Page 10 of Her Blind Deception (The Dark Reflection #2)

Chapter Ten

T he musicians were carrying on a jaunty tune, as though they thought they could fizz everyone into enjoying themselves and have them all forget that they’d just witnessed a brutal execution.

The funny thing was that it seemed to be working.

Courtiers were beginning to invade the space reserved for dancing, packed down with thickly woven rugs to protect their shoes from the indignity of dirt and grass. A few couples were already whirling their way around in a spray of coloured fabric while the rest of them gorged themselves on the delicacies displayed on every table in a constant rotation of silver platters. I supposed they all attended the Burnings on a monthly basis, so a bit of crown-sanctioned death was hardly new to them, but I would have thought they’d be a little more disturbed that one of the land’s most powerful lords had been eaten alive before their very eyes. Not to mention the fact that they’d all been told their princess was dead, so they should technically be in mourning .

But the closer I watched them, the more I noticed the quick peeks in the direction of the head table. Was the laughter a little too high-pitched? The conversation too forced? There was definitely something frantic in the way some glances fell on the man draped across the centre seat, receiving gifts and pledges of allegiance.

‘Which one?’ Leela asked as she scanned the scene, a frown pinching her mouth.

‘The one closest to him, on the left,’ I said, leaning in to pass on the information. ‘Find me anything you can. Nothing is too small. We’ve no idea what might be important.’

She shot me a wry look. Her hair was arranged artfully in a wave across her forehead, before sweeping up into a modest but impeccable chignon, and her eyes were bright against the colour of a little rouge on her cheeks.

‘What?’ I demanded.

‘Nothing,’ she said, fixing her gaze back onto the soldier I’d named as her target. ‘What’s his name?’

‘Lester.’

‘He doesn’t look like a Lester.’

‘What’s a Lester supposed to look like?’

‘Less blond and lanky. He doesn’t look like he’s related to your husband.’ She exhaled slowly as she took in the rest of the scene, the cavorting nobles, lingering on the languid king lording over them all. ‘Are you sure he’s the one you want me to focus on?’

‘For now,’ I said. Straightening my shoulders and thrusting my chin into the air, I prepared to enter the fray. ‘How do I look?’

‘Formidable, of course,’ she replied without irony.

I offered her a quick smile, before sweeping back into the throng of activity that was the lunch party as it slowly devolved into a dinner one. Setting Leela on Lester was hardly an outlet for my anger. Draven had manipulated me again. He had kept me in the dark again . But if he thought he was the only one with the ability to play puppet master, he was going to find out that I could pull strings, too. First, I needed a likely candidate to spark a reaction.

I scanned the crowd as I went, quickly picking out the energetic Lord Terame, flirting shamelessly with a red-headed girl who looked far too fine for the likes of him.

He dipped into a bow as I approached him. ‘My queen,’ he said in a tone too familiar, a reminder that he remembered I had first come to the palace as a maisera, selling my charms to entertain visiting dignitaries. And he shouldn’t forget it, either. They should all remember that I knew who men were beneath their titles and their fine clothes. ‘I’m sure you’re more beautiful every time I see you,’ he continued with the flair of someone used to positive responses. ‘You all but take my breath away.’

Aether’s teeth, could he be any more cloying? But I threw my head back and laughed, touching a hand to my chest, drawing his eyes there. ‘You have such a pretty way with words,’ I said with a bright smile. ‘I wish everyone had your manners.’ I shot Draven a look as I said this and was rewarded to find his attention entirely fixed on me from across the party.

Terame puffed up like a peacock, and I could almost see his ego straining against the boundaries of a public place, where he really couldn’t push his charm too far. But he could offer me a hand and beg me for a dance in the most flowery language I’d ever heard. I readily agreed, letting him lead me away, place a hand on my waist and pull me in close.

I studied him as he began to ply me with as many compliments as he could fit into a single dance. I could see the conspiracy in his face. It was shockingly obvious. He was a known opportunist, always looking to improve his standing or stir up notoriety by involving himself in ever more scandalous affairs. I supposed he had learned to trade on his conventional good looks: chiselled jaw, luscious curls, sparkling eyes, straight white teeth. An affair with a queen would be the capstone to a lascivious career as a court reprobate.

