“Albus will marry her this very day.”
The news buckled his legs. He settled back onto the cot and waited for his racing heart to slow.
His brother had summoned him to a wedding, and Maynya had been carrying out a macabre wedding ritual on the hill. He should have put two and two together. But why did the woman’s bonding with Albus stab into his heart? Adala’s death must have unhinged him. He couldn’t imagine a more ridiculous fit of infatuation than the one he now suffered.
Teasha set a hand on his shoulder. “Is something wrong, Quintus?”
“I wouldn’t know where to begin.” He brushed past her.
* * *
Quintus shaded his eyes and hurried past the ripe odor of livestock in a nearby pen. The afternoon had grown chillier despite a bright sun. The notion of returning for his cloak and another whiff of Teasha’s lemony perfume almost tempted him back to the bungalow.
He wrapped his arms around himself and continued across a vacant marching ground separating the last dwelling at the edge of town from the palace, a ridiculously presumptuous name for the makeshift wooden building housing the royal chambers.
Albus and his bands of thieves—no better term for the marauders—had been cutting through tribe after tribe, taking their land, raping their women, and stealing houses, roads, monuments. They’d never found the skill to build anything of substance on their own. The most impressive structure in the area, a foundry he’d noticed when Maynya struggled up the hill, had been constructed by the latest fallen ones, a hardy tribe of laborers who now stoked its fires night and day as slaves.
Quintus, too, had often led bands of soldiers who might have been likened to marauders by the innocents who strayed across their path. Yet he saw a critical difference. His men faced a greater power, an army bent on pushing the natives of Virtus east to the sea—a tribe boasting frightening inventions, such as the fierce metal beast, the locomotive, he’d seen at the western border. Quintus and his men served as defenders, not invaders.
Even on those rare occasions when they managed to seize a territory instead of surrendering another slice of their own—Virtus crawled like a snake, shrinking in the west as it expanded to the east—they allowed the defeated men some measure of freedom, and they left the women unharmed. He’d kill the soldier who so much as thought about touching a woman against her will. Just ask Gaius, the bastard who took Adala’s life.
The reminder stirred more ice into the wind. Quintus hurried to the door of the palace.
He nodded to three soldiers standing checkpoint, but he surrendered only his visible weapons. The fools didn’t frisk him. Then he strode across a great room crowded with scoundrels, rakes, and whores, the profiteers of war. Many sat drinking at a long table, echoing randy songs and raucous laughter off the walls. Others made merry at a piano, while a few had already begun unlacing maidens’ bodices in the hall’s shadowy corners. Any excuse for an orgy. In this case, the inexplicable wedding of a king and a slave.
He slowed to endure one more inept soldier’s careless search before passing through a door to the next chamber, a quieter one, a war room where maps had been tacked to the walls and spread across a large table in the center. At the far end of that table, he found Albus on a high throne, puffing his chest. The normally slovenly man had dressed like a dandy this day, his dark hair wrapped into a diamond-speckled braid, a purple, star-studded robe thrown over his shoulders, a jeweled crown set upon his thick head, and gold chains cascading from his neck.
The maidservant attending Albus seemed as young as Teasha, nineteen at best, but far less innocent. She’d painted her lips, shaded her eyes, and unlaced much of her bodice. She swayed her hips when she started forward to greet him.
The king waved her off.
She scurried out the door with barely concealed excitement, no doubt eager to dive into the debauchery on the other side, body and soul.
Alone now but for a soldier at the door, the two men stared each other down. Three years had passed since Quintus had last seen his brother, but he had no interest in exchanging niceties. “You’ve pulled me from the front so I might serve as a guest in a sham of a wedding?”
“Best man, Quintus, best man!” Albus leapt off the throne and rushed over to embrace him. “It’s so good to see you!”
Quintus endured his brother’s liquored breath.
After the hug, they stepped back and gazed at each other in silence. Words had never passed easily from one to the other. Quintus noticed hints of his brother’s earlier physical charms—an ever-youthful face, dark, curly hair, eyes capable of melting a princess—but the steady creep of sloth had already compromised the man’s handsomeness with an extra chin and too large a gut.
Albus was the first to turn away. He shook a fist at the soldier standing guard. “Get out! Can two brothers not share a moment alone?”
The guard hastened out of the room and shut the door behind him.
“You need better help,” Quintus said. “These soldiers don’t have your back.”
Albus clapped a hand on his shoulder. “I have my own back, plus a brother at my side now, and the grandest of plans.” He lowered his voice and for good reason. Walls within the shifty kingdom had many ears. “I’m defeating Maynya in this sham of a wedding.”
Another pang troubled Quintus, thickening his throat to the point he almost couldn’t speak. Though no less irrational, his emotions were becoming harder to shake off. “You’re defeating a wench? A simple slave?”
His brother scowled. He started pacing the floor with hands clasped behind him. “A simple
