by Dan Wingreen
"While they were locked securely away in a dungeon," the Prince said. He fixed Elias with a pointed look. "No. You aren't going."
Elias bristled. "I am not a child to be coddled."
"I never said you were."
"And yet, you're treating me like one."
"No, I'm treating you like anyone would treat the person they love when that person insists on putting themselves in unnecessary danger. The exact same way you're treating me, I might add."
"I am not treating you that way," Elias said, glaring.
"Then why are you attempting to go alone instead of saying that we can both go?" the Prince asked with a smug smirk.
Elias did not miss having to fight the urge to throw things at the Dark Prince, but at least he wasn't so out of practice as to give in.
"Because," he said, as slowly and as deliberately as he could. "You are a murder suspect. It's bad enough that I'm asking questions about this case, given our courtship, but to have you attempting to collect evidence of your own innocence would be unconscionable. Anything you discovered would be dismissed out of hand, especially if anyone thought to accuse you of using magic to force a confession or create false evidence."
The Prince blinked. "Oh."
"Yes," Elias said. "Oh."
"Well, I still don't like the idea of you being alone with him," the Prince said, crossing his arms.
I take back what I said about his petulance being cute.
"I would think someone who was just going on about murder being an acceptable way to carry out a family duty would have great understanding of things that needed to be done despite one's opinions on the matter."
"Fine!" The Prince threw up his hands. "Go then. But I'm going to be nearby and I'm placing a scrying enchantment on you so I can hear everything you say to each other. If he tries to harm you in any way, I'll be close enough to stop him."
Elias cocked his head. "You can do magic like that?"
"Yes," the Prince said as if daring Elias to doubt him.
"Hmm. All right. That sounds eminently sensible."
The Dark Prince furrowed his brow. "You aren't going to fight me on that?"
"Why would I?" Elias asked, honestly confused. "As I said, it's sensible."
The Prince stared at him for the longest moment, then let out a small, breathy laugh. "Elias, if you ever change I shall never forgive you."
Elias wasn't exactly sure what the Prince meant, but he was familiar enough with compliments by now to recognize when he was being given one. And if he was being complimented, then there was a very good chance he'd just won their argument. He smiled.
"Quite."
Chapter 25
It was exponentially less difficult to gain entrance to Duke Hightower's suite of rooms than it was to get inside the Crown Prince's, and upon walking into the duke's drawing room after passing by a guard who barely glanced at him, he rather thought he could figure out why.
"Boy! Serving boy!" The duke's rough voice trailed off into a long, hacking cough which pierced the thick wooden doors to Elias's right like they were made of paper. "I require more wine, and not this watered down horse piss!"
There was a crash, then a high pitched yelp before the doors opened and a harried looking page that couldn't have been older than eleven scurried out with a look of abject terror on his freckled face. He stopped short just before running into Elias, stammering apologies while he struggled not to drop the brass wine jug he was holding. Elias had no idea why, since all the wine that should have been in it appeared to be soaking into the boy's tunic.
"No apologies necessary," Elias said after it became apparent the page wasn't going to move until his stuttering was acknowledged.
An almost heartbreaking look of relief crossed the boy's face, and Elias wondered just how long he had been subjected to the duke's caustic presence.
"I-I should be going, sir," the page said. "The duke isn't liking it when he has to wait for his wine."
Yet instead of leaving, the boy licked his lips and shuffled his feet for almost half a minute before looking up at Elias with wide, bright eyes and adding, in a whisper so quiet Elias almost couldn't hear him. "Are…are you going to assassinate the duke, sir?"
Not even Elias could keep the surprise off his face. "Certainly not."
The boy slumped. "Oh."
Elias blinked. "Were you…hoping that I was?"
The boy nodded, then seemed to realize he was admitting that he wanted a peer of the realm to be assassinated and started to panic. It lasted only a second, though, before he shrugged. "Someone's going to," the page said, sounding more cynical and worldly than any eleven-year-old Elias had ever met. "Woulda been nice if it happened before I had to get back to him. He's been in a right awful mood these past few days."
