Page 158 of Brimstone

My mate blew out her cheeks, shaking her head slowly from side to side. “My ears are ringing so hard, I’m not going to be able to hear any of these petitions, Fisher.”

I got to my feet and placed a quick, chaste kiss against her lips. “You’re welcome. Come on. If we keep Tal waiting another minute, his head might actually implode.”

“Okay. Yeah, let’s—oh, wait, no! I need to . . .” Saeris hurried across her chambers and picked up the book that was still sitting on his nightstand. “I nearly forgot. I need to read the next page in your mother’s journal.”

She flipped through the front half of the book and paused, her eyes sliding from one side of the page to the other, fast, like a metronome. The post-orgasm haze left her face as she took in whatever secret lay before her and tried to wrap her head around it. When she looked up from the page, she gave a small nod and set the book down on the end of the bed, a strange look of determination on her face.

“All right, then.NowI’m ready. Let’s go.”

38

SCION OF NO ONE

KINGFISHER

THE HALL OFTears was transformed.

The benches were gone. Long tables lined the vast space on the left and the right, the center of the hall reserved for dancing. Tall pillars of evenlight swayed and danced along the perimeter of the hall, the haunting, heatless flames almost soaring all the way up to the vaulted ceiling high overhead. Glassy-eyed Fae thralls dressed in the crimson red of the Blood Court carried pitchers of wine to the hundreds of high bloods gathered in their finery, beautiful despite the too-pale quality of their skin and the flinty, cold judgment in their eyes.

Many of the female high bloods whispered behind lace fans or their hands, venomous gazes darting furtively toward Saeris. I sat sprawled in the chair next to her, playing the game. I wanted to rip out their snake tongues for even uttering Saeris’s name. I didnotdo that, because that would cause a scene—the kind of scene that would end the ball early—and after what had happened at Saeris’s coronation, I doubted I would get away with ruining two ceremonies, back to back. Tal would skin me alive for complicating matters further than I already had. Sohere I would sit, on my very best behavior, not ruining anything for anyone.

For only the second time since we’d arrived at Ammontraíeth, Saeris presided over the court on her throne, a golden diadem studded with diamonds glittering atop her head. Now that all of the kneeling was out of the way, her shoulders were relaxed, her eyes soft as they passed over the gathered high bloods, but her hands gripped the arms of her chair a little too tightly. Her knuckles were white.

There’s blood in the air, she said into my mind.So many different people, bleeding freely. I can smell it.

With a casual roll of my shoulders, I nodded in the direction of a Fae male at the foot of the dais, pouring wine for a high blood noble. As soon as he was done filling the glass, he set his pitcher down and prickled the inside of his wrist with a metallic spiked ring that he wore around the tip of his thumb, drawing blood. Holding his wrist over the nobleman’s glass, he allowed two, three, four droplets of blood to fall into the wine. The nobleman bared his teeth, clearly displeased by the small amount of blood the Fae male had spared him, but the Fae male just closed the cuff of his shirt, already speckled with blood, picked up his pitcher, and moved on to the next high blood with an empty glass.

They partake all night at these things, I said to Saeris.By the end of the night, they’ll all be sideways from the wine and feral from the blood.

You’ve been to one of these balls before?

No. But we’ve all heard the stories.

The black diamond earrings at Saeris’s ears winked in the dim light as she turned to face Tal, who came striding up the steps toward us with purpose. He wore a dove-gray suit this evening, made from fine cloth. The color would have been a foolish choice for a normal male with skin the color of alabasterand hair as silver as moonlight, but Tal was not your normal male. Where the pale gray might have washed another out, it seemed to lend the Keeper of Secrets an ethereal, distinctly Fae air that most high bloods lost when they transitioned.

Tal’s loose white shirt was unbuttoned all the way to his solar plexus; when he dropped into a deep bow in front of Saeris, his hand, hovering in front of his chest, did nothing to hide the expanse of skin that suddenly became visible for all to see.

I’d seen Tal without a shirt plenty of times before. We had swum in the waters at the foot of the white cliffs of Inishtar together, back when his heart still beat in his chest and he had grand aspirations of embarrassing his parents by becoming a cartographer and disappearing off on a boat to map uncharted lands. He had given me the shirt off his back numerous times in the maze, too. Reviving after a run-in with Morthil more often than not meant that I woke up freezing cold and naked on a slab of wet stone, just beyond the demon’s reach. Most of the time, Tal knew when Morthil had caught me and was already waiting for me when I came to, a fresh set of clothing in hand. Sometimes, my sprawled-out, naked ass took him unawares, though. He didn’t once flinch at stripping out of his own attire and giving it to me. He had no reason to;hismagic answered him in that poisoned pit. He was a creature of the Blood Court, and as such it was no problem at all for him to summonhimselfsome new clothes.

Regardless of the scenario, I had seen his chest many times, and recently, too, which meant that the extensive ink I glimpsed now, staining his skin, was new.

I crooked a questioning eyebrow at the male, who registered it immediately but only gave me a small, private smile by way of explanation. “We’re almost ready for the petitions, Saeris,” he said. “There are five applicants, with five proposed avenues through which they consider themselves useful to you. We’llbegin in about thirty minutes. Better to get it done before dinner.”

Saeris nodded.

“And, well, the other matter?” Tal said.

“Yes?”

“If it’s all the same to you, I’d like to take care of it now, before they’re all too drunk to remember that it happened.”

The disavowment.

Saeris had told me Tal wanted to sever the bond between them, but she hadn’t mentioned the fact that he was so anxious about the matter. Maybe she hadn’t noticed the tells: the way the skin between his brows pinched when he spoke of it. The way he stretched out his hand, closed it into a fist, shook it out, as if he were readying for a fight. In fairness, there was nothing overtly anxious about the male . . . but Iknewhim. Had known him all my life. And these small tics made something inside me prick its ears and sit up, curious.

My mate shifted uncomfortably on the throne, but she nodded. “All right. Yes, let’s just get it over with, then.”

Tal beamed. “Excellent.”