The nod had the desired effect as the councilor’s lips dropped open for a single unguarded moment before he schooled his face and packed himself back into the carriage.
“Dunixi,” Renard called, without so much as a turn of his head—didn’t want to spoil the carriage’s view.
The Eritrian was there in a blink, now dressed in the full aubergine and white of the Bellringe guards. Hopefully he wasn’t ruining the visual for those below with his idiotic self-aggrandizing grin. “Yes, Your Highness?”
“See to it that the Royal Council and Queen Inés meet me in the council room at once.”
RENARDalmost wished he had forced his mother and her plume of advisors to march through the castle to the throne room to meet him. That would be a worthy embarrassment for Inés and her queenly ambitions.
A missed opportunity, yes. The next time he had a visitor worth intimidation, he wouldn’t hesitate to grin down from the Pyrenee throne. And in a matter of minutes, there would be literally nothing his mother could say that would keep it from being his.
As Renard sat in the large mountain lion–themed chair that was once his father’s the doors swung open. The councilors entered first, as stiff as boards and led by Menon. It appeared only three had returned from the wedding—Menon, Collette, Laurent—and they watched him wearily as they stepped into the room. Perhaps their initial shock had cooled to this—a muddled mix of resignation, confusion, and fear. They were on the wrong side of this equation and knew it. Renard smiled at them with every inch of practiced gaiety he had learned in all his years of training at the feet of experts in regal comportment.
Inés wasn’t with them.
This disappointed Renard a little, though he was buoyed by the certainty that the very moment she learned of his existence, she’d wail loud enough to be heard from the Basilican beaches all the way to King’s Crest.
Yes, the thought ofherfury made his own flare—fuel for the biggest thrill yet to test his still-beating heart.
“Councilors! Welcome home. I see you sacrificed the sandy warmth of Basilica for a return to King’s Crest at my mother’s behest. Tell me, how was the wedding?” Renard settled back into the embrace of his father’s chair as if settling in for a juicy tale. “Did my mother beam with a moonlit glow over the idea of finally stealing my kingdom with vows and a new heir?”
The councilors glanced among one another as if action were truly a dream and they were walled in, unable to respond except to move their eyes, not a spine of bravery among their three sagged bodies. Renard wondered whether it was a note of praise upon them that they’d been the ones sent back from Pyrenee, or if it was a mark of punishment.
“Your Highness,” Menon, the designated leader of this crew, finally answered. His tone was tentative, as if he was gathering his thoughts on how best to share news that Renard would not enjoy. “Your mother is dead.”
The hum of fury halted for one thick moment as Renard read the man’s face, then those of the other two councilors. All hung their heads, eyes on the tile.
Inés was dead and Renard was alive.
Just a few days ago, as far as he knew, the opposite had been reality.
“Dead?By whose hand? Domingu’s?”
Menon’s thick brows twitched, and his mouth pinched as if he tasted something sour. “By Taillefer’s, Your Highness.”
“Taillefer? By his poisons, of course.” That anger spiked, but in that instant Renard was unsure if it was because his mother was no longer an adversary or because his brother had the honor of dispatching her. “And where is that grinning rat? Hiding in the Aragonesti, growing a mustache to twirl as he serves his backstabbing mentor?”
“No.” Menon’s beady eyes swept to Dunixi, who was standing attentively at the door. “Your Highness, we should have this conversation alone.”
In all honesty, Renard had been about to order Dunixi to leave, but the fact that the councilors wished him gone gave him the sudden urge to keep the Eritrian around.
“No. Dunixi stays. In fact, Dunixi, sit.” He gestured to the chair to his right. “The rest of you, too. Sit down and tell me exactly what happened.”
The councilors lurched into motion, claiming their customary seats as Dunixi grinned a little too hard, sliding into the chair next to Renard. Again, predictably, it was Menon who first spoke. “Your Highness, much has happened since… since Princess Amarandeinjured you.”
“Yes,” Renard replied, and it took nearly all of his life’s training to keep his voice neutral while allowing his words to cut for him, “andI’mcounting on you to make me better informed in the next two minutes or you’ll spend the next two days in the dungeon cell that was recently vacated by my companion Dunixi.”
In response, Menon leaned forward, his hands visibly trembling as he set them upon the table. Next to him, Laurent pulled a crumbled bit of parchment from his robes and offered it to his counterpart, but Menon’s shaking fingers batted it away blindly and the ancient councilor relented without a fight.
“Your Highness, your mother is dead by your brother’s hand, but not in the way you are likely envisioning.” Menon drew in a steadying breath. “And Taillefer is dead as well.”
For the first time, a pinprick of fear rolled through the waves of fury in Renard’s belly. This was a trick by the clever bastard, surely. Something that could fall apart with prodding from the person who knew Taillefer best.
“What? Taillefer—dead? When? How?”
“Again, not as you may expect,” the councilor intoned as the others nodded.
Menon then launched into a sordid summary, and it was true—Renard did not expect any of it.
