own father—a bit rich coming from someone whose entire job had been to remain within earshot of the late duke, and who had been mysteriously absent from his post when the duke’s lateness took place. Since then, he’d served me with even less zeal.
Still, I trusted him, more or less, and had kept him on rather than replace him with someone more pleasant. Fabian despised me, but he hated the thought of Calatria’s throne occupied by someone not of my father’s blood even more. Even a patricide of my dynasty was better. I didn’t understand Fabian at all.
“Speak to me before you approach too closely,” I snapped. “I didn’t hear you over the rain.”
The sour twist to Fabian’s mouth deepened, and he bowed. “I beg your pardon, Your Grace,” he said, and his gaze flicked to the side…to the arched gap between my balcony column and the next, through which he must have had a perfect view of Benedict and Clothurn.
And they, in turn, of him—speaking to someone to whom he’d been bowing.
Perhaps Benedict would’ve turned back to Clothurn, too absorbed in pressing him against the wall and seducing him to notice that his earlier instinct, that someone had been watching from the balcony, had been correct.
A quick hand through my wavy blond hair to smooth down any damp-induced curls, and a regal lift of my chin, and I stepped out from behind my column, as outwardly unconcerned about observers as any duke ought to be.
No, of course I hadn’t been lurking there like a pageboy getting his thrills from seeing his betters feel each other up under an arbor. Nor had I been paranoically following my courtiers about to try to catch them plotting to kill me and replace me with Benedict.
But when I shot a glance down into the courtyard, intending to allow my eyes to flicker over Benedict and Clothurn with total indifference—Benedict was the only one there.
My breath caught as his bright gray gaze snagged mine and held me as if I’d been pinned.
Leaning against the wall, hands in his trouser pockets and booted ankles casually crossed, glossy black hair like raven’s wings hanging loose down to his shoulders, crooked grin on his unshaven face, he almost could’ve passed as one of the lower town’s ruffians.
