room. “You will doubtless have many uncomfortable nights ahead of you if that’s to be the case.”
“I’ll be just fine,” I said, because I sure as hell wasn’t about to admit that I didn’t know what we were going to do with him. “Not like your beds are all that comfortable to begin with.”
Josette would know what to do, I told myself. Fiacre too, if Josette could get him to calm down long enough to come and see the situation for himself. I was a mite worried about our leader in diplomatic proceedings, since he did a little too much bowing and scraping for my tastes, but Fiacre wasn’t half-bad when you got right down to it.
And we were definitely down to it.
“Say…” I said, not really sure where I was going to go from there, or even what I was doing besides preventing Temur from asking more questions I didn’t have the answers to.
There was a soft cough from the adjoining door and the familiar dull sound of wood sliding against wood, and without warning—which was how he liked it best—Caius Greylace arrived with impeccable timing so I didn’t have to say a thing. I was grateful for the little peacock, feathers and all.
He was wearing white, a color he hated, but with a bright red beneath it like fresh blood on snow. Probably making a statement. When wasn’t he? Trouble was, I couldn’t tell whether he was trying to be patriotic or just plain creepy. Maybe he thought they were one and the same.
“Oh, you’re awake!” Caius said, as if Lord Temur were a guest he’d invited for dinner and not a man he’d just spent the better part of the day torturing with visions and mind tricks and bastion-only-knew what else.
“Been awake for a while now,” I said, feeling uncomfortable again in the face of all this pretending that everything was normal. Everything wasn’t normal. Fiacre was going to string all of us up by our privates before we could get a word in edgeways—but, knowing Greylace, the little nut would probably enjoy it.
“That’s very good,” Caius said, slinking over to stand on the other side of my bed like a viper waiting to strike. “Perhaps then he can tell us what’s happened to our esteemed head of proceedings.”
“Fiacre?” I asked, confused again and liking it about as much as I always did. “Isn’t he with Josette?”
Caius shook his head, not looking away from Lord Temur, though I had to admit the warlord looked about as baffled as I was by the new revelation.
“She’s still looking,” Caius explained. “She wanted to come in and ask Lord Temur himself whether he had any thoughts, but the poor dear has a temper much the same as yours, Alcibiades, and I felt it best—well, I may have persuaded her just a touch, just the slightest touch—that it would be the best for everyone involved if I was the one to do the questioning.”
“Wait,” I said, “hold it there. You did what to Josette?”
“Please try and focus on the larger picture, my dear,” Caius said, clasping his hands like he was some kind of saint and I was the troublemaker.
Lord Temur closed his eyes again and moved to sit up. I stood the moment he shifted, one hand against my sword just in case he did something stupid. He didn’t seem like the type to make a move—too much prudence and all—but you never knew what a man was capable of after he’d been tortured. I saw Caius’s hand creep into the fall of one of his long sleeves, too, so I knew that he’d been thinking the same thing I had.
It turned out we were both wrong. Either Lord Temur was confident in his expectation of rescue, or he wasn’t the sort of warlord who carried around poisoned arrowheads or daggers, or anything else that clumsy.
“This is news to me, as well,” he said. “You say that your head of proceedings, Fiacre… He is nowhere to be found?”
“Not in his rooms, nor the meeting rooms,” Caius said. He hadn’t taken his hand out of his sleeve, even though I’d sat back down. “He wasn’t seen going into the city, and he wasn’t seen at breakfast. I happen to know that breakfast is his favorite meal, even without traditional Volstov fare, so I find it all quite unsettling news.”
I started to get a really bad feeling as Caius went on, listing all the places that Fiacre should have been but wasn’t.