“Then these higher powers must favor you, Your Grace, for everything has worked out as you intended.” His rheumy eyes glinted. “Almost, at any rate.”
Keris’s skin prickled and crawled with tension. No… not tension, fear. Serin had something up his sleeve. Something that was going to hurt. His mind raced over what it could be, because he’d ensured his family was under guard, with the men hand-selected by Dax. That his little sister Sara had been hidden out of harm’s reach. Except he knew this creature had his ways, for Keris had watched him destroy people all his life. He glanced to Dax. “Leave us.”
The man hesitated, watching Serin as most people would a poisonous snake. “Your Grace…”
“It’s fine.” Even as Keris said the words, he slipped a knife from his boot, resting it across his lap. “You’re not going to try to kill me, are you, Magpie?”
Serin’s jaw tightened, ever hateful of that moniker. “No, Your Majesty. I have greater ambitions than your death.”
Keris’s blood ran cold, sweat rolling down his spine as Dax left the room. “Enough with the games, Serin. My plan is to give you a swift death via the headsman, but if you continue to test my patience, I may have to resort to my original intention, which was to nail your feet to the dirt in the garden below and then give my aunts several buckets of rocks. They dislike you even more than I do.”
The Magpie only leaned back in his chair and laughed. “I neither feel nor fear pain, Your Grace. Besides, I knew in coming here that I was walking toward my death.”
“Then why didn’t you run? You of all people have the wherewithal to escape and stay hidden.”
Serin rubbed at the grey stubble of his chin, flakes of dry skin falling like snow to join the collection dusting his robe. “True, but it is hard to give up power once one has grown used to it, and while many might wish to live out their last years in peace, I am not one of them. Peace has never given me any pleasure, and as such, I will always walk the opposite direction of such a fate. Which is why I walked toward you.”
Keris’s thoughts raced, trying to predict the man’s intent. Trying to predict his plans. But his mind came up empty of anything but rising panic.
“Your father was the perfect master in that he was the perfect pawn,” Serin continued. “In all but one thing: his weakness for your mother. And her spawn.” He spit on the floor. “Despite all my protests that you both would be the death of him, he favored you and Lara. Saw your failings as merits, and even after your sister showed her true colors, he refused to turn on you.”
“I watched my father strangle my mother.” Keris couldn’t keep the anger from his voice. “So I think he did not care for her any more than he cared for Lara. Or for me.”
Serin giggled, a strange, insane sound that made Keris recoil. “There is no denying that your father was a flawed and violent man, but your mother is the only woman he ever loved. It was not her defiance in going after Lara that drove him to kill her, but the things she said when he caught up to her. The revelation of her true feelings for His Grace, which were not at all what he’d believed. How swiftly love turns to hate in the face of betrayal. A feeling I suspect Zarrah Anaphora is deeply familiar with.”
Keris couldn’t breathe.
“Did you really think you could keep a secret like that from me, Your Grace?” Serin rested his elbows on the desk. “I won’t belabor the countless little clues, not the least of which was a willingness to play the game you’d run away from all your pathetic life. I knew there was something between the two of you, but without proof, your father wouldn’t hear it. I thought the whore in Nerastis would yield something, but all she could tell me was that you wouldn’t touch her and that you’d disappear into the night, returning hours later smelling of lilac. She believed you were visiting a lover, and an innkeeper swore a man of your description rented one of his rooms in the company of a Valcottan woman. Which was compelling, but still not good enough for your father.”
The world around Keris pulsed in and out of focus, but the cursed monster wasn’t through.
“I came to realize that nothing short of catching you in the act—which I suspect our dear Otis did—would damn you in your father’s eyes. That even him catching you in Zarrah’s bed might not be enough, for he relished your defiance, ever believing that it would one day turn you to the purpose he envisioned for you. I saw that I was destined to watch you ascend and lose my power to your idealism, and so I resolved to render you powerless in the one way that mattered most.”
Kill him! Silence him! Keris’s grip on his knife tightened, because he could not let this get out. Could not allow Serin to voice the truth—not because it would damn him.
But because it would damn Zarrah.
He lunged across the table, knife slicing toward the Magpie’s throat, but then Serin’s words caused him to freeze. “If you kill me, you kill her, too. If I die, my flock has orders to release the details of your sordid little affair.”
Shit shit shit. Keris let go of the front of Serin’s robes. “What do you want?”
The Magpie let out a strange giggle. “My flock whispered your speech into my ears, Keris. Told me that you swore to protect those who need protecting and to bring the villains who would prey upon them to justice.” Serin’s laughter turned wild, absolutely devoid of sanity. “If you wanted to protect Zarrah, you should have taken her far, far away, but instead, you sent her back into the arms of the greatest villain I’ve ever known.”
Dearest God, what have I done?
“For all his faults, your father loved you. Protected you. And I think even if I were to reveal this truth to the people, they’d forgive you, Keris, because they want what you’ve promised. But Petra? Petra does not love. Petra does not feel. And Petra and I have a rapport that goes back all those years ago to when she delivered word to my flock that her sister, the true and rightful heir to Valcotta, was staying, virtually unprotected, at a villa near the border. I, in turn, whispered that information into the ears of your father.”
His breath caught, horror turning his veins to ice. The Empress had arranged the murder of her own sister. Zarrah’s mother.
“To twist the knife deeper, Petra took her niece and raised her in defiance of everything her mother believed in. Taught her to revel in violence and vengeance and war, not the peace her mother sought.” He smirked. “Just what do you think Petra will do to Zarrah when she discovers that her niece was not only the lover of her mortal enemy, but that Zarrah ruined her one chance to destroy Maridrina? Because if I meet my end, Petra will find out that Zarrah betrayed her plans. I promise you that. My flock is loyal only to me.”
Panic roared through Keris’s veins, everything too bright, too loud. “Name your price, Serin. What do you want?”