George was not the kind of man who lost gracefully. He was the kind of man who would rather burn the game board than concede.
“I know what’s going on,” he said. “I’ll deal with it and be back for the wedding.”
He pulled on his coat, checked his pistol, then walked out.
He found George in a barn two miles east.
It was not difficult; George had left traces. A broken branch. A hoofprint. The kind a trained man left when he wanted to be found. George always wanted to be found. It was part of the game.
He was sitting in the barn, on a hay bale with a pistol on his knee, eating an apple.
“You found me,” he said, as though Edward had arrived for tea.
“Ye wanted me to find ye.”
“Of course. What fun is hiding if nobody comes looking?” He took another bite. “Having Peter throw that note was a bit theatrical, I admit. But I wanted to see how you’d react, and I couldn’t very well do it myself after your bride had already looked me in the eye. He volunteered, the fool. Nobody properly appreciates disloyalty.”
“It was low,” Edward grunted. “Even for ye.”
“Low?” George looked amused. “I once watched you throw a man through a window in Lisbon because he insulted the Queen’s honor. You do not get to lecture me aboutlow.”
“That was different.”
“How?”
“Because he deserved it.”
Edward did not move from the doorway. George’s hand was on the apple, not the pistol. He was here to talk.
“What do ye want, George?”
“I want my friend back.”
The polish was gone. George now looked like the boy Edward had known. The orphan with nothing and nobody.
“I don’t want your title. I don’t care about the Duchess. I want my friend back. We came up together,” His voice was rough now. “Remember? Two orphans in the Queen’s household. You, from Edinburgh. Me, from God knows where. Nobody wanted us. Nobody looked at us twice. We were furniture. Background. The boys who cleaned boots and carried messages and slept in the servants’ hall.”
Edward remembered. He remembered George at fifteen, skinny and sharp-eyed, stealing bread from the kitchens because the servants were fed last and the bread was always cold by then.
He remembered George at twenty, talking his way past a guard at the French embassy with nothing but a forged letter and a smile that could have charmed a snake.
He remembered George at twenty-five, sitting across from him in a safe house in Vienna, bleeding from a knife wound, yet laughing because the man who stabbed him had missed his artery by half an inch.
“I remember,” Edward said.
“Then how can you leave?”
“Because the boy I grew up with would not have imprisoned an innocent man. The boy I grew up with would not have threatened my wife.” Edward’s voice was steady, but his jaw was not. “The boy I grew up with is gone, George. And I have been mourning him for two years.”
“Mourning.” George’s voice was flat. “You are mourning me while I am sitting right here.”
“Aye. Because the man sitting right there is not the one I knew. Ye threatened her.”
“I wanted to see what you would do.” George set the apple core down. “And you punched Peter, which was predictable and exactly what I would have done. But after a bit of a punch, he backed down, the dog.”
“If ye were an honest and loyal person yerself, we’d still be a team.”
George’s expression shifted. “So it’s not for power? Not for being called Duke?” he taunted.
