Page 2 of His Realm

“The palace cannot be breached,” Zev, my hendr, my champion, assured me. “Even if the best sniper in the world was perched on a rooftop, what would they shoot at so deep into the rooms?”

He was a vampyr, like everyone around me, so really, what did they have to fear? Being at the top of the food chain, the alpha predator, made them complacent about their safety, unworried, and without any understanding of my concern.

“Listen,” I’d say to Zev. “The threat, whatever it is, it’s not imminent. They’re doing recon work. They’re trying to find openings, charting times and noting who’s there and who isn’t.”

He’d widen his eyes and nod like I was out of my mind.

“You see,” I’d point out again to Dae-Jung. “The curtains are never in the exact same way, and different rugs are aired out and hung over the sides of the balconies.”

“Yes, I see,” he’d agree cheerfully, as if fearing for my sanity.

“I’m not crazy,” I reiterated often.

“I know you miss Varic,” Brenna, one of my private guards, would tell me. “He’ll be back soon, I’m certain.”

I did miss him, yes. But that had nothing to do with what was happening.

I tried to watch which servants were there when curious things happened, but I was constantly called away, and with Varic gone, Hadrian and Tiago at his side as they hunted Varic’s half brother Alrek, who was wanted for treason, I was left to stand at the king’s side and greet all the visitors to court.

The king, more interested in adding to his stable of courtesans than in warnings from me, didn’t want to hear how the many men and women going in and out of his private rooms in the palace were not the same. I could count, but apparently no one else could.

One would think, after uncovering a plot that killed Nerilla and nearly killed me, that I would have a bit more clout. But apparently, imagining anyone attempting to kill the king was laughable. It made no sense to me, the certainty that it couldn’t happen. But this was again that complacency because it was no easy thing to kill a vampyr, especially one as powerful as the head of the house of Maedoc.

They all thought I was nuts and looked at me like it was so sad that missing Varic was beginning to affect my mind. I was only human, after all, and five months had to seem like a lifetime to me.

When I called Varic on the phone, he was distant and distracted. He wanted to come home to me, and was frustrated that he couldn’t until he found his half brother, who hadn’t so much taken part in the coup as run away in terror. Since I was the only one Varic could vent to, I became a source of both desire and annoyance. As days rolled into months, the phone conversations had become shorter, until they were perfunctory nightly check-ins. I’d stopped calling the week before and had not heard from him. If Tiago were at court, he could have filled in for me, and I would have been free to leave at any time to return to New Orleans to visit Ode and my store, or visit the queen on her island, which I was dying to see. But as I had to be there for the king, I was good and stuck, or at least had been until the king gave me leave. Five council members had arranged to come and fill in for me in all my different capacities. It was very kind of them, and I’d thanked each one lavishly in a handwritten note accompanied by gifts I knew they would like. I did my research, and each had been pleasantly surprised. The longest serving member of the king’s council, Countess Sabira Minsi, had arrived that very evening from Oslo, Norway, and I had been so glad to meet her.

She was an ancient vampyr, like Messina, and her family, she told me, had hunted mammoths. Icy with me initially, even having appreciated the gift I sent her of a complete saber-tooth tiger fossil, when I sat and listened to her with genuine, rapt attention, she warmed quickly and promised to stay even when I returned after a month. When she took my hand in hers, I’d held tight. She was lifting the burden of being in the king’s service off my shoulders, and I couldn’t have been more grateful.

“These simpering courtesans will receive no sympathy from me,” she’d said as we walked into the hall together hours earlier. “To place yourself willingly at another’s mercy is utter madness.”

I couldn’t agree more.

“Some people would think you do the same by agreeing to wed Varic, but I know better.”

Listening was always best, so I remained silent for her thoughts.

“Someday, when Varic succeeds his father, all the courtesans will be gone from the palace, as for Varic there will be only one. Only you. Isabella told me how dearly Varic holds you. The rabble should prepare now for an exodus.”

Clearly, she had no love for the courtesans, but that was to be expected. She and Isabella Maedoc, the Queen Consort, Varic’s mother, were sisters.

“I will try to make Messina see the logic of taking no more while I fill in for you,” she told me. “I doubt he will listen.”

I doubted that as well, and as Zev reminded me often, being in service to the king didn’t necessarily mean he was going to heed your counsel. He knew that from experience. Because yes, I had brought the coup to light over a year ago, but Zev himself had warned the king for centuries, actual centuries, that Gideon, his deceased rajan, was up to no good. His warnings had fallen on deaf ears, just as mine had in the days preceding this ball.

I had shared my fears with the king a week before to no avail, receiving only his usual smiling and nodding, and if I’d gone to him earlier tonight, he would have laughed at me, or worse, given me that patronizing pat on the cheek he was so fond of. There were guards at the only entrance to the hall, everyone there had to show their braided gold silk bracelet adorning their left wrist before they were allowed admittance, and though they weren’t announced—it was a masked ball, after all; you weren’t supposed to know who you were talking to—the invitations, in form of those bracelets, had been meticulously distributed by the aides of the rajan of the prince. Tiago was above reproach, as was his staff, so to think someone was there who shouldn’t have been was ludicrous.

And yet…

As I stood beside a column and watched the throng, I saw the king drinking and laughing, downing goblet after goblet of thick, rich, heavily spiked blood, and I noted several people moving along the perimeter toward him. If they were there to socialize, to flirt and engage with others, they would have remained in the packed crowd. These individuals were making their way around the edges of the sprawl to our sovereign.

Once they were close, I could see them puncture the bubble near Messina Maedoc, slithering closer, not stopping to chat—which was the point of the ball, to talk to people and unmask them. If you guessed right, off came their disguise and their bracelet was added to yours, both adorning your wrist. If you guessed wrong, the opposite occurred. The winner was the last one with their identity still veiled at the end of the decadent evening. I wasn’t a big lover of masks, had never been crazy about Halloween even when I was a kid, and presently I liked them even less.

But again, I was probably being paranoid. Maybe those jostling their way to the king were excited to see him; maybe it was their first time at court and they wanted to touch him. Several members of the nobility had brought their newly of age children with them, so perhaps I was misreading sheer excitement and seeing only subterfuge and threat. The issue was, with everyone masked, I was stumbling around in the dark.

Then suddenly, in an opening between bodies, people moving close and apart, there was body language I knew on instinct. It was the hold on a knife of someone prepared, gripping it so the blade pointed downward. Slashing didn’t always work, but stabbing did. The lights from the enormous crystal chandeliers confirmed it, bouncing off everything in the gilded, mirrored room, tracing the curve of steel as it was lifted.

If I yelled, however many assassins there actually were would converge on the king. If Varic had been here, he would have been beside me, and I could have pointed out the threat. With his speed and strength, he could have reached his father. If Hadrian, the rekkr, the champion of Varic’s house, were in the room, he too could have made it to the king—though, as this was an event exclusively for the nobility, Hadrian wouldn’t have been there anyway. More importantly, as there was no need to be protected in the hall, no champion and no personal guards were in attendance. Saving the king fell to me alone.