“Another Angoulême party that I’m not invited to?” Tristan asked.
“No.” Ana?s flung herself with force into the chair next to me, then wrenched off the heeled shoes she wore and threw them across the room. “I’m seducing you.”
“I see. In that case, carry on.” A faint smile formed on Tristan’s face, and I fought the urge to kick him under the table.
Ana?s needed no defenders. “Your Highness,” she said, “if you are under the mistaken impression that I can’t beat you bloody wearing skirts and heels, I’d be happy to demonstrate otherwise.”
“No need for that. I believe you.”
Both of us remained silent, waiting for the teeming swirl of Ana?s’s power to settle, along with her temper.
“My father wants to put Roland on the throne,” she finally said.
“Why would he want that? Roland’s insane and as much a Montigny as I am myself.”
“Because he believes that he can control him.”
“A puppet king.” A frown creased Tristan’s forehead. “Can he control him?”
Ana?s was silent for a long moment, then she said, “Yes. Roland is incapable of true affection toward anyone, but he seems to value my father. He listens to him.”
“That’s new.”
Ana?s said nothing, which made me wonder whether she’d been keeping this particular development to herself.
“For that to happen, I’d have to be disinherited,” Tristan said. “Or dead. And my father is the only one who could manage that.”
I raised one eyebrow.
“Manage it without consequence, that is,” he amended. “Which means the Duke believes there is something Ana?s can discover that would push my father in that direction.” Tristan’s frown deepened. “He suspects I’m a sympathizer.” His eyes fixed on Ana?s. “What’s changed?”
It was a struggle not to hold my breath as I waited for her to respond. What had changed was that Ana?s was no longer destined to be Queen, forcing the Duke to pursue another angle to gain control, but would she admit as much given she’d kept their betrothal a secret for so long?
“He didn’t say why or for how long he’d suspected you, only that he believed you to be plotting against your father and that I was to find proof.”
She hadn’t answered his question, but if Tristan had noticed, he didn’t show it, likely too consumed with thought over how he’d aroused the Duke’s suspicions to consider that Ana?s might be deceiving him. Which put me in the position of choosing between keeping Pénélope’s confidence and telling him the truth.
“And he believes I’m more likely to reveal such proof under intimate circumstances?”
“Yes.”
Ana?s’s eyes flicked to me, then away again. Did she suspect I knew about the broken betrothal? Had Pénélope told her?
No one spoke, the only sound in the room the tick tock of the clock on the wall. Tristan rose to his feet, pacing back and forth before finally saying, “Tell him I rejected your advances. To do otherwise and have you claiming not to have learned anything of value would be suspicious, and that’s the last thing we want. We need him to trust you, otherwise we’ll lose all insight into his faction’s plans. As it is, you’re going to have to start giving him better information or he’ll begin to question your loyalties.”
I knew his rejection, despite it only being to her plan, had to have hurt. A fact to which he was likely oblivious. But no reaction showed on Ana?s’s face. Given she lived life as a spy, she’d made a practice out of ensuring it never did. Originally, her father had set her to sniff out details on the Montignys, but she’d come over to Tristan’s side long ago. Now she spied on his behalf, for the good of the sympathizer cause. One did not live such a double life without becoming a master of self-control.
“I think that’s a mistake,” she said. “We can use this opportunity to feed him information of our choosing without him becoming suspicious. Plus, it gives you a reason to sneak around that will seem innocent by comparison to the truth.”
It was an awful idea that was destined to end badly, but on the heels of the conversation we’d just had, there was no chance Tristan wasn’t considering it. Everyone would be too caught up in the scandal of the future Duchesse d’Angoulême lowering herself to the status of a Montigny mistress to question whether there was another reason Tristan was disappearing for hours at a time. It would cost him nothing and her everything, and I couldn’t help but wonder how badly Pénélope would take it. I opened my mouth to voice my opinion, but Tristan beat me to it.
“No,” he said, eyes on the diagram in front of him rather than her face. “It wouldn’t just be your father we’d be deceiving in this, it would be everyone. People would gossip. Things would be said that I don’t want said about you.”
“Oh, please.” Ana?s twisted a curled lock of hair around one finger and rolled her eyes. “What does my reputation matter? I’m afflicted in the worst sort of way, and everyone knows it. There isn’t a man in Trollus who’d risk the odds, even if my reputation were pure as the driven snow.”
Except that it did matter, because everyone would see it as a concession to Montigny rule. An admission of weakness. And in Trollus, power ruled.
“You’re not afflicted,” Tristan muttered.
“As good as,” she replied. “You know it runs in the blood. Besides, you have no other options.”
“I’ll think about it.”
“Don’t think about it too long,” she replied, winking. “I might go looking elsewhere for my entertainment.”
They both laughed, but looking down, I saw the silk of her skirts was twisted and soaked with sweat from where she gripped them. “There’s one more thing,” she said. “Yesterday afternoon, my father tried to kill Pénélope.”
I was on my feet in a flash. “Is she hurt?”
“She’ll recover.”
“I’m going to kill him.”
“No, you’re not,” Tristan said, and not for the first time, I considered taking a swing at him.
“I intervened,” Ana?s said. “And if he doubted my power exceeded his own, he does no longer. I threatened him if any harm should come to her, but…”
“You think he’ll call your bluff?” Tristan asked.
She nodded. “Obviously it’s a circumstance I wish to avoid.”
“Why?” I spat, furious that despite being wholly innocent and uninvolved with our machinations, Pénélope’s life should be twisted up in them. “Because killing him doesn’t align with our plans?”
“I was thinking that killing him won’t bring her back from the dead,” Ana?s said. “But there is that as well.”
“We have to do something, Tristan,” I said. “We can’t just leave her in this situation.”
Tristan exhaled a long breath. “If she was anyone other than who she is, my father could make her a ward of the state. But to do so would be a slap to Angoulême’s face – practically a declaration of war, for which he’d gain nothing.”