“You have no authority outside l’Empire Céleste. You no longer possess even the delusion of being the princess’s protector. Because Her Highness values your sagging hide, I will tolerate your presence, but only so long as you do not interfere with my duties. If you become an impediment, or persist in being an embarrassment, I will remove you.”
Jean-Claude considered Vincent’s hands—finely muscled, callused, and scarred—and his high collar bedecked with dueling trophies, jeweled pins in the shape of crossed swords. Le roi had made dueling illegal for Sanguinaire—saintborn blood was sacred—but it remained a popular method of suicide amongst clayborn nobles and military officers. This created a small but lucrative market for men like Vincent, who were good at dispatching easily provoked young men at the behest of older, wealthier ones.
Jean-Claude was not proud to admit that he had once been one of those young hotheads, nor was he fool enough to deny it. Even now he was tempted to taunt Vincent into violence—teach the whelp a lesson—but serving Isabelle required temperance. Even so, Jean-Claude could not bring himself to cultivate the man’s goodwill.
Jean-Claude rubbed his face and worked his jaw. “Your proposition is noted. Now, if you will kindly lend me your boot, I need something in which to vomit.”
“Drunken sot.”
“Better than being des Zephyrs’s lickspittle. Or was it his cock you sucked to get this post?”
“Cur!” Vincent whipped the white glove from his belt and slapped Jean-Claude across the face.
Jean-Claude reeled, stung more in pride than in flesh. His anger flared up, and it felt good. Oh how he yearned to take this runt to pieces! Only the weight of experience held him in check, not the ache of old knees, surely. Never play the other man’s game. Vincent was good, and Jean-Claude had never been much of a fencer. A fighter, yes—give him a tavern full of crockery or a pigsty knee-deep in mud and he’d teach this pup new ways to bleed—but he was no duelist, to be hemmed in by rules or honor.
Jean-Claude spat on the deck. The gobbet was pink with blood from his split lip. “I am sure that you will stand fast if one of Isabelle’s enemies is polite enough to challenge her to a duel.”
Vincent curled his lip in contempt, and he dropped the glove at Jean-Claude’s feet. “Coward. Until you have the balls to pick that up, stay away from the princess. She is my first priority, and I will brook no meddling from you.” He turned and climbed through the hatch.
Jean-Claude let him go. Isabelle is my only priority. He walked in circles a few times to shed the gut-churning energy of constrained anger. He plucked the gage from the deck between thumb and forefinger. He considered using it to wipe his arse next time he went to the head and then flinging it at Vincent’s feet, but that would likely be an insult too far. He couldn’t get rid of Vincent, so he’d have to use him instead. That would be much more satisfying. He squeezed between the cannons and threw the glove out a gun port. It whisked away in the wind.
And yet there was something about what Vincent had said, not what he was talking about, but his actual words. She is my first priority.
And that was what was wrong with this whole cursed scenario. Priorities. If Jean-Claude had been an evil bastard attempting to abrogate Príncipe Julio’s marriage and faced with a bride and a spare, he would have killed the lightly guarded spare first. It would have been less work that way. Presumably the threat against Sonya had been anticipated from the beginning, and she had been guarded, however ineffectively, but it was not until after her death that all this extra attention had fallen on Isabelle. If the evil bastard had done things the other way around, Jean-Claude might have been blindsided. There would have been no second line of defense.
That thought made Jean-Claude even queasier than the skyship’s heaving. But for his notable failure to protect her friend Marie, Jean-Claude had always managed to keep Isabelle one step ahead of intrigue and danger, but this betrothal had hit him like a broadside from the fog. No one had even whispered of it on the l’?le des Zephyrs before Kantelvar arrived.
He commanded his rubbery legs to obey and half-dragged himself up the ladder with a mind toward having a word or three with the boatswain—if the man was any good at his job, he’d hear every rumor and muttering aboard ship—but he had to divert into the ship’s hold to avoid being plowed under by a bounding gang of sailors en route to the turvy sails. Their simian acrobatics made him dizzy, so he slumped down on a crate—one of Isabelle’s two meager trunks, actually—and covered his eyes to make the world stop spinning.
When he opened them again, he saw his face staring back at him, gray and pasty, from the surface of a full-length mirror. The cloth that had been tied over its face had been pushed to the side, bunched up in the ropes that held it in place. He grabbed the edge to pull it back into place so he wouldn’t have to look at himself, but it had been jammed between the rope and the frame with force and would not be casually dislodged.
Grumbling, he leaned in to make a better go of straightening the cloth. Who was down here undressing the cargo in the first place? Not the Aragothic sailors, that was certain. They were very cautious about mirrors and the constant threat of sorcerous meddling they represented.
At last, Jean-Claude’s conscious awareness caught up with what his back brain was trying to tell him. This mirror had no scores or cracks. He did not recognize its frame. And the cover had been pushed aside …
Jean-Claude’s legs arrived at the frightful conclusion an instant before his brain. He bolted into the ladder well. The mirror had been planted in Isabelle’s luggage and a Glasswalker had come through it, and there was only one possible reason for that: Príncipe Julio’s last bride had been assassinated, and now a killer had come for Isabelle.
Jean-Claude launched himself up the ladder, scattering a troop of off-duty marines crowding his path. “Make way. Make way!” He erupted onto the main deck and dashed to the quarterdeck, but Isabelle was gone. Jean-Claude’s heart rattled as if kicked by a frantic rabbit, but he kept a tight hold on its scruff.
He seized a young crewman by the shirt. “?Dónde está la princesa?”
The young man pointed down. Jean-Claude dropped through the nearest hatch, but that led to a gun deck. She wasn’t in the hold. She couldn’t just vanish! The sound of female voices caught his ear. He followed the sound through a narrow doorway into the keel run, a cramped tunnel of a room that extended most of the length of the ship. The already tight space was very nearly filled by the cylindrical steel-clad shaft of the aetherkeel. Flickers of sickly light, like green lightning, flashed behind glassed-in portholes in the barrel of the beast, and the whole thing throbbed from one end to the other with a buzz like a swarm of locusts trying to find a way out.