Page 31 of The Consort's Curse
“I’m glad you’re not afraid of me anymore,” he said at last, with a short laugh. “Fuck me. Very well, I’ll stay home tonight, if it distresses you to be left alone, and make inquiries tomorrow. My informants won’t go anywhere. You can take your bath and go to bed in the serene consciousness that I’m downstairs getting into the brandy. You have my word. All right?”
“All right.” My horrid flutter had come back, a response to that rough tone that I now knew covered a sincerity he didn’t like to show. How far did his guilt and his remorse extend, though?My heart pounding, I tested the limits. “When you send in Aldrich, I also want a pot of tea. And something light to eat. And tomorrow, I need the carriage. I’m going out to—do whatever it is that lords’ consorts do during the day, I suppose. Aldrich will know.”
“You’ll have a proper escort,” he said, with a twitch of the lips that suggested he knew precisely what I was doing. “And no, I don’t mean to preserve propriety, I mean the kind that knows how to kill anyone who looks sideways at you. But I support the impulse to go out and spread confusion to the enemy. I’ll speak to you about it in the morning. That and a great many other things we need to discuss. Good night, Remi.”
The threatening tears had risen in my chest and up, like a suffocating tide through my throat and nose, and as he turned the doorknob and began to open the door, my magic protested violently, stretching toward him, feeling like something that had been attached under my ribs would snap—
Stefan opened the door and stepped through, and that invisible somethingyanked, and I burst into a storm of weeping, curling over into my lap, everything all muffled and exhausting and dim and shaking.
Running footsteps approached the bed.
“My lord!” Aldrich’s voice, more angry than I’d ever heard him. “What have you done to him?”
“Nothing! I didn’t—nothing this moment, he simply—Remi?”
Gentle hands landed on my shoulders, and even if I hadn’t recognized them as Aldrich’s, my magic would’ve; it wanted Stefan, and Aldrich’s touch, obviously meant to comfort, didn’twork, damn it to hell.
“My lord, you’re all right,” Aldrich said, and then, “My lord, please go!”
The change in his tone as he addressed one lord and then the other made me laugh through my tears, which transformed into a grotesque-sounding hiccup.
“Listen to him! He’s distraught! My lord, I must beg you to remove yourself, and allow me to—”
“You can’t possibly think I’d, I’d, fuck,” and he sounded more flustered than I’d thought it possible for Stefan to be. “You can’t possibly—”
“My lord, get out.”
“Fuck me,” Stefan muttered. “Send me word once—”
“Out!”
The door shut. I tried to choke down the hysteria, but I’d lost the plot, and my magic’s dismay at Stefan’s departure bloomed into despair as his footsteps faded away.
It took some unknown, indefinite, miserable span of time to run out of energy for more, and to be able to focus on being calmed by Aldrich’s soothing voice and the way he patted my back. My magic settled enough that I could breathe again.
Someone tapped on the door. “Lord Remigius’s tea and supper are here in the corridor,” said a servant outside.
“I’ll bring that in and run your bath,” Aldrich said, patted me one more time, and went.
The odd, heavy knot under my ribs and the faint stirring of my magical senses, reaching out toward the corridor and the stairs and Stefan’s study, suggested that part of me wished he’d be the one to pet me and cosset me and run my bath.
No one had told me that my potion suppressed insanity along with my powers and my curse.
The moment this poison wore off, I’d drink my potion and be grateful for it. Stefan might be my husband, and perhaps he’d taken my virginity, and he’d kissed me until I moaned and climbed him like a tree, and he might also have promised to protect me.
But he meant nothing to me at all. Absolutely nothing, no matter what my magic seemed to think.
Damn it. Dromos and Ennolu could both go jump in a river.
Chapter Thirteen
A bath, a pot of tea, and a good night’s sleep should’ve restored me to a normal state of health and cheer in the morning, but when Aldrich pulled the curtains to reveal a beautiful sunny day…well, they hadn’t.
Climbing out of bed to do all the necessary morning things turned into more of a lurch and a stagger, and I had to support myself with a hand on the wall as I came back from the bathroom. My optimistic plans to go out and see the city today now sounded nauseating and utterly exhausting. Confusion to the enemy would need to wait until I’d resolved my own.
Aldrich abandoned the fresh tea tray he’d been setting out on my dressing table and lunged at me, catching me by the elbow and helping me back into my bed.
“You’re obviously ill, my lord,” he said bluntly, frowning down at me. “You ought to have a physician in to see you. Or a mage, whatever you think is proper.”