I wondered if he was not at least a little affected by the execution of Lord Boccius. He had been involved with Boccius’s wife, yes, so likely didn’t much like the man, but surely that made the execution more personal to him than most.

‘I hope I’m not overstepping,’ Terame said as the dance brought us back together again and he put a hand on my waist. ‘But you could have found plenty of willing suiters closer to home in your quest to remarry.’ He leaned in. ‘Much closer.’

‘Whatever do you mean?’ I fluttered my eyelashes, smiling prettily as I considered whether it really was worth tolerating him being so forward with me just to test a theory.

‘I mean that we haven’t spent much time together and I think we should remedy that,’ he said huskily. I slapped him playfully on the arm.

‘You are terrible. You’re going to get us both into trouble, teasing me like that.’

He laughed, dropped his hand to my lower back. ‘You really are very beautiful. And so sweet. Like an apple blossom.’

I felt like rolling my eyes, but I tried to look flattered instead and amused myself with imagining what he would compare me to next. Something equally fragile and unthreatening as a flower. Probably some sort of food. But then he halted.

‘Perhaps if the apple blossom had thorns.’ Draven’s voice cut in as he placed a hand on Terame’s shoulder. ‘Long, sharp ones. Infused with venom.’

‘My king,’ Terame spluttered, dropping me like I was suddenly burning hot. ‘I didn’t--‘

‘Terame, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, Your Majesty.’

I noted the title use with some irritation. Your Majesty . Was that pack of lies he’d sold really all it took for him to be elevated from a regent to a monarch? I was sure no one would have used that title with me without repeated reminders .

Draven scanned the lord from head to foot. ‘It doesn’t seem like you have much in your head, Terame, but I’m still a little surprised that you aren’t more attached to it.’

Terame blinked stupidly in reply, and I heaved a long-suffering sigh. ‘Please excuse us,’ I said to him, clamping a hand on Draven’s elbow and turning him away to let the lord scuttle off into the throng of people.

‘If you felt like dancing, you needed only to ask,’ Draven said, looping an arm around my waist.

‘I didn’t want to dance with you, I wanted to dance with someone pleasant,’ I said, slipping his grip and heading out of the throng of dancing couples. I’d known I would feel satisfied, smug, when he took the bait. He seemed the possessive type, and business arrangement or not, I was his wife. What I didn’t expect was the fierce, dangerous warmth in my chest when he’d tapped Terame on the shoulder. I didn’t want to feel thrilled by it. That, I needed to control. ‘ You didn’t need to be rude to him. Are you upset that he made me smile?’ I continued as he followed close behind me.

‘Rhiandra, you smile at everyone, and it always sits on your face like paint. I’d be more worried if he made you scowl.’

I stopped, snorting in disgust as I turned on him. ‘Well, aren’t you lucky that’s an expression I save just for you?’

A smile twitched at the corner of his mouth. ‘I know. I won’t share it.’

‘I think you’d like Lord Terame if you got to know him,’ I continued, pretending to be oblivious to the wicked bent of his expression. ‘He’s a scream. The most outrageous wit.’

‘A scream is an interesting choice of words. I think I’ll make him scream if he touches you like that again. And not—’ he caught a lock of my hair, tucked it behind my ear ‘—the way I make you scream, my dear.’

I brushed away his hand. ‘I’ll thank you not to talk like that when we’re in the middle of a crowd.’

‘You can thank me all you want, but that doesn’t mean I’ll stop.’

‘You know, you promised me marriage to you would be fun, but this constant push to undermine me is getting boring,’ I said airily, resuming my march towards the head table, where a bunch of courtiers were clustered, waiting to bend and scrape and offer gifts in hopes of winning the favour of the new king. The fools. As if they couldn’t see that he only valued that which he had to chase. ‘I thought at the very least you wouldn’t be predictable. Perhaps I expected too much. ’

He said nothing as I mounted the dais and sauntered towards the centre of the long table to where a servant raced to pull out my seat. I felt the weight of his gaze as I picked a tart from a platter of desserts and placed it on my plate.

