not blue because they don’t want to offend anyone.” He finished this with a pointed look at my army jacket. Fuck him, I thought. Little rat didn’t know what it meant to be a soldier, and I wasn’t about to sweep all that I knew the Ke-Han were capable of under the carpet just yet.
I adjusted my collar, which wasn’t too tight, and took stock of my surroundings. There weren’t any windows in the place, since it was right in the middle of the palace and surrounded on all sides by the narrow halls—no good for making a quick exit, should the talks turn sour. It felt like being boxed in, like the tunnels in the Cobalts had been modeled after the palace itself.
As far as the Ke-Han were concerned, there wasn’t a friendly face to be found in the crowd. In fact, there wasn’t a face at all in the crowd that didn’t wear a mask of stony indifference, save for one, and that was what surprised me. It was the younger prince himself.
Things were pretty awkward, I’ll give them that, but that was to be expected. Except that Fiacre and another member of the Basquiat, Josette, seemed to be drawn to the younger prince like a horse to the feed, and when I looked over in their direction, they were actually talking to him. Josette was laughing. I shot a glance at Lieutenant Valery, who himself was looking pretty annoyed and pained by Casimiro, who’d somehow snagged himself a conversation with one of the bowing, scraping servants. He’d caught this one midscrape, and she had her head down like she wanted to plan an escape but couldn’t decide whether or not she’d be breaching etiquette. Damn, talking to Casimiro was bad enough when you understood the language. I couldn’t help but think it’d be worse if you were a foreigner.
Marius stood leaning up against the wall and speaking in low tones with Wildgrave Ozanne. They were both observing Fiacre’s discussion with the prince with interest, but also like they were too smart to go over there and get in the line of fire themselves.
The younger prince was flanked by a man who looked as put out by this whole situation as I was. I couldn’t tell how unhappy he was from his face but from the set of his shoulders. He was a soldier, and there was something resigned and tense in the way he held himself—like he thought he was going to be attacked, too.
“Now, that’s hardly fair,” Caius said, almost like he was getting ready to sulk. “I thought it was the height of rudeness to go up and talk to a member of the royal family.”
“Just the older prince,” I replied, distractedly.
It was obvious, at least to me, that while the Emperor was maintaining his mystique or whatever it was he thought he was going to accomplish with this recess, he’d left things up to his more personable younger brother, who was probably making polite conversation about the weather and the price of silk with two of our most esteemed diplomats.
From the looks of the Emperor—from what kind of man he obviously was—it was likely a good thing, I thought, that he wasn’t in the room to see how nicely his younger brother got on with the men and women from Volstov.
“Come,” Caius said, without any warning, giving my arm a fierce tug. I almost flipped him again. That time, it was harder to squash the instinct. It wouldn’t do to make a scene, and the last thing I wanted was to give th’Esar any more reason than he already had to exile me. Not that a diplomatic mission was exile, but it might as well have been, and after it was over I was looking forward to a good long rest back home. I didn’t need to give anyone any reason to be pissed off with me. After all, I’d only just got back from the front lines, to find myself in the thick of it once more. Somehow or another, I’d managed to piss somebody off. Killing a member of the Basquiat in front of all the Ke-Han warriors in the middle of treaty talks, no matter how much I wanted to or how easy it would have been, wouldn’t look nice on my résumé.
So I managed not to kill Caius Greylace. But barely.
“We simply have to talk to him, don’t you agree?” Caius asked. And, for an incredibly small creature, I had