Grave Destiny (Alex Craft, #6) - Kalayna Price Page 0,12

not working for the shadow court, you will not report back what you learn. We still wish to hire you.”

“No,” Falin said.

“Why not?” I asked, looking between them. “Nothing I do can influence the testimony of a shade. It doesn’t matter who hires me. Shades are incapable of deception. They have no will. They are just memories.”

“Your line of questioning could be biased,” Falin said.

Which was the opening I needed. “What if both winter and shadow hired me equally?”

“How could it ever be equal? You are apparently betrothed to him.” Falin spat the words like they’d rotted between forming and being spoken. Yeah . . . That was going to be a fun conversation later.

“And she is a member of your court, but I can trust her to be impartial.” The words were a dig, as if Dugan, who barely knew me, trusted me more than Falin. They were cleverly worded too—he’d said he could trust me, not that he did trust me to be impartial.

Of course, that trust was unwarranted on a personal level—I had no true connection or loyalty to Dugan or the shadow court, but they were justified professionally. As I’d said, shades couldn’t lie, and regardless of whether one or both courts hired me, I’d look for the truth. Falin knew me well enough to know as much.

“If you trust her impartiality, then why insist shadow be the court to hire her?”

Muscles above Dugan’s jaw bulged, but when he spoke, his voice was a carefully controlled neutral. “Because we wish to be kept apprised of the situation.” Dugan leaned back in his chair. “When I came here, I assumed our fae had been taken against his will, murdered, and dumped in winter territory. I am not yet convinced that is an unlikely scenario. I know the fae in question, and I can think of no reason he would have to enter winter, let alone attempt to assassinate a winter noble. But whether he entered on his own or was taken against his will, we need to know the players involved. Was this an isolated grudge? Or is a conspiracy at hand? Either way, we need proof that our court was not behind it, and proof of who is if it is a conspiracy.”

“You think you are being set up?” I asked.

Dugan cocked his head to the side, and I thought he was considering my words until I realized he was simply trying to parse out my phrasing. Dugan was a very old fae who didn’t interact with the human realm often. That was hard to remember when looking at a face that appeared not much older than my own.

“I mean that you think someone might be trying to create tension between shadow and winter,” I clarified, and Dugan nodded.

“The king was . . . very displeased to hear of the death. The knowledge added stress he did not need.”

I considered that statement. Fae rarely gave an entire answer to a question, and if I read between the lines, I could guess that it wasn’t just fear that the Winter Queen would declare war that had Dugan in my office. There was a risk that the Shadow King might have felt forced to take action against winter if his man had been kidnapped and killed.

“When I asked you earlier if you had a suspect, you said possibly. Who were you thinking about?” I asked.

Beside me, Falin huffed under his breath. “How can he have a suspect if he didn’t even know the circumstances of the murder? His fae is the suspect.”

Dugan scowled at him, but all he said was, “The inner courts have very little reason to quarrel with the seasonal courts.”

And that was what I meant by not fully answering a question.

From what I understood of Faerie’s hierarchy, the seasonal courts spent the year waxing and waning in power, but light and shadow, having no direct doors to the mortal realm, were outside such struggles. Which would explain why the seasonal courts and the courts of light and shadow rarely found points of contention. The high court would be one of the inner courts as well, but considering I couldn’t find easy access to enter the high court, or any members of the high court, it didn’t seem like the citizens of the high court interacted with the rest of Faerie, so I guessed he didn’t suspect anyone from that court. That left the court of light. I knew only one fae with ties to the