But no one could hold it. It would be a civil war in which the four main parties were equally matched. Civil war of a kind far worse than the civil war that Regnus had feared ten years ago when he allowed Aleine to take the throne.
Where did that leave the other players he’d been worried about so much recently? Where did the Sa’kagé and Khalidor fit? If the price were right, Khalidor could buy the Sa’kagé’s help.
And then all the pieces snapped together for him at once.
Lord General Agon swore loudly. He cursed so rarely that the king stopped in midsentence. Aleine looked at Agon’s face, and whatever he read there made him afraid.
“What is it? What is it, Brant?”
All these years, he and the king had been so focused on Khalidor that they’d never thought of a threat coming from within. Khalidor was taking out the entire line of succession, and manipulating the king into helping. Once all the heirs who were both legitimate and powerful were eliminated, Khalidor would kill the king. They would act quickly, before he could establish a new line of succession, before he could consolidate power or mend the relationships he was about break. Then they could watch the chaos, and march when they pleased.
“Your Highness, you must listen. This is the prelude to a coup. We may only have days. If it starts, all our preparations against Khalidor will be useless. And you’ll be the first to die.”
The king’s face was painted with fear. “I’m listening,” he said.
44
After congratulating Logan a few more times, Kylar had excused himself to let the young duke speak with his father-in-law-to-be. Serah was in the back of the house getting changed, and they had agreed that she probably shouldn’t see Logan and Kylar being friendly until after the wedding.
“I’ll understand if I’m not invited,” Kylar had said. “But if you ever do tell her, I’ll expect an apology. Congratulations.”
He climbed up the stairs to his room, pitched his tunic in a corner, and stared into the looking glass. “And congratulations to you. Your master is going to kill you and all the women in your life hate you.”
Next to the mirror, he noticed a bundle of letters bound together with a ribbon. He picked it up. Scrawled on a scrap of paper in Blint’s hand was a note: “Since you’ve crossed the line, I guess there’s no reason to hide these from you anymore.”
What? Kylar untied the ribbon and read the first letter. It had been written by a child, all big letters and disconnected thoughts: “Thank you so mutch. much. I love it here. You are great. It is my birthday today. I love you. -Elene” An adult had written below that. “Sorry, Count Drake, she overheard us talking about her lord benefactor. She’s been wanting to write this letter since we started teaching her how to write. She wouldn’t let go of the idea once she got aholt of it. Tell us if we shouldn’t let her write no more. -Humbly Yours, Gare Cromwyll.”
Kylar was spellbound. There was a letter for each year, each getting longer, the handwriting better. He felt like he was watching Elene grow up before his eyes. She, too, had changed her name, but there was no denial in her of what she had been, no divorce from her previous weakness and vulnerability.
When she was fifteen, she wrote, “Pol asked if I get mad because my face got cut up. He said it’s not fair. I said it’s not fair that I got out of the Warrens while so many others never did. Look at everything I’ve got! And it’s all because of you. . . .”
Kylar had to flip through the letters, just skimming them. He was living on borrowed time. Sooner or later word would arrive about the prince’s death. And damn! the girl could write a lot. He flipped to the last letter. It was dated just a few days ago.
“You don’t know what you’ve done for me. I’ve told you about all the ways your money has saved my family, especially when my adoptive father died, but you’ve done more than that. Just knowing that somewhere out there, there’s a young lord who cares about me (me! a slaveborn girl with a scarred face!) has made all the difference. You’ve made me feel special. Pol proposed to me last week.” Kylar had a sudden impulse to find this Pol and kick his ass. “I would have said yes, even though I hate his temper and . . . other things, too. The point is, just that you’re out there caring about me makes me believe that I’m worth more than a lousy marriage to the first man who will propose to a scarred girl. It gives me faith that the God has something better for me.” Oh, she’s a God person. Great. So that was how she knew the Drakes. “Thank you. And sorry about my last letter, I’m totally mortified by what I wrote. Please ignore everything I said.”
Huh? Kylar turned back to the last letter and couldn’t help grinning. Elene had been deep in the throes of full-blown sixteen-year-old–girl romanticism. “I think I’m in love with you. In fact, I’m sure of it. Last year when I went to Count Drake’s to drop off my letter—mother finally lets me do a few things by myself—I think I saw you. Maybe it wasn’t you. But it could have been you. There’s this boy there, a young lord like you. He’s so handsome and they totally love him. I mean, you can just tell how much everyone thinks of him, even Count Drake. I mean, I know he’s not really you because he’s not rich like you are. Because his family is poor, he lives with the Drakes . . . ” Kylar’s breath caught. Elene had seen him. She had seen him a year ago and she thought he was handsome. She thought he was handsome? “ . . . but what does money matter when you have love?”
There were . . . no . . . yes, there were tear splotches on the page.
Well, Kylar had grown up around three girls. It didn’t totally surprise him. He just wondered when Elene had started crying. “So since you’re the strong silent type, and you never write back to my letters, I’ve decided I’m going to call you Kylar. I suppose you might be fat and ugly and have a big nose and . . . I am SO sorry. I should start over, but mother says I already use too much paper as it is. I’m sorry. I am a total brat. But can’t you write back to me even once? Have Count Drake give it to me next year when I drop off my letter? Pol says I’m not infatuated with a man, I’m infatuated with a bag of money.” Elene didn’t know anything about him, but hey, she’d been barely sixteen, and Kylar still wanted to kick Pol’s ass. “But I’m not. And it’s not infatuation. I love you, Kylar.”
A chill washed through him at those words. How he wanted to hear those words! How he wanted to hear them from her. And here they were. Here they were in knots and knots of his duplicity. She said those words to him, not thinking he was he, not knowing Count Drake gave her letters to Durzo, not knowing Kylar really was her young benefactor, not knowing Kylar was really Azoth, not knowing Kylar was a killer, not knowing that for that one time she’d seen him that he had seen her hundreds of times: twice every week, whenever he could make it, in the market off Sidlin Way. He’d watched her grow up in that market, told himself a thousand times that next week he wouldn’t go and try to catch a glimpse of her, and always succumbed. He’d watched from afar and come to have his own infatuation, hadn’t he? He’d told himself that she was just forbidden fruit, that that was all that appealed to him about her. He’d told himself he just wanted to see that she was well. When that didn’t work, he told himself that it would pass.