“No—I’m a viscount.”
After a short pause, everyone burst out laughing. “All right, all right, here, take my trousers! Take them. What do I need trousers for? I’ve already lost all my dignity.”
“Who needs dignity when you have coin?” Royce tossed him a stack of silver pieces topped with a gold.
Albert caught them as if he were a practiced juggler. Standing naked before the fire, he appraised the coins with a smile. “I’m noble once more!”
“Wrap this around you.” Gwen handed him the blanket. “We’ve seen enough of your nobility for one day.”
She gathered up the rest of his clothes and headed out.
Albert draped himself in the soft wool and sat in a chair as close to the hearth as he could get without setting himself on fire. Rubbing the coins between his fingers, he said, “Silver and gold are so pretty. It’s a shame you have to trade them away.”
“And these won’t last.” Royce sighed, then faced Albert. “At the rate we’ve been taking jobs, and the small purses, things are getting tight. We need something that pays more.”
“Actually, I have another job ready to go. This one is worth—get this—twenty gold tenents plus expenses. Which is good because it’s way down in southern Maranon.”
Royce and Hadrian sat up.
“That was fast,” Hadrian said. “You don’t normally work that hard.”
“True, but this one fell into our laps.” A drop of water slipped down Albert’s face, and he paused to scrub the wet from his hair with a corner of the blanket. “Sounds incredibly easy, too.”
“You’re not qualified to judge, Albert,” Royce said.
“Ah, but this one is. They don’t even want you to do anything.”
Royce leaned forward and eyed the viscount. “Who pays twenty yellow for nothing? What’s the job?”
“It seems that someone is trying to kill Lady Nysa Dulgath.”
“We aren’t guards for hire.”
“Oh, she has guards. Lady Dulgath is a countess and will soon be the ruler of a tiny province in the southwest corner of Maranon once she pledges fealty to King Vincent. Apparently her father, the Earl Beadle Dulgath, recently passed, and she’s his only child.”
“Was he murdered?” Royce asked.
“No. Old age. The fellow was ancient, nearly sixty. But someone has it out for his daughter. From what I’ve been told, there’ve been three attempts on her life in the last month. After those failures, they want a professional. That’s where you come in.” Albert looked squarely at Royce.
“I wouldn’t call assassinating a countess nothing. Besides, you know how he gets about those kinds of jobs.” Royce gestured toward Hadrian.
Albert waved a hand. “No, you misunderstand. You’re not being hired to kill her. Rumors say they’ve already hired someone.”
Royce shook his head. “Unless they went cheap, the hired hand is a bucketman for the Black Diamond. The BD and I have an understanding not to interfere with each other.”
“I remember,” Albert said. “But they don’t want you to catch the killer. Your job is to assess the situation and inform Sheriff Knox how you would go about killing Lady Dulgath so he can formulate plans to prevent it.”
“Why me?”
Albert smiled. “I let it slip that you used to be an assassin for the Black Diamond.”
Royce glared.
“No one in Maranon cares about what you’ve done elsewhere. These are nobles we’re talking about. Morality works on a sliding scale for them. They’re excited to have someone with experience.”
“Sounds…” Hadrian began and searched for the word.
“Suspicious,” Royce provided.
“I was thinking odd,” Hadrian said. “But yeah. It’s strange. Is it possible this sheriff is the one who wants her dead?”
“Unlikely. I’m not certain he even knows about this. He’s not the one who hired us. And I don’t think this client is in the habit of assassinating heads of state.”
“And who has? Hired us that is.”
Albert hesitated a moment, then said, “The Church of Nyphron.”
Chapter Two
The Artist
Sherwood Stow held his paintbrush with unconscious effort as he stared at Lady Nysa Dulgath. The woman stood ten feet away, one hand poised over her stomach and the other at her side, clasping a pair of riding gloves as if she were about to race off on a hunt. She stood divinely straight, chin high and level so the dangling pearl earrings hung in precise balance. Her hair was up, braided, coiled, and wreathed her head like a royal diadem. She wore an exquisite gold silk-brocade dress with billowing sleeves, and around her shoulders a grinning-faced fox stole curled, as if it, too, were delighted to be so near this magnificent woman. While the lady’s gaze was regal in its elevated, distant focus, Sherwood’s only regret was she wasn’t looking at him. She was, in fact, staring over his head at the chandelier that hung at the center of her private study.
The room was small by Castle Dulgath standards. Intimate was how Sherwood thought of it, like a dressing room or a parlor used for courting. Even more so since parlors came staffed with chaperones, and they were the only two present in the study.
“Why don’t you look at me?” Sherwood asked.
“Is that a requirement?” the lady replied, her eyes fixed on the chandelier. Her lips held fast to an indifferent near-smile, the obligatory face of state. Usually he appreciated subjects who could maintain a certain statuesque quality while he painted, but she took the request to an extreme. Nysa wasn’t posing for him; she was hiding.
“Let’s say it’s a request.”
“Request denied.” The words were as sweetly neutral as her lips, neither warm enough to suggest familiarity nor cold enough to imply displeasure.
I can’t even tell if she’s breathing.
Nysa was altogether too stiff. This, of course, was the image she wished to portray, but Sherwood Stow wasn’t interested in painting the soon-to-be Countess of Dulgath. He was after the woman. And while he never spoke the name publicly, in his mind he always thought of her as Nysa—never Lady Dulgath.
The Dulgath line was an edifice, a monument, a dust-covered dynasty of renown. Nysa was a woman in her early twenties—he didn’t know how early, difficult to tell because her body possessed a youthful vigor, but her eyes were ancient. A beautiful and mysterious being of light, but her movements exposed the charade. Too graceful. Sherwood had known many women—ladies, princesses, even queens—but none possessed a fraction of her poise and elegance. Nysa was a spiraling leaf caught by a breeze, and if she landed on the surface of a placid lake she’d leave no ripple.
“Mister Stow, isn’t it usually customary when painting to actually bring the brush to the canvas?” she said to the chandelier. “You’ve stood there for twenty minutes mixing paint and holding that bristled stick aloft, but never once have you employed it.”
“How can you tell while looking at the chandelier?”
“Seeing and looking are unrelated. You, of all people, should know that.”
Sherwood nodded and once more added walnut oil to the thickening umber. His old master, Yardley, was no doubt heaving in his grave. Yardley had always insisted on working with egg tempera, but Sherwood preferred oil. Not only did it enable him to give a translucent depth in his portraits, but its slow drying time granted him the luxury to do…well…everything.
“Yes, indeed, and since you know that as well, you understand the necessity for my delay and the importance of going slow.”
“Slow doesn’t properly define you, Mister Stow. A bead of honey in winter is slow. It pours, as if with great reluctance, but it does pour. You, Mister Stow, are not a drizzle of honey. You’re a rock.”
“Pity. I do so like honey. Perhaps you could reconsider your assessment?”
“A rock, I say. A vast block of granite, immobile and resolute in your refusal to budge.”