her arm around Caeb’s neck, willing him to stay in place. “My cat loves this woman more than he does me. If you hurt her, he will tear you apart—and I will not stop him.”
“You would defend this coward? Then your hair might be white as snow, but your blood is yellow as piss.” Disgust and rage filled Uland’s expression as he jerked back out of Aerax’s grasp, then looked to Lizzan again, voice rising. “Never should anyone defend a coward who ran away to hide while my friends were slaughtered!”
Lizzan hadn’t run away. She hadn’t hidden. If she had, she would not still see her father and soldiers torn apart before her eyes. She would not still feel the hot splash of their blood. She would not still hear their screaming and the wraiths’ screeching blended into one.
And she had marched in here with her gut on fire, ready to loose arrows from her tongue. Now the burning in her throat made ash of every volley that she would have sent.
But she’d expected to find councilors, not soldiers. And Uland had been her friend once, too—but that friendship was another casualty of that horrifying night.
“Captain Uland, stand down.” That firm warning came from Degg the Red. “She is nothing to you.”
As if in response to that, Uland spat at Lizzan’s feet. Caeb growled, showing not just his saberlike fangs but his sharp front teeth, and Lizzan buried her fingers more deeply in his ruff.
“Do that again, Captain,” Aerax said quietly, “and I will feed you to him, limb by limb.”
Uland was more of a fool than she knew. Instead of backing down, Uland turned his furious gaze to Aerax—as if he believed Aerax’s words were a toothless threat. “It is said you helped her away that night.”
“So I did.”
“Captain Uland, recall the law,” was Lady Junica’s sharp reminder. “Her name is struck from the books. You are speaking of someone who does not exist.”
Visible was the battle that raged through Uland then, as he stared at Lizzan with poisonous hatred—before turning it on the target who did exist before him.
“The feral prince has been defanged and declawed, but he is still led around by his cock,” he hissed to Aerax. “So until he is depricked, he will never be a man of Koth.”
Never a man of Koth? Aerax had been born one, as surely as Uland had been. And if Aerax were led by his cock, then two years now he would have been with her.
Lizzan shook her head, the frozen tension easing from her shoulders. She had been stunned by Uland’s attack, but never would she let Aerax fight this battle for her.
“What good is a prince with no prick?” Lizzan asked Uland, and won a small victory when his wrathful gaze moved to her face and lingered on the scars—the evidence that she had not hidden away. “If a prince could not beget snow-haired heirs, he would only be as useful as a soldier without a brain. And yet Koth seems to have at least one of those, and given him the rank of captain.”
A furious breath whistled through Uland’s gritted teeth. He opened his mouth.
“Uland!” Lady Junica snapped. “You do not see her and do not hear her. Now take your seat.”
Stiffly, he did. And so would Lizzan, it seemed—though not near Uland. After bidding Caeb to go with the Parsathean girl, Aerax led Lizzan farther down the table. She had been aware of the others in the room, how they had all surged to their feet when Uland had lunged for her and then tensely waited. Now she observed them more closely. During the confrontation, two Parsathean warriors had angled their bodies as if to shield the young men behind them from any violence that might erupt. One of the youths must be the nameless monk—though his chinless beard suggested that the monk was not as young as the pale-eyed boy beside him. No doubt that boy was the prince who was everything Aerax wasn’t.
She supposed that meant the prince was courteous and well-mannered, for there was nothing else that Aerax wasn’t. In all other ways, Aerax was everything. Koth claimed to produce the finest of all things; in Aerax, it had truly created the finest of all men. With the finest of all backsides. So tight it was as he prowled ahead of her, his muscles thick and supple.
Oh, and drunken lust would not do at all. She was here . . . for