Page 3 of The Traitor's Curse
Of course, his mother’s entirely unsubtle efforts to convince my father to disinherit me in favor of her own precious son probably hadn’t helped matters. Six years older than me, an accomplished soldier and clever strategist, a strong mage, charismatic and popular. All well and good, except for the small problem of his having no legal or legitimate claim to the throne whatsoever—although that could be solved with a few signatures in council, and a ratification with a larger quorum of lords.
My father had grown colder to me in the months before his death, snapping at anything I said, interrogating me about my movements and my friends, and excluding me from council meetings. It wasn’t hard to imagine what the topic of discussion had been at those.
Benedict chewed, swallowed, and leaned back with a shrug of his absurdly broad shoulders. “I suppose you’ve been impatient for the title for a long time, so if you did get him out of the—”
“I’m not the one who’s been impatient for the title. That would be your bitch of a mother!”
Silence fell, my words ringing and ringing in it. Benedict stared at me, eyes steady, but with something gathering in their depths, a darkening storm. He didn’t move, but the air around him swirled heavily, his magic palpable even to someone without a shred of magic of his own.
Fuck. Fuck me. My father had been deadone day, my grip on the crown was tentative at best, and I’d just told my rival claimant that I thought his mother had murdered her husbandon his behalf.
He’d kill me right here and no one would care. They’d have him legally on the throne before some unfortunate servant had finished scrubbing my blood out of the parquet flooring. I braced myself for the blow, magical or mundane, it didn’t matter—he could take his pick. Gods, no one at all would miss me except my cousin Tavius, and he might not have cared either except for the fact that we’d grown up together.
One of Benedict’s eyebrows rose slowly, and some of the tension dissipated, the pressure in the air dropping enough that I could let out the breath I’d been holding. Perhaps he wouldn’t kill me today after all.
“There hasn’t been a duchess reigning in her own right for at least a hundred years, I believe,” he said at last, “and never anyone who became so by marriage.”
I blinked at him in confusion and growing disquiet, almost wishing he’d simply slit my throat. His choice to willfully misunderstand me, or appear to do so, didn’t have any possible beneficent motives I could see.
Which meant he’d be toying with me in order to slit my throat later. And in the meantime, he wanted me alive either to serve as a source of amusement or to be used for some purpose I couldn’t yet see.
Wonderful.
“I didn’t realize you’d added historical scholarship to your many other accomplishments,” I said, making my voice as snide as possible to hide any betraying tremors. “What’s next? You could take up fine needlework. Then perhaps you’d be able to attract a husband at last. Although you may need to go easy on the bacon. The palace seamstresses are going to run out of fabric for your tunics.”
True as far as it went, actually, but Benedict didn’t have a spare ounce of flesh on him, as far as I could tell. Pure musclestrained his woolen sleeves.
The air thickened again, though, his magic pressing on me from all sides.
Benedict’s scowl twisted his handsome face into something almost ugly. Terrifying, anyway.
At least I had the satisfaction of knowing I’d angered him as much as he had me.
The screech of chair legs on the polished wood floor as he shoved roughly to his feet echoed through the parlor like a crack of thunder, and his magic crackled around him and raised the hair on the back of my neck.
“I should marryyou, you’d put me off my feed for the rest of my life,” he snarled, his composure gone at last, something raw and frightening gleaming in the depths of his eyes. Benedict loomed over me, massively strong and wreathed in the aura of his menacing power. I couldn’t have so much as twitched if my life depended on it, frozen like a rabbit. “Not to mention, that’d give me a claim to the throne, hmm? A legitimate one. Unassailable. I could keep you locked up in your bedchamber day and night, waiting to service my curse. Do you think anyone would fucking stop me? You and your army, perhaps?”
Ice trickled along my veins. I stared up at him, aghast, breath starting to rasp, with eyes that had to be as round as my coffee cup.
Marry me. Use me. Take my crown.
Gods, could he do it? Probably so. The law forbade a union between us, despite our familial relationship being through marriage only, but convincing the council to make an exception for the man my predecessor had preferred in the first place would be easy enough for someone who controlled…
“Your army would follow me, not you,” he went on, with complete, humiliating accuracy. “Your father was a right fucking bastard, but they stayed loyal because he used to be a hell ofa soldier himself. He led from the front, whatever his other faults. Most of the men he executed were lords, courtiers, who’d never picked up more than a dueling rapier, and they didn’t care that much. You’re one of them, from any common soldier’s perspective. A courtier. Useless. Dressed in silk, not a scar on you. I could bend you over your throne and mount you like a bitch in front of the whole army and they wouldn’t intervene.”
They wouldn’t. They’d cheer him on, I had no doubt. Not to mention leer and jeer, and now apparently my mind had decided to gibber rather than take any more useful action.
My stomach churned, my meager breakfast threatening to reappear.
With an effort, I forced my dry lips to form the words, “I ought to clap you in chains for that. Let you rot for a few months before I put your head on a spike over the palace gates.”
Benedict went still for a long moment, face unusually pale under a tan baked in by years of campaigning, the corners of his mouth creasing.
He couldn’t possibly be afraid of my threat, could he? I couldn’t believe it. Not when he had to know that I probably, almost certainly, very likely wouldn’t carry it out even if the council and the army would let me get away with it. (The head on a spike part, in any case. Locking him up and letting him molder in a cell for a month or two, yes. I would do that. Gladly. Asshole. And his mother with him.)
And yet the bleakness in those wintry gray eyes, the clench of his fist where it rested on the breakfast table…some strong emotion had him in its grip, and it wasn’t only anger.
Finally he shook his head, pushed off the table, and said, in a tone I couldn’t interpret at all, “Looks like you bid fair to follow in your father’s footsteps, Lucian. Maybe he was right about you after all. That’s irony for you.”
