***
The journey up-country was long and would have been dull if not for Deyvid’s presence. Everyone in the group except for Brannan had softened to him. He and Lise had similar taciturn personalities, and both were fiercely practical, which came in useful whenever something needed to be done—usually by directing someone else to the task, but Petur appreciated the ability to delegate. Herow was quiet about it, but he certainly enjoyed Deyvid’s ability to cook up something more than just edible over the fire, and Ginnie and Rhys enthusiastically solicited stories of his travels in the evening. By the time they finally got to Delomar, it was as though Deyvid had been with them for months, not weeks.
Petur had been prepared to take great pains to show him around the city, but Deyvid rode through the streets with ease. “You’ve been here before, I take it?” Petur asked in a low voice as they got close to the palace.
“A time or two,” Deyvid replied, his voice giving nothing away.
“Kill anyone I know?”
“I never kill and tell,” Deyvid replied, easily guiding Petur’s second mount away from the waste runnel along the side of the street. “What’s the protocol for me once we reach the palace?”
Petur wanted to say that he would bring Deyvid to his sister immediately and assure him that she was going to be as glad to meet him as Petur had been, but there were, in fact, some royal protocols that he was expected to follow. “I’ll talk to the queen first,” he said. “You go with Lise to the barracks. She’ll make sure you have a place to stay for now.”
“I have no formal position in your military,” Deyvid pointed out. “I don’t think the barracks are the right place for me. I can find a room here in town.”
“I want you close,” Petur said firmly. “You’ll have an official position soon enough. I don’t want to have to hunt you down in town just to tell you, ‘Look, here’s the rooms you should have been in all along. Come on back.’”
Deyvid sighed. “Fine,” he said, “but if it doesn’t work out that way, I’m going to mock you, I want you to know that.”
“It’s going to work out,” Petur insisted. “Why do you keep doubting me? Haven’t you realized yet that I’m right about almost everything?” It was going to be fine. He was sure of it.
It was not, in fact, fine.
“A High Harrier?” Tania hissed the moment the door to her study was closed. The red heat in her face contrasted oddly with the bright teal of her gown, and every inch of her posture radiated umbrage.
“Oh, you already know,” Petur said, a little disappointed that he wasn’t the one to break the news to her.
“Of course, I know! But I should have known fromyou, rather than relying on your second-in-command to bring me the intelligence of a murderous assassin in our midst. One who you brought here, nonetheless!” Her mouth worked silently for a moment, disbelief and anger making her unexpectedly inarticulate.
Petur rolled his eyes. He should have known Brannan would try to paint Deyvid’s presence in the worst possible light. “I should have told you sooner,” he acknowledged. “That’s my mistake. But he’s not like you think he is. Deyvid Cleareyes saved my life more than once. He—”
“I don’t care if he’s saved every single one of you a hundred times,” Tania said, her hands on her hips. Her heart-shaped face, usually so composed, seemed stuck in a snarl, and the cordsof her neck stood out starkly beneath her skin. “High Harriers are some of the most dangerous people in existence, and I willnothave one as part of my court.”
Petur was genuinely baffled by this reception. “I’m vouching for him,” he insisted. “I promise you right now, Deyvid isn’t going to cause us any sort of harm. He was hunting mages along our southern border when we chanced across him.”
“Hunting mages.” Tania let out a mirthless laugh. “Of course, he was just out there hunting dangerous killers for his own amusement.”
“He wasn’t doing it for amusement’s sake, obviously.” Why was his sister being so obtuse? “He was being paid by the local townships to handle a problem that we hadn’t gotten to yet. And he was doing it well, I might add—far more effectively than me and my squad. There’s much we could learn from him.”
“And there’s a great deal of damaging intelligence he could learn about us in the process,” she snapped. “How we do things. Our tactics. Our advantages. I can’tbelieveyou haven’t stopped to genuinely consider the fact that he could be a spy.”
“He doesn’t have anything to do with his people any longer,” Petur said.
“That’s what he’s told you, but you can’t believe a creature like that. Deceit is in his blood.Literally. I watched you all ride up to the palace, and he certainly doesn’t look like what hereallyis.”
“Well, you can hardly expect him to walk around advertising the fact,” Petur snapped back.
“It indicates a personality steeped in dishonesty,” his sister stated. “And I won’t have him here. I won’t. Get rid of him.”
Petur’s mouth opened and shut a few times as he tried to gather his thoughts. Tania had never once dictated to him like this before, not even when they were children fighting over toys. His first impulse was to give in to her. She was his queen, and obedience was his proper place, and yet …
“No,” he said and watched as her hands balled up into fists.
“No,” she repeated dangerously. “What do you mean by that?”
“I mean,” Petur said, “that he’s not what you say he is. He’s not what youthinkhe is. I wouldn’t bring someone I didn’t trust to you, and the fact that you think otherwise makes me very uncomfortable.”
“The fact that you think I could welcome a ruthless killer into my household—”