Elias's heart picked up. "These past few days, you say?" Could the duke be growing unstable? Perhaps from guilt over a murder or the stress of trying to cover it up? "Do you know what—"
"Wine!" the duke screamed from the other room. "Where's that blasted wine? Someone find that serving boy and have him horsewhipped!"
The page paled. "I best be going, sir. If you should change your mind about the assassination, I haven't seen no one come through here all day, and I won't tell no one otherwise." He tapped his nose twice, almost dropping the jug in the process, then shot Elias a conspiratorial wink before running out the double doors and into the hall.
Elias wanted to chase the page down and ask him exactly what he meant by "a right awful mood", but he had enough experience with harried servants to know the boy was long gone. Still, what the page had told Elias was promising. The duke hadn't struck Elias as a pleasant man when they'd met, but he didn't seem horrible enough to inspire children to wish death upon him. Well, children that weren't his own, at any rate. Something had to have changed to cause such a dramatic personality shift, and Elias was cautiously confident that he knew what it was.
He also didn't want to be interrupted in the middle of his upcoming conversation.
"Please waylay the page who just left on his way back," he murmured under his breath. The Dark Prince had assured him the spell he'd placed on Elias would be able to pick up any vocalization, no matter how quiet. And, while Elias didn't know exactly where the Prince was hiding, Elias knew the other man well enough to know he would be more than close enough to detain any possible interruptions. Not that Elias thought anyone else would be eager to deal with the surly duke.
Without wasting another moment, Elias walked into the room the page had raced out of.
"Finally!" Duke Hightower growled. He was lying in his bed and propped up against what had to have been at least eight different pillows. As the door snug closed behind Elias, the duke turned towards him, his bloodshot eyes widening. "You!"
Elias stopped and stared at the Duke. Hightower looked, for lack of a better word, awful. The gray in his thick, dark hair seemed to have waged an offensive which had met little resistance, and it was now almost impossible to tell what color the Duke's hair had originally been. His cheeks were sunken and sallow and covered in red splotches, and his lips looked like they had been split open in several places. Gone was the small, fleshy stomach Elias had noticed all those weeks ago, and in its place was a concave hollow which was only half covered by thick, expensive blankets and a slightly worn linen bed tunic. The duke, it seemed, had aged twenty years in less than a month.
Is that because of the marquis' poison? Or was his Rot more advanced than I thought?
"Well?" Hightower snapped. "What are you doing here then? Come to take me up on my offer?" The duke dissolved into a fit of hacking, disgustingly wet coughs. After a minute, they trailed off into what could almost pass for bitter laughter. "I think you're a bit late for that."
Elias's breath caught in his throat.
Was the duke about to confess?
"And why would I be too late?" Elias asked, trying to keep his voice as even as possible.
"Don't play stupid with me,"
Hightower said, glaring. "You know exactly what I'm talking about."
Apparently he was. Elias's rigid self-control was the only reason his face remained expressionless. "I still need to hear you say it."
"You need to hear me say it," Hightower said with a sneer. "I should have you beaten. But fine, you want to kick me when I'm down? You want to see the great Duke Hightower admitting how far he's fallen? Never let it be said that I went to my fate with anything less than dignity and poise!"
After he confessed, Elias would have to move quickly. He would have to go to the King himself, which meant the Dark Prince needed to stay nearby to keep any guards who might want to silence the only person who could clear the Prince's name from assassinating the duke. Elias hoped he could get an audience with the King that day, he didn't know how the Dark Prince would react to having to spend the ni—
"I have the bloody Rot!"
Elias blinked.
