Instantly abandoning his plan to strangle the man, Gavin hugged Leonus’s head against his chest. With his twisted spine, Leonus’s neck had grown thick as a bull’s with muscle. Gavin whipped his torso left and right, left and right. He couldn’t hear any crack of the neck breaking, didn’t feel it, so he whipped back and forth until he was certain Leonus wasn’t moving. He was a beast, and the rage was all.

And he was too late.

He released Leonus, unwrapped the bandages, and heaved his foul body into the aisle. He looked at Antonius’s body lying between the benches.

Lying between the benches … and blinking up at Gavin. “I think I owe my aunt Eirene an apology,” the boy said, very much alive. He spread one of the cut gaps in his tunic, showing a coat of the finest Ilytian mesh-steel beneath it. “She gave me this for my birthday. I asked for a racehorse. I complained.”

“F-fuck,” Fukkelot said, impressed.

Antonius jumped to his feet, shaking it off. He began patting his pockets, looking for something. “My spectacles. My red spectacles! Where are they? I can’t burn open your manacles without them!”

The slaves began looking around furiously. Suddenly, freedom was this close—and with Leonus dead, it suddenly seemed real.

“Ah!” someone cried out. He lifted a mangled frame, the red lenses shattered to dust and tiny bits nowhere near big enough to draft through. There was blood on the deck—could it be enough? No, there wasn’t enough light. To Gavin’s eyes, it was a black pool.

Then Orholam stood. He lifted a hand. He held the manacle key.

Chapter 31

Arys Greenveil rose from the bed where her new lover lay spent. She drew a silk robe around her heavily pregnant belly. Child number thirteen didn’t seem to want to leave her womb yet. Stubborn, like his mother. Her own mother had taught her that lovemaking would help convince a child to come to the light, and Arys had no baseline to say her mother was wrong—she’d tried it with every pregnancy. With her third, Jalen, her climax agonies had melded directly to labor pains, and Jalen was the sweetest of her children by far.

But this boy, number thirteen—the number of Orholam added to the number of man—he was going to be special, she knew it. Just as she knew it was going to be a boy. She moved to her desk and began reading her correspondence. The correspondence never ended for Arys Sub-red. Letters from her satrap, of course, but also letters from family begging favors, from family friends begging favors, from friends of family friends begging favors. There were people asking favors for things she couldn’t control in a hundred years. Her secretary, mercifully, separated all the beggars into stacks, and usually did an excellent job of it, but there were things a woman had to do herself.

Arys kept her own lists of favors granted and favors owed, and when she could, she matched those back and forth, trading up favors so that the right people would owe her for times such as this. Her home satrapy, Blood Forest, was going to be invaded, perhaps within weeks. The news wasn’t encouraging. Against orders, General Azmith was preparing to make a grand stand at a town named Ox Ford on the Ao River. Her sources didn’t think much of the man, or of the plan.

Atash had fallen as fast as a bard’s pants, barely slowing the Color Prince’s advance. If this wild gamble at Ox Ford didn’t work, her own people were next. Arys would do anything she had to do to save her people.

She looked at one of her personal letters. It was from her sister, Ela. Ela was at least as passionate as Arys, and not half as wise. Ela claimed that Gavin Guile had seduced and murdered her daughter, Ana. She begged, demanded, ordered, and begged again that Arys do everything in her power to avenge her niece.

Not that Arys had been sitting still. As soon as she’d heard Ana had died, she’d begun investigating. Of one thing she was certain: Gavin hadn’t seduced Ana; Ana had been trying to seduce Gavin. According to her roommate, Ana had tried half a dozen times despite increasingly firm rebuffs. The roommate had also said that Ana had been under intense pressure from her mother Ela to seduce Gavin, though that had taken some prodding to get out of the frightened girl. Whatever had happened in that room, Ana, the damned fool girl, had gone there of her own accord, and she shouldn’t have been there. The Blackguards on duty had sworn, at least three times, that Gavin had screamed in fury at the girl and she’d jumped off the balcony in terror.

Ana had been a pretty girl, and love her though she did, Arys had thought she was spoiled horribly. When people had less than half a dozen children, they always spoiled them. Ana had probably never had a man scream at her in her life. And yet, jumping off a balcony?

Was Ana that stupid? Arys didn’t think so, but there was no way to prove it, was there? There were three witnesses, and they all said the same thing. Arys had hired the most beautiful courtesan she could find, and paid the woman a ruinous sum to seduce one of the young Blackguards who’d been there, a Gill Greyling. The courtesan had seduced him, got him drunk, and asked him about the event. His story hadn’t changed. The courtesan said she thought he was lying, but if a man wouldn’t let go of a lie when drunk and blinded by lust, there was no shaking it from him. It was a dead end, a sadly literal one.

Damn you, sister. What was the worst that could be true of Gavin Guile here? That he got furious at the daughter that you’d sent to seduce him repeatedly, and when she’d succeeded in getting into his bed and nearly ruining his relationship with Karris White Oak, whom everyone knew he’d loved for fifteen years, Gavin threw her off the balcony? If that was what had happened, Ela was as responsible for it as anyone.

Not that Arys wouldn’t make Gavin pay for it, too, if she ever found out that was true. Family was everything. The Greenveil motto was Fásann Ár Gciorcal, Our Circle Grows. ‘Circle’ was understood to be family, and territory, and friends, and influence. Orholam knew that Arys had done her part on that account, and more. But anyone shrinking that circle would pay—damn it, Ana. Arys had liked the girl, mostly, though Ana had tried her luck seducing men who had been interested in Arys herself. Shooting high, and sometimes artlessly. How, though, was one to object to will in a drafter? Ana had been pretty enough to mostly go unpunished.

And found punishment too great by far.

But Gavin Guile was out of reach for the time being. Someday, Arys would ask him herself. Certainly she would before she voted his way ever again—but it wouldn’t affect her vote in the end. She was practical, eminently practical. As practical as any sub-red had ever been, she liked to think.

And knowing that she was always laid up for a few days at least after a birth, she quite practically moved on to her stack of must-read letters.

Another from her satrap, Briun Willow Bough, telling her things she already knew. Urgent, help immediately, you serve for such a time as this, et cetera. What did he think Arys was doing here, anyway? At the end, the letter asked if she needed to be replaced because she was too pregnant. Arys saw red. Too pregnant? That upjumped son of a carter was questioning her? She’d rip his squinty right eye out, pound it flat with a meat hammer, pan fry and feed it to that slobbering stupid piece of—

She breathed slowly. Easy, Ary.

The sub-red was close, always close these days. Two more years, Arys. You can make two more years if you’re careful.