snarled, ready to fling the rock-hard pillow at his head if necessary, but he was already skipping out of the room.
“Ten minutes!” he cooed back at me, like a songbird.
I rubbed the back of my neck, which was stiff and sore, and thought about whether or not I could barricade the adjoining door at night with what meager furnishing my room’d been allotted.
Anyway, that was how I’d wound up in a grand council—and I’d never seen a more mismatched, ill-suited group of surly and impassive faces all crammed together into the same room—listening to the Emperor give some speech about how his brother was a traitor and in some cases you had to cut off your own right hand for the greater good of the rest, should it fall to rot. Josette looked about ready to fall to rot herself, like she’d still have been asleep if it had been up to her, and she kept twiddling at the fancy Ke-Han hair ornament that she’d pinned up her curls with. Marius, seated next to her, seemed wide-awake, but he was frowning down at the table like he wanted it to be the Emperor.
I wasn’t the only one who didn’t like what I was hearing, then.
Sure, it was the Emperor’s own brother, and he probably knew the situation better than I could from the outside. But the point remained—and here was what stuck in my throat—that I just wasn’t ready to sit back and eat everything he fed me. There was something about the way he was talking, something about the way he held himself, that stank.
Even Caius, crooked in the head as he was, could tell that the second prince wasn’t the sort of man who would just up and betray his brother out of the blue. He’d been blushing the other day at the banquet, just because he’d managed to pronounce a few Volstov words right. And it’d been his bodyguard, not he, himself, who’d gone for it when Caius got too close.
The sort of man who wasn’t on the defensive in the slightest wasn’t the sort who was plotting something.
In short, the Emperor was selling—and pretty hard, too—but I wasn’t buying. Not yet.
Then I thought I caught my name, which made me snap to attention quick as anything—though part of that was to do with the elbow Greylace had thrown into my side. He was a sharp little lizard, and I was going to pay him back for that. Just as soon as I figured out what was going on.
One of the red-faced lords seated next to the Emperor was speaking. He looked like a kettle ready to whistle, trembling slightly with the force of his words. Or maybe it was just his reaction to the Emperor, who was looking at him with intent interest. I was real glad that the Emperor’d never had cause to look at me like that, but I was even more glad that I wasn’t the man next to him, who seemed to be experiencing his own personal rainstorm of spittle.
“Not that I wish to cast aspersions,” he went on. “I merely wanted to bring it up as a matter of course so that we might dismiss the possibility up front and get along with our business.”
I was still lost. Casimiro snorted, his hands folded against the table. Josette was staring daggers at me, and Greylace was sitting still as a little doll, neat and unhelpful as you please.
That was just great.
Fiacre opened his mouth to speak, then seemed to think the better of it and turned to me.
“General Alcibiades, I imagine, can explain himself quite capably.”
Just as I was thinking that I might have to toss pride aside for sense—and kick myself for it later—Josette shifted in her seat and sat up straight.
“This is all so silly,” she began, drawing a fan out of her sleeve as though she was embarrassed, which was about the most ridiculous thing I could imagine, since I was pretty sure Josette hadn’t been embarrassed since the day she was born. “I’m afraid it’s my fault, only General Alcibiades is too much the gentleman to place the blame on a woman. The fact of the matter is we were all up quite late together, the three of us, discussing what a lovely reception we’d been given in your honored palace. I quite lost track of the time, so that it was well past midnight when I sent him and Caius Greylace back to their rooms.”