Daire’s pale eyes turned to saucers. “You’re a eunuch.”
Sesto’s natural defensiveness crept forward, but Daire’s expression was full of kinship, not pity. “Yes. I am.”
“Me, I’m...” Daire glanced around, but everyone close was too busy setting up their shops to pay them mind. “I was born with the parts of a man and a woman. Cursed, my father said.”
Sesto had heard of androgyne individuals but hadn’t met one. As Daire had said, such an “affliction” was seen as a curse by most, and he had a sense he knew where the story was going. “They abandoned you, didn’t they?”
Daire tucked his long blond hair behind both ears and looked down. “I was a blight on their household. I can’t blame them for bringing me here and then leaving without me. I would have starved to death if not for Ryquin.”
Sesto had a far less charitable take on the princeling, but the tendency to relate with a subjugator was common in servitude. “Why did your parents bring you here? Just to leave you?”
Daire shook his head. “Rivenholde is where necromancers come to practice their talents. They... I believe they thought they could sell me, but there were too many necromancers here already. I wasn’t worth much.”
“A necromancer is...”
“One who communes with the dead.”
“Speaks to them.”
Daire nodded.
So Jesstin was not so unusual after all. The correlation was too neat to be coincidence, though connecting any of those threads was still beyond Sesto’s reckoning. “That must be exhausting.”
“Merely sometimes. I only talk to them when Ryquin asks me to.”
Sesto thought of Jesstin’s agony the night before. “You don’t hear them all the time? Were you trained to block them out?”
“No, necromancers have to focus to hear them at all. Some of us can only do it with complete silence or meditation. The stronger ones can do it at will, but we only hear them when we want to. Those who live in the crypts of the sept live in a constant state of focus so they can be conduits for the pretor and his family.”
It made sense that Jesstin’s magic would hold to different rules, since his had not come from the Seven Sisters, but in learning this, Sesto had only opened up more questions his new friend would not be able to answer. “Is that where you live?”
“Sometimes, but I stay with Ryquin most nights. He cares for me.”
I’m sure he does, love. “What does he want from the dead?”
“Answers, of course.” Daire skipped back into motion, pointing at a new row of stalls with gold-topped tents. “Would you have your cards read, Sesto? Or your astral alignment? Oh, it’s always such a treasure to open doors to our future!”
“My what or what?” Sesto shook his head in bewilderment. “What answers, Daire?”
“Hm?”
“Ryquin. Your consort. What answers does he seek?”
Daire’s expression clouded. Sesto worried he’d pushed too far, had been too obvious in his fishing. “Ryquin has been under assault from would-be assassins for years. It’s horrible. Really horrible. Every consort he’s taken, except me, has eventually tried to kill him. They’re all dead themselves now, of course.”
“Indeed?” Sesto tried to look as shocked as Daire expected, so the man wouldn’t pick up on how much he’d revealed.
“Necromancers, all of them.”
“And he wants to know why?”
“He’s the son of the pretor,” Daire replied. “But he doesn’t believe they intended to kill him.”
“I believe an assassin has but one job.”
“He believes they all loved him until they were corrupted by influences who want to hurt his family. He wants to know who hired them, so he can put a stop to it.”
Delusions of grandeur. “Oh, but of course he does.”