"There? Are you satisfied now? Have you gotten your fill of the dying noble? Do you want to laugh at me and gloat about how my ambitions have failed? How, even if you would have helped me, I wouldn't have been able to find a way to get the foreign prince under my thumb because I'm not going to live out the month? Do you want to—"
Whatever he was going to say was lost in a fit of rough coughing. The duke's face turned purple as he struggled to breathe through his convulsions. Elias wondered if the duke was about to die right in front of him. He rather hoped not; there were still questions he needed answered.
"But what about the marchioness?" Elias asked after the duke's face had returned to a less life-threatening shade, but before he could start speaking again.
"The"—Hightower coughed—"what?"
"Marchioness Selmanica," Elias said. "Did you kill her?"
"Did I what?" Hightower's eyes bulged. "It's not enough that I'm dying, you need to accuse me of murder as well? And who the bloody hell is Marchioness Selmanica? Is that…isn't she old Nesbeth's girl?"
Elias frowned. The duke's reactions seemed…disturbingly genuine. He nodded.
"Was she the one the damned servants were gossiping about, then? Found dead in the halls, or some such?" Hightower asked. There was less bite in his voice than his words might have suggested. Elias nodded again. "Damned shame. She always brought the most divine eclairs when she visited…"
"So, you didn't kill her?" Elias asked with a high pitched quality to his voice that stopped just short of being a whine.
"Of course not!" Hightower glared at Elias through a fit of less intense coughing. "Why would I kill her? If I was going to murder anybody it would be that bastard son of mine. That…that…"
The duke's face once again started to darken into an alarming shade of deep purple. A rather large vein on the side of his temple started to throb and then, much to Elias's horror, the duke burst into loud, body-wrenching sobs.
"I'm a failure!" Hightower keened.
Elias took a step back without meaning to. He was unused to being faced with raw, unfiltered emotion. It made him distinctly uncomfortable.
"I never should have left him to his mother to raise. She…she hated me, she turned my own son against me!" Hightower looked at Elias through tear-filled eyes. "It was an arranged marriage, you see. I didn't love my wife. I loved another. Much too old for me, of course. Too low class. But she was the only light that had ever shone upon my wretched life, and my son killed her. Murdered her with poison most foul!"
Elias took another step back after the duke looked away. Perhaps he could make it to the door before more uncomfortably personal family history was thrust upon him. It was quite obvious the duke wasn't behind Selma's murder. And even if he was, enduring a complete stranger's emotional breakdown wasn't something Elias was prepared to do. Not even to stop a war.
"And now he's going to get everything!" the duke wailed. "The murderous, little shit is going to get my duchy, the only other thing that ever mattered to me, and he's going to ruin it!"
Elias took another step. The door was, thankfully, close to the bed. All he needed to do was reach it without being noticed. There was a guard within shouting distance, and the duke could order Elias restrained if the mood struck. He didn't want to think about how the Prince might overreact to that.
"He'll probably rename it as well, flouting all tradition. It would be something poncy, too. Like 'Skyblazer' or 'Wiffleflower', or something even worse. Something foreign."
Almost there…
"You!" Hightower yelled, his gaze snapping to Elias once again. Elias froze. "You can help me. You…you can make it up to me, for accusing me of murdering Nesbeth's pastry-bearer."
"Absolutely not," Elias said immediately.
The duke, of course, ignored him.
"Yes. That would work nicely. And you obviously hold some affection for the Nesbeth girl, or else you wouldn't have cared whether I killed her or not. You can have your revenge! There's a very good chance my son murdered her. He did try to murder me, after all," Hightower said, his eyes gleaming with feverish cunning.
Or perhaps just fever.
"You tried to murder him as well," Elias said. There were so many other things wrong with what the duke had said, but he was in no mood to point them all out.
"That was preemptive self-defense! Besides, he deserved it. None of that matters, though. The only thing that matters is"—the Duke's voice dropped and he eyed Elias with a smirk on his lips that might be called sly, if he was less ravaged by illness—"do you want to inherit a duchy?"