Strolling over, he leaned in to pluck the sugared violet from the top. My skin prickled with awareness at his proximity. ‘That sounds like a challenge,’ he said as he sat beside me.

Almost immediately, the announcement of the next family to step forward cut in and took hold of my attention.

‘Lord Catacus Tiercelin and Lady Genna Tiercelin, of Risaille.’

I stiffened. Two people approached the table. The man had a severe brow and frown lines cut across his face, and the woman wore an embroidered gown of dove-grey velvet, her dark hair streaked with silver. They both dipped down, the lord in a rigid bow and the woman in a deep, elegant curtsey, before straightening and waiting with gazes tipped respectfully to the floor. If Lady Tiercelin had been looking at me, I knew I would have seen rich brown eyes looking back at me. Just like my mother’s eyes. Just like my eyes.

‘Tiercelin,’ Draven leaned forward to plant his elbows on the table. ‘Ti-er-celin,’ he repeated slowly, like he was biting off each syllable. ‘What a joy. Have you been presented to your queen before?’

They looked up, confusion lightly touching their expressions as they angled their bodies towards me to dip down again and murmur, ‘Your Royal Highness.’

‘Why?’ I asked him, my voice low.

‘Believe it or not, I actually didn’t plan for this,’ he said, leaning closer to keep his words from carrying. Then he straightened and announced, ‘Your Majesty, you mean.’

I stared at him .

‘What?’ he asked. ‘We can share the title. Consider it a peace offering.’

‘Because it’s so easy to just override laws,’ I replied. When there was a king in the picture, the role of monarch defaulted to him, with queens always relegated to consort.

‘Of course it is.’ His tone was so flippant, as though it was a trifle. It made me think he was only doing it because he enjoyed my shock and revelled in the fierce whispers being exchanged by anyone within hearing distance. Or perhaps he was just trying to placate me after what he’d done in the menagerie.

Whatever the reason, I wasn’t about to pick him apart in front of witnesses. I returned my attention to the Tiercelins, studying the pair of them and assessing how encountering them made me feel. I could remember seeing Lady Tiercelin once, but the memory had the hazy quality of one from when I was very young. I could remember my skin stinging with the acerbic soap I’d been scrubbed with to slough off the dirt I’d been wearing for weeks, and I remembered the too-small shoes borrowed from someone else squeezing my feet. I’d been dragged along as an accessory, a pity magnet, and my mother had left me by the side of the road while she’d gone to seek an audience. I had found a half-eaten pastry and had been tearing into it when my mother returned with the woman now standing humbled before me. I didn’t remember what had been said, but I remembered how frightened I’d been of her fine clothes and stern expression. I remembered even better the warmth of the coin she had pressed into my small hand, and my mother snatching it up when she was gone.

‘Tell me, Catacus Tiercelin, how have you served the crown?’ Draven asked in a drawl.

Lord Tiercelin’s gaze lifted. I don’t know why I scanned his face so carefully, why I wanted to find evidence of myself in his features. Our shared blood had never meant anything before, and it certainly didn’t now. They probably didn’t even know their granddaughter had survived her desolate childhood, let alone that they were bowing before her.

‘I served as ambassador to Creatia for many years, Your Majesty,’ my mother’s father said.

‘You lived in Creatia with your children. In Novaros.’ The words were out of my mouth before I could think better of it.

He turned his gaze on me, but if he was surprised, he was too good a courtier to let it show. He nodded in agreement.

‘Your daughter,’ I continued. ‘Did she enjoy her time there?’

His face still didn’t show feeling, but if it was possible for it to lose even more expression, than it seemed to do so now, becoming almost inanimate, like the face of a sculpture. Or a corpse. ‘I have no daughter.’

Lady Tiercelin stiffened ever so slightly.

My answering smile was threadbare and cold. ‘How fortunate for you.’

A gaping silence expanded between those words and any others, where the pair waited like obedient hounds, patient and docile. And while any compassion I had for my mother was complicated and thin, I couldn’t help but wonder if this was why she had never known how to love me. Because how could these people have ever loved her? Even if falling pregnant out of wedlock was a disgrace worthy of disownment in their eyes, the way her father so readily denied her was a slap in the face.

