Page 2 of The Traitor's Curse
Almost.
The long sword at his hip, the fine wool of his clothing, and the thumbnail-sized ruby hanging from his left ear marked him as the officer and aristocrat he was, even if nature had fitted him for cutting purses and breaking heads in a stinking gutter.
That earring might’ve been more suitable for a ruffian, too, truth be told. A successful one, anyway.
Benedict’s grin widened like a shark’s as I stared down at him, his teeth flashing white.
He knew I’d been watching. And he’d find some way touse it against me, to insinuate that I cared which of my courtiers he dallied with rather than simply needing to keep ahead of who might betray and murder me first. Humiliation burned acidly in the pit of my stomach.
He pulled one hand from his pocket and made a subtle, small gesture, fingers flicking. His lips moved.
And I nearly jumped out of my own skin as his hot breath brushed over my ear, projected by his magic.
“I’ll be visiting his chambers tonight, if you want to try to find an open window to leer through,” came Benedict’s laughing whisper, as if he’d spoken from an inch away.
And then as I gaped at him, my face heating and fists clenching in rage, he winked at me, pushed off the wall, and sauntered under the veranda and out of sight.
“If Your Grace pleases,” Fabian said from behind me, “the council meeting is beginning momentarily. I am here to fetch you. My apologies for…interrupting.”
Gods-damned fucking Lord Zettine, the head of my council, and his childish tricks. The meeting had been set for two hours from now, but clearly he’d changed it and waited until the last possible moment to inform me.
Childish, but effective. Because now I’d be late to my own council meeting, looking like a careless fool, and if I were so stupid as to argue that no one had told me, I might as well admit to having no authority over my own government. I ought to be the one setting these meetings at my ducal convenience.
Forcing any expression out of my face had been a skill I developed in early childhood, learning to conceal my feelings at an age when most children, so I’d been told, were encouraged to laugh and play.
So when I turned to Fabian, my cheeks had cooled and I was fairly sure my eyes showed nothing.
“The council will wait on my pleasure, as is their duty,”I said. “And it astonishes me that you think I require your reminders to carry out mine.”
Fabian’s own mask showed only the faintest crack—the malicious glitter of his eyes—as he bowed, murmured his insincere apologies, and slipped away, leaving me alone on the balcony with the patter of the rain.
After counting to twenty to make it seem as if I’d been taking my time, I turned and followed, forcing myself to walk at a steady, regal pace. They hated me anyway. I might as well arrive at the meeting with my dignity intact, for all the good it’d do me.
Two years and nine months before, almost to the day, I’d woken up to Fabian bursting into my bedroom at dawn to tell me that the duke had been murdered.
And despite how much I’d come to hate my father over decades of watching him bankrupt, imprison, occasionally torture, and frequently kill anyone he suspected of treason, his death shocked me to the core. Seeing my own parent lying unnaturally still, claylike and bloated, eyes staring in horror at nothing at all, had left me in a foggy fugue through which I could hardly think, let alone hear or speak.
The first council meeting I’d attended as the Crown Duke of Calatria had been held within an hour following the discovery of his body. Lord Zettine had called it without consulting me, speaking over my attempt at a protest and assuming total authority, mouthing a few condescending and infantilizing platitudes about helping me through my time of grief: he’d served my father for decades and seen me grow up, and so on. On another day I’d have been able to think of a rebuttal, a way to outmaneuver him. But the words hadn’t come, and in the end, I’d attended and taken my father’s seat without comment.
By evening, a new rumor had joined all the others burning up the tongues of the court: that I’d laughed as I settled into the duke’s chair at the council table.
Benedict had been the one to bring me that particular gossip. I’d been breakfasting alone in the family parlor, a room only my father and I, plus the now-Dowager Duchess and her son, were allowed to use.
With my father dead and his wife in seclusion to “grieve,” that left me. And Benedict, who preferred interrupting my solitude to buggering off to dunk his head in a cesspit, an option I’d have suggested had he asked.
“I heard someone saying last night that you’d have left his council seat empty for a meeting or two if you had any decency,” Benedict said as he heaped a plate with bacon. I suspected his mother had kept to her rooms in order to carry on as usual, bacon and all, without anyone commenting on her hard-heartedness. Benedict had no such scruples. “I also heard you laughed when you sat down. I know that isn’t true, of course, since I was there.”
He dropped the tongs with a clatter, and I tensed up so as not to wince.
“I doubt you bothered to correct them. And you could set me a good example and leavethatseat empty,” I said as he dropped into the chair across from me. “But then, everyone knows you have no decency.”
I set down my fork, resigned to getting through the day on the two bites of egg I’d managed to chew and swallow. The queasy slosh of my belly didn’t invite further experimentation.
“At least no one’s accusing me of murdering my own father.” Benedict stuffed a slice of bacon in his mouth, gray eyes gleaming, as if the topic of patricide dulled neither his appetite nor his sense of humor.
“That shows their lack of decency, not mine,” I snapped,clenching my fists on my thighs under the table so maybe he wouldn’t see how he’d gotten to me.
Gods, Benedict had always been able to bring out the worst in me. He made it nearly impossible to keep my temper. Five years we’d been unfortunately related through our horrid parents, and he’d been a constant irritation.
