“No?” Jars said. He used his broken crutch to drag a chair over and lowered himself into it. “Then his master will answer for him.”
It was a nicely veiled threat, but if Dylan had caught it…everyone had. Caolán stiffened and reached for his hip, presumably to where a weapon would usually hang. Since his belt was empty, he ended up with his hand awkwardly tucked behind his back instead.
“I admit that you were…offended…by my retinue,” Caolán said, visibly careful with the words he used. “So for now I’ll forgive you for overstepping, Yule Lad, and take my reminder in the same spirit. You don’t speak for Yule.”
There was a pause, and then Jars skinned his teeth back in a shark’s smile.
“Don’t I?”
Dylanfeltthe tension pull wire-taut in Somerset’s body. He stepped forward before Somerset could do anything and cleared his throat. Everyone looked at him. He let a brief, wistful thought about telling them to sort it out for themselves drift through his head,but then banished it. That ship had sailed when he took up the whip last Christmas, and it had sunk to the bottom of the ocean when the wolves had taken his friend.
“So far he’s not said anything I disagree with,” he said. “Last night the wolves attacked me and stole my friend. Today your servants tried to finish the job. I’d like to know why.”
For a second, as Caolán set his jaw stubbornly, Dylan thought it wasn’t going to work. Then Caolán grimaced and his shoulders sagged.
“That’s the problem,” the duke said. “So would I.”
Hill had been taken away by the Yule Lads, to be kept under guard until he regained consciousness. The other two members of Caolán’s retinue were being made comfortable while they conferred. Dylan had expected that to cause some sort of complaint, but if anything Caolán seemed relieved that it was only Dylan and the two Yule Lads who sat around the bloodstained table with him… Stúfur having excused himself because it was about to get boring.
“I was sent here to be a figurehead,” Caolán admitted stiffly. He frowned into the glass of whiskey he’d been given, then shrugged off his misgiving and downed the shot in one. It didn’t even make him blink. “The Winter Court wanted to make a good show for the new Santa, but they didn’t want to overexert themselves, since they don’t expect him to last.”
That was… Actually, Dylan wasn’t sure if that was news or not. Between juggling his mortal life and the investigation into who killed Santa, he’d not thought much about the Winter Court.
And since you only got a new Santa when the old Santa died…they didn’t think much about him either.
“So you weren’t expected to uncover any wrongdoing,” Somerset said.
“Don’t paint me the hero,” Caolán said. “I didn’t want to uncover anything. I wanted to while away the duration of my appointment drunk and well-fucked. I mean—”
He stopped and flashed Dylan an embarrassed look. Red crawled up his cheeks and into his slightly pointed ears.
“Um, sorry, Santa,” he muttered as he rubbed his nose.
“I’ve heard worse,” Dylan said. He couldfeelSomerset shake with silent repressed laughter beside him, and he kicked the other man under the table. “So what changed?”
“Nothing,” Caolán said after taking a breath to compose himself. “They continued with business as usual, so openly that eventually even I had to acknowledge something was amiss.”
“So you knew Demre and Hill were traitors?” Jars asked, a hint of silky annoyance in his voice.
Caolán warded off that accusation with an upraised palm. “No. Something amiss, that I suspected. But something of this scale? No, I had no idea it went that far. Or that Hill and Demre were involved in anything. Like I said earlier, if they wished to harm the Court, they could have done much worse than this without ever getting their hands dirty. They had the purse strings of the treasury. All it would take would be a few bad trades and that would be gone. They probably wouldn’t even get caught. Who here last checked if they were overdrawn?”
Dylan put his hand up. No one else did. He looked around the table.
“Really?” he asked. “Nobody?”
Somerset shrugged casually. “I pay someone for that.”
Jars rubbed his chin. “I just realized that we paythemfor that,” he said, with a nod toward Caolán. “An audit might be in order.”
Caolán curled his lip in a smile that didn’t even try not to look fake.
“Very funny,” he said.
“Most people don’t enjoy mine and my brothers’ sense of humor,” Jars noted. “So if you didn’t suspect Hill and Demre and it wasn’t money—”
“I didn’t say it wasn’t money,” Caolán corrected him.
Jars and Somerset traded a look. It was one of the “known each other for centuries so it doesn’t matter if we like each other” moments of silent understanding. Dylan didn’t know what it meant, but he’d learned to recognize it.
