and there was sweat trickling down the back of my neck, but I felt good. Not only that, I realized that although I’d sheathed dauda-dagr, I hadn’t dropped my shield altogether when Stefan stopped pressing me; it had already become instinctive to keep a faint spark kindled in my thoughts.
Stefan opened his eyes and smiled at me. “Well done. You have been practicing.”
“Yep.”
As before, he went into the kitchen to pour a couple of glasses of water. I wandered over to the display case with his father’s ceremonial shield, gazing at the dark-haired knight kneeling before his queen, wondering about the story behind it. Stefan returned to hand me a glass of water without comment.
“Thanks,” I said to him. “I really needed this today.” I smiled wryly, remembering the bond between us. “But then you probably knew that, didn’t you?”
He inclined his head in acknowledgment. “I sensed your unrest.”
“My best friend, Jen—Jennifer Cassopolis, you met her the other day—her older sister’s been out at the House of Shadows for eight years.” I took a drink of water. “This morning, Jen got an invitation to her sister’s rising.”
“I see.”
I shook my head. “No, see, here’s the thing. I was out there last week. There was an, um, altercation. Under the terms of Lady Eris’s decree, I had a legitimate chance to take down the vampire who’s turning Jen’s sister. And I didn’t do it.” My temper rose like the proverbial phoenix from the ashes of my temporary sense of calm, my anger again directed at my own hesitation. “I mean, I didn’t know at the time that he was turning her. But I didn’t fucking do it, Stefan.”
Stefan pointed at the couch. “Sit.”
I sat.
He sat in a chair opposite me. “Do you think it would have made a difference?”
“Well . . . yeah. Obviously.”
Stefan gave me a look that was hard to describe—rueful, compassionate, maybe a little patronizing without meaning to be. The kind of look that spanned a six-hundred-year gap’s worth of life experience. “Your friend’s sister made her choice years ago, Daisy. Either she would have found another sponsor or wasted away trying.”
“Maybe.” I shrugged. “Okay, probably. But we’ll never know for sure, will we?”
“No.”
I have to say, I appreciated the fact that Stefan didn’t mince words. He turned his head to gaze out the window, and we sat for a moment without speaking. I contemplated the clean, crisp, strongly drawn lines of his profile, his high, rugged cheekbones. I could see the resemblance to the kneeling knight on the shield.
He looked back at me, his pupils steady. “At least she had the luxury of making a choice, no matter how unwise or uninformed.”
“You had no idea that you would become . . . Outcast?” I asked softly. I mean, I assumed it, but I didn’t really know for sure.
“No one does.” Tilting his head, Stefan Ludovic regarded the ceiling. “I loved my father,” he said, apropos of nothing. “I revered and admired him above all men, and I do believe he was worthy of my regard. It was a golden age in the history of Bohemia—indeed, in the history of Europe—and my father was a nobleman in every sense of the word—a just and compassionate ruler, a highly educated and visionary thinker, a valiant knight. But he wed a weak-willed woman.”
I didn’t say anything.
“It was not his fault.” Stefan glanced at me once, then looked away again. “In those days, the aristocracy did not wed for love. It was a union of political expedience. But while my father was away on one of King Charles’s campaigns, she allowed my uncle to seduce her. And upon my father’s return, my uncle, his own brother, poisoned him.”
I swallowed. “Um, isn’t that the plot of—”
“Yes,” he said before I could finish. “It is very like it. But although I was my father’s only son, I was no Hamlet. I was a man grown and a knight in my own right, a Knight of the Cross with the Red Star. I was a member of a branch of the order affiliated with a hospital in Prague that specialized in occult afflictions. When my father’s spirit appeared to me in a dream, crying out for vengeance, I knew it was a true vision.”
I set my glass of water down carefully on a marble coaster, trying not to let it clink. “I see.”
“My uncle was everything my father was not,” Stefan continued, still not looking at me. “Craven, ambitious, untruthful. But he could be