“He killed my father.”
A profoundly uncomfortable silence followed, during which Matrick drained his bowl of wine in several long, loud gulps. When he’d finished he made a show of smacking his lips, stifling a belch, and asking, “Is there … um … more?”
At a gesture from the gorgon, the king’s wine was refilled. As the servant retreated Clay stole a glance at the trio of scabbards slung across the druin’s back. All three swords were of various lengths and sizes. The topmost he’d seen drawn on the Isle at Lindmoor. The blade had been short and wedge shaped, radiating heat and riddled with cracks that glowed like a fire blazing behind a black iron grill. The middle scabbard was long and narrow, very slightly curved. The last was longer still, white as sun-bleached bone. The pommel of the sword it sheathed was wrapped in ragged black cloth.
Clay hoped—though not optimistically—that he’d never have occasion to see the weapon inside.
Gabriel opened his mouth to speak, but the Duke, informed by druin prescience, cut him off.
“I know Vespian asked you to kill him.” Lastleaf’s white-furred ears were flat against the top of his head. “And I know you used Vellichor to do it. My father did not deserve such a mercy.”
Having your own sword pushed through your heart hardly seemed like a mercy to Clay, but he decided to try his wine instead of saying so. It was delicious: a heady blend of pepper, spice, and smoke. Unsurprising, since he’d never met a villain (or villainess, in this case) without impeccable taste in wine. It was a prerequisite, he figured, to being rich and evil.
“Where is it, by the way?” The druin narrowed his mismatched eyes. “Where is the priceless relic my craven father entrusted to a human?”
Clay winced. Lastleaf said the word human the way a human might say pile of shit.
Gabriel straightened. “Vellichor is hidden, beyond your reach.” A lie, of course, but telling the truth—that he’d traded the Archon’s fabled weapon to a crooked booker to pay off debts and satisfy his drug-addled, pacifist wife—wouldn’t have done Gabe any favours. The frontman made a point of transferring his attention from Lastleaf to the gorgon. “I came for Ganelon,” he said to her. “You and I had an agreement. Six hundred courtmarks—”
Moog choked on his wine, coughing a mouthful of it back into his bowl. “Courtmarks?” he sputtered. “You mean that’s gold in there? All of it?” He clasped Matrick’s shoulder. “Have you ever seen that much money in your entire life?”
“I had an actual castle,” Matrick reminded him.
Moog palmed his forehead. “Right, never mind.” He cleared his throat quietly and nodded at Gabriel. “Pardon the interruption.”
Clay, too, was stunned by Gabriel’s declaration. He’d assumed the bag was full of silver crowns, with plenty of copper and the odd courtmark lurking in the mix. But six hundred gold coins was a sizable fortune, especially considering Gabe had shown up at his doorstep with rags for clothes and holes in his boots.
“Six hundred courtmarks,” repeated Gabriel, leaning forward on his chair. “That’s twice what you paid the keepers to have him out of the Quarry, and a hundred more than I promised you. Give us Ganelon, and it’s all yours.”
Dinantra eyed the bag rapturously. “How generous,” she cooed, but then affected a crestfallen pout. “Alas, if you’d come just a few weeks sooner I’d have happily honored the bounds of our little arrangement. The good Duke, however, has suggested an amendment, and has made me an offer more tempting than gold.”
Clay peered over at Lastleaf, who was smugly swirling the bowl of wine in one long-fingered hand.
“And what offer is that?” Gabe asked flatly.
The gorgon’s ample chest swelled, forcing Clay to look at something, anything else, and he found himself examining her tail instead. There was a rattle on the end, each segment painted in fine detail with flowing Narmeeri script. He’d heard it said you could tell how often a snake had molted by the number of those segments, and so Clay found himself counting before the gorgon’s reply startled him out of reverie.
“I’m to be an Exarch of the New Dominion,” she said.
Moog blinked. “New Dominion? You mean the Old Dominion. There isn’t … he doesn’t … you can’t just—” The wizard blinked several more times in rapid succession. “Wait, I’m confused. I’ve confused myself.”
“You can’t be serious,” breathed Gabriel.
Lastleaf bared his teeth. “I can be. And I will soon have need of those used to wielding power.” When he turned his jagged smile on the gorgon it grew a fraction warmer, a glimpse of sunshine on a bleak winter’s day. “My Lady Dinantra, such as she is, will prove most suitable to the task, I think.”
So would Kallorek, Clay found himself thinking. The thug turned booker turned magnate would no doubt leap at the chance to become an Exarch, regardless of the circumstances. Although his ego will need a bigger pond to swim in, Clay mused.
“A New Dominion?” Matrick scoffed. He gestured dramatically with the bowl in his hand, but there was no wine left to spill. “And where do you suppose this magical kingdom of yours will spring up, huh? There isn’t …” He trailed off as the obvious occurred to him.
“Castia!” Moog exclaimed, having shrugged off his self-inflicted bewilderment.
“Castia,” said the druin, and then looked to Gabriel as though expecting him to speak next.
Which he did. “Then why destroy it?”
“For several reasons,” said Lastleaf. He stepped away from the curtains, his footfalls silent on the marble floor. As he crossed behind Dinantra the snakes on her head turned to track him, hissing softly.
When the druin drew near to Clay he felt his blood go hot and every hair on his body rise as if in warning. His nose was filled with the scent of crushed autumn leaves, of dry brush burning, and of something less pleasant, more sour, like rancid wine gone to vinegar. The silvered scale beneath Lastleaf’s coat whispered metallically as he passed to stand before a vast painting framed in polished rosewood, which he examined while he spoke.
“As I believe I mentioned at Lindmoor, the Horde is hungry, and that hunger must be sated. They need a victory. I need one, to bind them to me.”
“Didn’t you trounce the Republic army already?” Matrick pointed out.
Lastleaf glanced over, arching a brow. “That was too easy.” He said so without bravado, which Clay found unsettling. “I would hardly call it a battle at all. Oh, the Castians certainly made a show of coming out to face us. They formed up in their neat little squares. They waved their banners and blew their horns, and then they broke the moment the Horde hit them. Your vaunted mercenaries put up a better fight, at least, though they were far too few to matter. If not for them we might have swept the battlefield clean that day, and Castia would already be mine. Which is why, again, those who took refuge in the city cannot be spared.”
Gabriel wrung his hands. He looked as though he was about to be sick—or rather, like he’d already swallowed a mouthful of his own bile and was struggling to keep it down. “So this ‘Duchy of Endland’ you spoke of at the council …”
“Nonsense, obviously.” Lastleaf returned his gaze to the artwork before him, which Clay only now realized depicted the fall of Kaladar, the great and glorious capital of the Old Dominion. The city—a mountain of fine arches and reaching white spires—was on fire, shrouded in smoke, surrounded on all sides by a shadowy sea of clambering beasts. “If the courts suspected I had plans to revive the Dominion, they would have no choice but to unite against me. Instead, they believe I aspire to join them.” He chuckled into his bowl as he raised it, drinking deep.
Matrick sighed and rubbed at his whiskered jowls. “And you don’t think wiping Castia off the map will cast any doubt on your credibility with the courts? If I were—”