"I most assuredly do not," Elias answered, although he was sure he must have misheard the question. There was no possible way the duke was suggesting—
"Of course you do," Hightower said. "Everyone wants land and populace to rule over, and I already know you're a traditionalist, so I don't have to worry about you ruining my family legacy. All you need to do is marry me and then murder my son before I die. There aren't any other living heirs, so by the inheritance rules of the Hightower duchy, you'll get everything."
Elias opened his mouth, but no matter what he did he couldn't produce a single sound. There had been times with the Dark Prince where Elias had been in awe of the sheer arrogance and brashness the royal could fit into a single, offhandedly spoken sentence. He had, naively, thought the Prince to be the only person in the world who could reach those levels of mind-boggling, reality-rejecting egotism. And yet, not even the Dark Prince had ever shown the unmitigated gall to suggest Elias marry him and then murder someone just to inherit a duchy.
"I—" Elias voice cracked. He scowled, then swallowed several times before speaking again. "I feel that I should be as clear and specific as I possibly can, so there is no possible way my words can be misinterpreted. I will never, for any reason, under any set of circumstances, no matter how this request may be reworded in the future, ever agree to marry you and kill your heir."
Elias wondered if there was any other way he could have been more emphatic, but after a moment's thought he was satisfied there wasn't. Which was a relief. After all, while a duchy wasn't a kingdom, the Dark Prince was listening in, and Elias would be wide open for remarriage after the duke succumbed to his illness…
It wouldn't do to go putting any ideas into the Prince's head.
"Dammit!" Hightower snarled, but to his credit he seemed to understand the futility of trying to convince Elias further. He slunk back into his pillows as his face pulled into an expression that, on someone forty years younger, might have been considered a pout. "I should have asked that scribe who brought me the letter. He seemed like the reasonably ambitious sort."
Elias, who had been turning away to once again attempt to leave, snapped his head back towards the duke. "Scribe?"
The duke grunted. "Overheard our conversation in the hall that day. Came to me later on and offered his services in place of yours. I refused, of course, since he didn't have any connection to the Dark Prince, but a few days ago he passed a letter to me written by the Prince himself, with the promise he could get
more if I paid him. Cheeky bastard, but ballsy. I liked him."
"Do you still have this letter?"
"Passed it along to the guard." The Duke coughed. "Some of the content could be seen as threatening. It was my civic duty."
Your xenophobia, more like.
Elias licked his lips and tried not to sound too eager. "And did this scribe have a name?"
The duke narrowed his eyes. "Why do you care?"
Elias almost frowned at the question. Surely, if the duke read the letter, he would know of Elias's connection to the Prince.
Unless he forgot my name…
It…was more than possible. The Rot didn't always affect the memory, but when it did it tended to be sporadic and very specific memory loss. The duke could easily remember every aspect of his meeting with Elias and yet have no recollection of his name. It would explain why he was bothering to answer Elias's questions, even though Elias was in a romantic relationship with a foreigner. Elias considered and discarded several possible responses. He wasn't patient or skilled enough for a drawn out manipulation.
"Because a friend of mine is suspected of killing Marchioness Nesbeth." Elias was reasonably sure Hightower hadn't heard of the Prince's involvement in the murder, since he hadn't even known Selma was dead, but there was still a slight risk to the lie. "And if there is someone out there who can get his hands on the Dark Prince's private correspondence, then, between the two of us, we should be able to find a way to frame him for the murder."
The duke looked unconvinced and Elias thought quickly.
"Or," he said slowly, "perhaps he would also be skilled enough to sneak into the rooms of another noble, and plant evidence there instead? Tell me, Your Grace, what are the rules of inheritance in your duchy if the heir is in the dungeons for murder?"
It took a moment for the duke to grasp what Elias was implying, but when he did his eyes shone bright with enthusiastic malice. "The scribe's name was Dunby or Dunkirk or something like that. Stocky fellow, with beady little eyes and dark hair."
Elias had to fight very hard to keep from snarling.