BLAINE
“He’s arionetka. We can’t afford to leave him alive,” Lore argued.
“Nathaniel seemed himself right up until he tried to kill Caris. That speaks to some portion of his mind perhaps still being his own, and I want to know how it was done,” Blaine said.
“He’s athreat. He needs to be put down.”
“No,” Caris said, the dull rasp of her voice cutting through their argument.
Blaine turned immediately to where she sat in an armchair in Meleri’s library, wrapped in a quilt with a cup of tea held forgotten in her hands. The bruises ringing her throat were painful-looking, but the swelling had been reduced with the help of a potion bought from an apothecary and the application of magic from an army magician who wasn’t a healer but knew enough field medicine to stabilize a person.
“He can’t be trusted,” Blaine said gently. “Especially not around you.”
She looked up from her teacup, dull gray eyes meeting his gaze. Her lashes were still spiky-looking from the tears she’d cried earlier, but the redness in her eyes had faded somewhat. “I don’t want Nathaniel harmed.”
Lore huffed out a sigh. “You can’t be serious. You must know that the only proper way to address this problem is to eliminate it in its entirety.”
“No one is laying a hand on Nathaniel.”
“He already laid one onyou.”
Caris straightened up, the quilt slipping off her shoulders a little. “You keep saying you want me to be your queen. Yet here you are, acting like I’m not. You can’t have it both ways, Lore. You can’t sit there and tell me you want me to rule, then ignore what I want simply because it doesn’t align withyourwants. I won’t be a puppet. I won’t beyour tool. I won’t be what they turned Nathaniel into.”
Lore jerked back as if she’d been struck, mouth falling open a little. Blaine watched as Meleri raised her hand in a quieting sort of manner to her daughter. “Enough.”
Lore stiffly settled back in her seat, hands clasped together over her lap. She held her tongue, and for that, Blaine was grateful.
Caris breathed in carefully, nostrils flaring as she winced in pain. “If you kill Nathaniel, then you’ll lose any hope you have of figuring out how he became arionetka.”
“You want him alive because you care for him,” Lore said evenly.
“I’d want anyone alive in this situation for the information they could give us.” Caris managed a thin, macabre smile, gaze flat and empty as she stared at Lore. “That’s somethingyoutaught me when I learned how to be a cog.”
Lore was too good to show how she felt in the face of that jab, but Blaine rather thought it cut deep. The two women stared at each other for a long, fraught moment, and it was Lore who looked away first. At that, Caris nodded once, more to herself than anything else, and focused on her tea. Blaine settled his hand on her shoulder gently, hating the way she flinched away from him. He pulled away immediately, wishing there was some sort of comfort he could give her that she’d accept.
Next to Lore, Meleri smoothed a piece of the charred veil taken off Nathaniel’s body over the table. The magic of its weaving was beyond repair, the veil nothing more than damaged, delicate cloth now.
Veils were expensive and intricate to make, thread magic needing to be woven with intent for the entirety of the spell. Magicians skilled at making such spellwork were few to begin with, the cost of a veil something few could afford. Meleri’s store of veils to hide a person’s face was a total of five now, after the one damaged in Blaine’s fight with Terilyn. Five veils on the smaller size came out to a fortune that could allow a family of poor means to live comfortably middle-class for at least two generations.
The one that had been sewn into Nathaniel’s body to cover the vivisection scars had been easily twice the size of the ones used to hide a person’s face. Blaine was no magician, but he knew a weaving like that would’ve taken years to produce and cost a fortune. He wondered if Eimarille had commissioned the piece, and if so, when? How long had she been working toward retaking Ashion?
More importantly, how were they supposed to counter her reach when she was dozens of steps ahead of them?
“The Clockwork Brigade’s magicians are looking into Nathaniel’s situation. We don’t have anyone presently assigned to Veran skilled in mind magic,” Meleri said.
“Then perhaps you should find a cog with that skill and summon them here,” Caris said.
“As important as understanding how arionetkais controlled, there are other pressing matters we must focus on. Parliament is refusing to bring to the floor eastern provinces’ concerns about the occupation of Haighmoor under false pretenses and the breach of our western border. Without the prime minister agreeing to hear such argument, the military cannot be brought into play.”
“Something tells me that is not the problem you believe it to be,” Blaine said dryly. “The army is preparing itself for a fight, and the officers who believe in Ashion’s sovereign right are prepared to go to war. It is the nobility who are digging in their heels at the present time.”
Meleri’s gaze lingered on Caris. “They need someone to rally around.”
“I said before I won’t be your puppet,” Caris said quietly.
“I understand your concerns—”
“Do you?” Caris cut in, pinning Meleri with a fierce glare. “If that were truly the case, you would have some idea on how to rescue my parents. As it is, they remain imprisoned in Amari, and I’ve yet to hear of a plan to rescue them.”
