was here. That was good. Niko would make breakfast, because Mah had always told him it was the polite thing to do for guests, even if one despised their guest, and then Vasili would take Adamo and leave. And Niko would never have to see him again.
He cut the stale end off the bread, found the middle part fresh, and toasted a few slices on the stove, then set the kettle onto the stovetop to boil. All very normal. Even if having Vasili inside his cottage was far from normal.
He’d rebuilt every wall and window and nook and crevice with his own hands, and there was much still to do, but it was finally a place he could call home. Vasili was the first soul he’d let step foot inside.
“I lost the book.”
Niko glanced up. “The one you went into a burning library for?”
Vasili stepped from the courtyard into the kitchen, and all at once, the room shrank around his presence. “I went in there to save all the pertinent books.” He scanned the shelves, reading the hand-scrawled labels on the jars for herbs and flour. “That was the last.” Vasili regarded the stove, with its burbling kettle and toast rack. The last time they’d shared anything nearly as domestic as this, Julian had been between them. Now, there was no Julian to distract. Just a whole lot of judgmental Vasili. “I dropped it in the grass. It’s probably still there.”
If he went back to that palace, the guards would kill him. They’d made that clear. But it wasn’t Niko’s place to advise a prince.
He waited, but when Vasili didn’t offer up any further information, his mind turned to that moment after falling from the roof when Vasili had tried to reach the book and the palace guards had turned on him. “Amir controls the guards?”
Vasili blinked, leaned back against the small countertop, and folded his arms. Considering they’d both fallen from a palace window and almost been killed, he didn’t seem hurt or even bruised.
Vasili raised an eyebrow, and Niko averted his gaze. “I was just checking you weren’t hurt.”
“His influence began slowly,” he said, ignoring Niko’s comment.
Niko steered his attention from wandering up the length of Vasili and gathered the toast instead. He tossed the pieces onto two plates, then hastily strained some tea in cups. When he handed Vasili’s out and received a soft thank-you, he wondered if he’d fallen from the palace roof and struck his head a lot harder than he’d first thought. This softer, bedraggled Vasili was too much like the Vasili from the farmhouse—the Vasili Niko had savagely kissed in a starlit field.
“After what he saw in Talos,” Vasili said, “Amir must have realized the truth in our mother’s tales and began rethinking them. Before, when he was younger—and not on spice—his mind was sharper.”
Niko wrapped his fingers around the hot cup. He’d tried not to think of Amir since leaving the palace. Vasili didn’t know the details of what had happened between Niko, Julian, and Amir, but the prince could guess from the state of Julian’s body, the fiend’s remains, and from whatever Amir had probably boasted of. It was enough. Niko had no wish to mention the fragments he remembered—like that terrible moment he’d ended the life of the lost soldier nobody had saved. He had enough horrors in his head without inviting those back in.
“He found ancient texts in a sealed-off section of the library,” Vasili continued, his crisp, royal voice loud in the small kitchen. “Books even I didn’t know existed. Books regarding the Caville sorcerers, those tied to the crown. And he began experimenting with the flame.”
Niko met Vasili’s gaze. The prince stared back, the ramifications too big a thing to convey with words alone. The small hairs on the back of Niko’s neck rose. As much as Amir was a dangerous, spice-addled prick, if he managed to wield real power, he’d be as terrifying as his father. Lady Maria had mentioned the same. And gods, he’d left her there with a prince high on a power he barely understood.
“He used whores at first,” the prince nonchalantly continued. “Placed his own blood in their wine.”
“He spiked his doulos’ wine with blood?” Was there no limit to how low Amir would stoop?
“You’re surprised?” Vasili’s brows rose.
“I wish I was.” Amir had been fond of spice. Consuming it, snorting it, forcing it on others. Now he’d found a new substance to torture his pets with.
“It changed them like it did