jewels sparked to the simmer of outrage. ‘That’s a brutal remedy, and a coward’s expedience, to leave the botched brunt for others to bear.’
‘I did try to warn you,’ Sulfin Evend said, too weary to steer the discussion away from disaster. ‘Again and again, I begged you to consider a basic arcane defence.’ His stance had invoked Lysaer’s wrath before this, despite every logical argument, that forged weapons could never eradicate sorcery, and troops sent to battle against invoked spell-craft could not survive without any shielding bulwark.
‘I was badly influenced,’ Lysaer stated. Harrowed still by the winter’s unconscionable string of defeats, he did not mask his face, or offer excuses to deny the horrific burden of full culpability.
Sulfin Evend lost his breath. The last thing he wished was a stripping confession. Still raw with rancour, he might strike out, or inflict a worse cruelty, given his liege’s torn nerves and wretched state of convalescence. He gulped down more tea to constrain his tried patience. ‘Your Grace, I am earnest. You must seek protection. Walk softly and watch whom you bind as your ally. Erdane is a dangerous stew of old intrigues. I cautioned you once, and will say yet again. Beware of the factions who offer you gold without an apparent agenda.’
‘Such ones work for necromancers?’ Even wrung by remorse, Lysaer’s probing thrust stayed dispassionate. ‘Then why should such ill-starred, slinking creatures stand in support of the Light?’
Sulfin Evend shut his eyes, fighting lassitude. ‘They want what you want,’ he said with brute candour. ‘Break the Fellowship’s compact, kill off the clan blood lines, and eradicate the free practice of sorcery from Athera. Once that’s done, initiate knowledge is sundered. Nobody’s left with the masterful force to oppose what steps in through the breach.’
Lysaer’s response seemed oddly removed, as though his voice dimmed into distance. ‘What about the Koriathain?’
‘The witches won’t become the implacable enemy of such powers until the moment they’ve ceased being useful.’ Sulfin Evend slid his emptied cup on the side-table. His fingers were shaking. The valet’s bitter brew had done nothing at all to lift his clouding exhaustion. ‘As long as the order’s active enmity ties up the Fellowship’s hands, none of the black cults will touch them.’
Lysaer’s inquiry continued, a relentless assault that pummelled against flagging faculties. ‘Ath’s adepts?’
‘You know they won’t practise outside of their hostels.’ Sulfin braced, prepared for rebuttal, since he had never spoken against Lysaer’s entrenched belief that Ath’s Brotherhood worked in league with Shadow.
Yet needling contention never arose. Lysaer lay quiet, if not actively hostile, at least choosing the threads of his arguments.
Chin propped on his fists, but resistant to the overpowering need to ease his numbed feet with a bolster, Sulfin Evend marshalled his strayed thoughts and qualified. ‘Some scholars suggest if this world falls to entropy, the Brotherhood will simply fade from Athera, much as the Paravian races have done since the Mistwraith encroached on the sunlight.’
‘My valet can undress you,’ Lysaer said, all at once crisply smiling. ‘Will you save trouble and grant him permission before you pass out in a heap?’
Caught with his head drooping, Sulfin Evend snatched up short. The room spun around him. Porcelain rattled as he jammed his arm on the table to salvage his sudden, swayed balance. ‘What have you done, prince!’ But his slurred voice already affirmed the fact that the drink had masked a remedy potion. ‘I don’t recall giving any man leave to dose me out on valerian.’
‘Sleep,’ murmured Lysaer. ‘You look pounded to pulp. The least I could do was to grant you relief from a duty too harsh for the asking. Let go and rest. The matter at hand can be left to wait until you’ve made a recovery. As well, my friend, we’ll fare best by appearance if you play the one fallen sick.’
Sulfin Evend awakened to someone’s hand, urgently shaking his shoulder. The fragrance of expensive soap let him know he had not been returned to the field camp. His eyes felt stuck with horse glue, and the coverlets were stifling. He pushed off the valet’s bothersome fingers, snapped a curse, and shoved erect in a nest of down pillows.
He was in Lysaer’s bed. It was daylight. His sinews felt slackened to caramel, and every bone in his body seemed recast in lead. ‘Damn you for meddling,’ he said in gruff fury.
The Divine Prince sat in the stuffed chair by the bedside, immaculately dressed. Lace cuffs masked his wrists and shadowed his rings, and a sumptuous white doublet smothered everything else up to his clean-shaven chin. The impact was one of forceful, pale elegance, composed as a sword-blade in ice. ‘The soporific you drank was too weak to lay you out for as long as you’ve rested.’
‘How long?’ croaked Sulfin Evend, then swore with invention to learn he had slept the day and night through, and lost most of the following morning. ‘Why didn’t somebody waken me?’
‘Somebody has.’ Lysaer’s prankish smile and arched eyebrows almost concealed the bruised shadows left by his ordeal. ‘You are meant to be ill. Why disturb the felicitous appearance?’ Still seamlessly talking, he encouraged the valet, who, undaunted, bore in with a razor and basin. ‘The fibbing gets tiresome. I don’t have your field captain’s knack for singeing language, or your uncle Raiett’s charmed gift for dissembling diversion.’
‘Raiett doesn’t lie. He evades, that’s his secret.’ Sulfin Evend shoved back his rat’s tangle of dark hair, scowling to fend off the servant. ‘I don’t care for charades. What’s changed?’
Succinct, Lysaer stated, ‘I need you awake.’ His piercing assessment suggested far more, as he watched his Lord Commander seethe with clenched fists amid the rumpled billow of bed-clothes. ‘Are we not under threat?’
Blue eyes locked with inimical steel grey, and Sulfin Evend attacked first. ‘Liege, you shouldn’t be upright.’
‘Appearances are everything,’ Lysaer amended. ‘You’re in that bed, sick, upon my direct orders. The Mayor of Erdane is due momentarily. He’s expecting an audience. I suggest, for time’s sake, that you let my valet do his work to make you presentable. Or not, of course. You may stay looking furious and degenerate, as you wish.’
The accents of refined Hanshire breeding clashed with a phrase borrowed straight from the barracks. His hawk’s profile livid, Sulfin Evend concluded, ‘I don’t fancy another man’s mincing hand, gripping cold steel at my throat.’
‘Well, I don’t care for strewn lather spoiling my bed,’ Lysaer said with disarming delicacy. His nod summoned the valet. ‘You’d make a poor job. One look, and you’d notice. Your fingers aren’t steady. Allow you the razor, you’d rip your own veins without someone’s outside assistance.’
Pinned as the valet raked back his loose hair and fingered his chin with light expertise, Sulfin Evend clamped his jaw in offended forbearance.
‘I do realize, today, that I owe you everything,’ Lysaer stated point-blank.
No rage could withstand that aimed barb to the heart. Given the accolade of absolute trust, Sulfin Evend suffered himself to be handled. Combed, shaved, and tucked back like an invalid under perfumed sheets, he endured the ignominy as the Mayor of Erdane was ushered in by no less than the same callow page. Insult to injury, the rabbit-faced chamber steward also manned the ante-room
