Though Faolan cast a narrow glance over his shoulder as they left Morien alone to his private business, he didn’t appear to find anything lacking in Somhairle’s company. He even refrained from pointing out, as though Somhairle might not have been aware of it, that there was no meat at dinner.
The dining room was built for a cozy twenty, white walls and dark wood. Through the windows in the daylight, the dying garden would have been visible. In Ever-Land, the greenery had ever remained fresh as first blooming.
Until Morien’s arrival.
Currently all one could see of Somhairle’s cultivated shrubs and flowers was a gaunt scattering of haunted, hunching shadows.
“I take it working closely with Morien is a marked departure from your usual affairs, Lord Faolan?”
Somhairle had no love for deceit. But he was very fond of stories.
“My honored mother,” Somhairle continued, while Faolan waged a battle with a particularly tough country vegetable, “believes I’ve too sensitive a constitution to learn the extent of her concerns about her enemies. She doesn’t wish to burden me. But if anything should happen to her, and I knew nothing of it . . . that would be the true burden on my heart.”
He busied himself then with folding and twisting his napkin, worrying his bottom lip. When he lifted his eyes, he made sure they were moist.
He found Faolan observing him closely, as if he were an ancient tome written in fae.
The instant their eyes met, Faolan’s hardened, jewel-like. His lips were smiling. “What is it you wish to know, Prince Somhairle? I’ve no similar concerns about your constitution, and not so gentle a heart as Her Radiance.”
In some regions, Somhairle’s mother was called Diamondheart for her unyielding strength. If Faolan was being wry, his tone gave no indication.
“Tell me everything you know,” Somhairle suggested. “Everything that’s happened since I left.”
“That’s asking a great deal. Fortunately, I find myself equal to your challenge.” Faolan gestured magnanimously. “Who loves to talk better than the son of a lawyer?”
By dessert, Somhairle had learned the current state of the Resistance.
He’d been sent to Ever-Land too early to have much memory of what life at court was like, but there had been murmurs of discontent even then from those who believed his mother’s reign had lasted too long.
She’s the first queen to have heirs, yet she won’t move aside for them. Somhairle remembered with a flush of sympathetic embarrassment the night Murchadh had had more drink than he could hold and had repeated this scandalous secret a bit too loudly to Lochlainn, who’d cuffed him for repeating it. The party, like others before it, had devolved into brawling.
That was the extent of it, Somhairle had thought, but in his absence, the murmurs had organized themselves into a unified Resistance. They disrupted Her Majesty’s mining operations, causing collapse and destruction throughout the city. They sowed rancor and fear among the good men and women of the Queensguard.
None of that compared to the killing blow they must have struck when House Ever-Loyal’s eldest son chose to champion their cause.
It had been Tomman, Somhairle learned, not Inis. Inis was, as far as Faolan knew, still alive and well banished, thanks to the Queen’s beneficence.
Somhairle recalled Tomman, Laisrean’s oldest friend, as slightly too serious, always marching at a dignified pace while Ainle, Inis, and Ivy Ever-Loyal gamboled ahead. Try as he might, he couldn’t picture Tomman as the fiery head of a rebellion, a deadly threat to order and the Crown.
Was Tomman’s betrayal the reason Laisrean had stopped visiting? The reason he hadn’t written Somhairle with the news? Laisrean’s big heart must have broken to lose Tomman twice. Once to treason, again to the blade.
However, regardless of personal sentiment, even as sheltered a prince as Somhairle understood the threat. House Ever-Loyal led the Queensguard. If they turned against the Queen . . .
They could not be allowed to turn against the Queen.
“Ever-Loyal was so beloved,” Faolan said. “Her Majesty hasn’t been the same since. I saw the aftermath for myself. I’ll always remember the violence I witnessed that dawn.”
So it had been bloody, as Somhairle feared.
Traitors to the crown forfeited their right to trial. What had happened at House Ever-Loyal provided public warning, a demonstration of a traitor’s ugly fate.
“I mean that as a compliment to Her Majesty,” Faolan added shrewdly. “I strive to be as heartless as she, in all things.”
Somhairle had to pretend he was choking in order to mask his startled cough.