In the aftermath, they lay entangled, Isabella’s hair free of its braid and Amaury on his back beside her. He was warm and solid, the beat of his heart beneath her fingertips as reassuring asthe calling of the hour from the gatehouse. Isabella heaved a sigh of contentment and ran her fingers across his chest.
She was no longer alone.
Amaury pressed a kiss to her bare shoulder. “Perhaps I should leave you in peril more often,” he mused in a low rumble, then kissed the hollow of her throat.
Isabella shivered in delight, catching her breath at his caress. “I was not in peril,” she said, keeping her voice very low.
Amaury did not reply, as if he disagreed, then reached to brush his lips across her own.
Isabella luxuriated in his kiss, then asked. “When was I in peril?”
“Every moment since your father passed. Perhaps even before.”
Isabella frowned and sat up. “Me? But why?” She eased open one drape so she could see Amaury’s shadowed features.
His expression was grim. “Your brother was murdered and then your father. You are the sole obstacle remaining in the path of whoever desires Marnis enough to kill for it.”
Isabella blinked. “My father was not murdered.”
“Was he not?”
“He died, as old men are wont to do.” She was keenly aware of the familiarity of the words, and also how she found the explanation somehow unsatisfactory.
“He died violently, after eating of a dish prepared especially for him,” Amaury corrected. “He was poisoned, my lady. I would wager my soul upon it.”
She shivered then, feeling suddenly cold. “You cannot know such a thing, just as you cannot know that your own father was poisoned.”
Amaury, though, had risen from the bed. She thought he might intend to leave, but he bent over his discarded clothing and opened his purse, retrieving some item. He tossed it in theair, caught it, then returned to the bed. He stretched out beside her, then presented the item to her, held between his finger and thumb.
It looked like an egg, but one carved of a mottled green stone. She took it, as she was clearly intended to do, and cradled its cool weight in her palm.
“What is it?” she asked when he said naught at all.
“A poison stone.”
Isabella knew her confusion showed.
Amaury turned to strike a tinder and light the lantern. It flickered to life, casting a golden glow over the chamber that was somehow more intimate than the darkness had been. He took the stone from her hand and turned it in the light. “It is said to have the ability to discern poison.”
“Any poison?”
He nodded. “In any substance.”
Isabella bit back a smile. “And then it cracks open and speaks, giving a lecture upon that poison?”
His eyes glimmered. “You are skeptical.”
“I cannot imagine who would not be.” She granted him a look. “How much of the wine did you enjoy this day?”
Amaury grinned. “The stone was a gift to me in the east, said to have been harvested from a winged lion’s gullet.”
“There is an obvious truth,” she murmured.
“I was skeptical as well when it was given to me, but it has proven its merit.”
“How?”
His merriment faded. “I placed it against the lips of my father’s corpse, and it turned black, just as it was forecast to do in the presence of poison.”