‘I find it unusual that you never knew of a plot to seize the Brimordian throne when you were so long at the Creatish court,’ I said finally, though it would have been years since Catacus Tiercelin had served as ambassador. He couldn’t possibly have been expected to predict a plot to steal Princess Gwinellyn. Especially when it was a complete farce.

‘I never had any inkling of ill intention towards us,’ Lord Tiercelin replied evenly. ‘The destruction of the Great War has always been enough to keep relations geared towards peace. I admit that I’m shocked by recent events.’

Did I imagine the hint of scepticism in his tone? Perhaps I was projecting my own thoughts onto him. ‘Then you’re not a very good ambassador, are you?’

To his credit, he didn’t so much as twitch. ‘Perhaps not.’

I combed them both with a sort of eagerness that I still couldn’t quite fathom, my gaze boring into Lady Tiercelin now, trying to find something in her mild expression that I couldn’t name. A spark of recognition, perhaps. But there was nothing. Only polite interest and guarded curtesy.

Draven interrupted my scrutiny with the low murmur. ‘What do you want to do with them?’

The question shook me back into the present, where I was a queen being observed by a court. Not a cold, hungry girl on the street dreaming of a different life. And if I wasn’t that girl anymore, it was because I had won the dream for myself, not because someone had come to save me. ‘Just be done,’ I muttered, turning my attention back to my plate. He dismissed them and they dissolved back into the crowd .

Draven was silent as I picked the tart into little pieces, eating not a bite, but I could feel his gaze on me. ‘What?’ I finally snapped.

‘Have you ever thought about actually using some of that power you’ve fought so hard to hang onto?’ he said.

‘To do what, Draven?’

‘Something like stripping the Tiercelins of their lands, their titles, and casting them out of the kingdom.’

‘Why would I bother doing that? They’re no one to me.’

He said nothing, and when I grew tired of him waiting out my silence, I dropped my fork. ‘I’m going to bed.’ Then I paused, touched a hand to his arm, leant in close with a heavy-lidded smile and hissed, ‘Don’t follow me.’ I abandoned the table without looking back, knowing he would be watching me. I tried to dismiss the thrill of anticipation at the thought.

As I readied for bed, anticipation was still warming my stomach, making me hungry for the sound of footsteps, for the click of a latch. Leela didn’t say much as she pulled the long prongs of the beaded hairpin from my coiffure, sending my hair cascading around my shoulders in thick curls. I had the sense that she wanted to ask me something, but she kept biting back the words. Her knitted brow wrote worry across her forehead.

‘Would you like one?’ I offered as I poured myself a drink from the liquor cabinet. ‘It looks like you need it.’

‘I don’t drink.’

‘I’ll have one for you, then,’ I said, knocking the liquid back. Appreciating the way it steadied my nerves and filled me with false bravado.

‘Did you know about the execution?’ she asked suddenly.

I paused in pouring another. ‘What?’

‘Did you know the king planned on feeding Lord Boccius to that creature?’

Shame heated my cheeks. There was no good answer to that question. Just that morning, she’d told me she admired me. I wondered whether a yes or a no would preserve that regard.

‘No.’ The admission was a hushed whisper. It came out smaller, more afraid than I’d meant it to.

Her brow unknitted slightly, her shoulders slumping a little in what might have been relief. ‘I thought not,’ she said, almost to herself. ‘Is it true what he said, that Princess Gwinellyn is dead?’

I choked on the word yes. Lying to her felt… wrong. Instead, I replied with, ‘that’s what he believes.’

She released a breath and sadness crossed her face. Then she dipped in a curtsey. ‘Goodnight, ma’am.’

I nursed my drink for a while after she was gone. When I’d finished it, I wiped out the glass and locked it back in the cabinet, before drifting over to my dressing table and studying the neat arrangement of brushes and perfumes and ornaments laid out for the morning. I picked up the hair pin and rubbed my thumb over the sharp metal prong. We sometimes wore pins like this in the Winking Nymph. They were useful as more than hair ornaments. Moving to the bed, I slipped it under my pillow and settled myself in to wait. Because nothing, nothing , was a surer way to get Draven to do something than telling him not to.