Leander noticed himself being studied and pulled on Oak’s sleeve. “You look bored. Want to play a game?” he asked, harnessing the guile of a child eager to press someone into the service of amusement.
“After dinner,” Oak told him with a glance at Oriana, who was already looking rather pained. “Your grandmother will be angry if we make a spectacle of ourselves at the table.”
“Cardan plays with me,” Leander said, obviously well prepared for this argument. “And he’s the High King. He showed me how to make a bird with two forks and a spoon. Then our birds fought until one fell apart.”
Cardan was spectacle incarnate and wouldn’t care if Oriana scolded him. Oak could only smile, though. He had often been a child at a table of adults and remembered how dull it had been. He would have loved to fight with silverware birds. “What other games have you played with the king?”
That launched a distractingly long catalog of misbehavior, from tossing mushrooms into cups of wine on the other ends of tables to folding napkins into hats to making awful faces at each other. “And he tells me funny stories about my father, Locke,” Leander concluded.
At that, Oak’s smile stiffened. He barely remembered Locke. His clearest memories revolved around Locke’s wedding to Taryn, and even those were mostly about how Heather had been turned into a cat and got really upset. It had been one of the moments that had made Oak realize that magic wasn’t fun for everyone.
On that thought, he looked across the table at Heather, suddenly wanting to reassure himself she was okay. Her hair was in microbraids with strands of vibrant, synthetic pink woven through them. Her dark skin glowed with shimmering pink highlights on her cheeks. He tried to catch her eye, but she was too busy studying a tiny sprite attempting to steal a fig off the center of the table.
His gaze went to Taryn next. Locke’s wife and murderer, tucking a lacy napkin into Leander’s shirt. It would be no wonder if Heather was nervous to sit at this table. Oak’s family was soaked in blood, the lot of them.
“How’s Dad?” Jude asked abruptly, raising her eyebrows.
Vivi shrugged and nodded in Oak’s direction. He’d been the one to see their father last. In fact, he’d spent a lot of time with their father over the past year.
“Keeping out of trouble,” Oak said, hoping it stayed that way.
After dinner, the royal family rejoined the Court. Oak danced with Lady Elaine, who smiled her cat-who-swallowed-a-mouse-and-is-still-hungry smile and whispered in Oak’s ear about how she was arranging a meeting in three days’ time with some people who believed in “their cause.”
“You’re certain you can go through with this?” she asked him, breath hot against his neck. Her thick red hair hung down her back in a single wide braid, strands of rubies woven into the plaits. She wore a dress adorned with threads of gold, as though already auditioning to become his queen.
“I’ve never thought of Cardan as any relation of mine, but I have often resented what he took from me,” Oak reassured her. And if he shuddered a little at her touch, she might imagine it was a shudder of passion. “I have been looking for just this opportunity.”
And she, misunderstanding in just the way he hoped, smiled against his skin. “And Jude isn’t your real sister.”
At that, Oak smiled back but made no reply. He knew what she meant, but he could never have agreed.
She departed after the end of the dance, pressing a last kiss on his throat.
He was certain he could go through with this. Though it led inexorably to her death and he wasn’t at all sure what that meant about him.
He’d done it before. When he glanced around the room, he couldn’t help noticing the absence of those whom he’d already manipulated and then betrayed. Members of three conspiracies he’d undone in the past, tricking members into turning against one another—and him. They’d gone to the Tower of Forgetting or the chopping block for those crimes, never even knowing they’d fallen into his trap.
In this garden full of asps, he was a pitcher plant, beckoning them to a tumble. Sometimes there was a part of him that wanted to scream: Look at me. See what I am. See what I’ve done.
As though drawn by self-destructive thoughts, his bodyguard, Tiernan, approached with an accusatory look, brows drawn sharply together. He was dressed in banded leather armor with the crest of the royal family pinning a short cape across one shoulder. “You’re making a scandal of yourself.”
Conspiracies were often foolish things, wishful thinking combined with a paucity of interesting Court intrigues. Gossip and too much wine and too little sense. But he had a feeling this one was different. “She’s arranging the meeting. It’s almost over.”