“Never took you for someone with a weak stomach,” a highborn man joked.
Tempest arched a haughty brow at him. “We could take this outside and I could show you how weak I’m not.” That shut the pompous peacock up.
Madrid eyed her and turned back to the conversation at hand. Her other uncles pushed forward to listen in.
“Another village was hit yesterday,” one of the members of the war council said. He was an aging man, with a lined face and graying hair. She didn’t know for sure, but his nasally voice was too unique to forget. If she wasn’t wrong, Temp believed him to be the man she’d overheard conspiring with the king to frame Talaga for everything going wrong in the kingdom. He was an ordinary looking sort of man. Unremarkable. It was hard to believe that such depravity lurked beneath the surface. What sort of man would kill women and children? She hated him.
“It was closer to the capital this time. Barely in the forest at all,” Madrid commented.
The relief that washed over her was quickly followed by shame. People had died, and yet she was thankful it wasn’t the village her mum grew up in. It was a wicked, selfish thought, but it was there nonetheless.
“This is concerning.”
Tempest stiffened at the king’s voice behind her.
The snake had slithered from his lair.
In a wave, the men bowed. Temp bit the inside of her cheek when the king’s hand rested on her left shoulder, his thumb brushing her collarbone. He didn’t look at her as he moved closer to the group.
“Before we know it, the shifters will be upon us in Dotae,” he said. “It’s only a matter of time before they prey on some of the more isolated villages.”
The isolated villages… It was as if he knew what she was thinking.
She did not manage to suppress the shudder that ran through her at the thought. She glanced around. Thankfully, nobody was paying enough attention to her.
“There have been captures of the drug responsible for the deaths in several of the affected villages,” Madrid said. The lead Hound was an observant man and only spoke when he had something of value to say. “Its roots definitely derived from the South Isles.”
“Has Aleks had any further luck determining what exactly the drug comes from?” the king asked.
“Very little. The drug has been expertly purified. We have only been able to link it to the South Isles because of a few spies in the forest watching the trade routes,” Madrid answered.
“It is only a matter of time before full-on war breaks out across the nation,” the king replied, convincingly upset.
What rubbish.
“Obviously, we do not wish this to happen,” he went on. “To go to war against the South Isles would ruin our relationship with them forever.”
It was uncanny how easily King Destin could lie. He was the one who was orchestrating the entire disgusting plan, though hearing Madrid talk of spies in the forest made her stomach lurch uncomfortably. Did he know what his king was doing? He must. He was the lead Hound. As much as she didn’t want to believe any of the Hounds had anything to do with the king’s treachery, she couldn’t let her affection for them cloud her judgement. It was almost her downfall before.
Framing the Talagans for poisoning villages in the forest was just the beginning of King Destin’s plan. Never mind the fact that most people killed by the drug were shifters. Looking back on it now, she could not believe she had been so naïve as to believe the Talagans were responsible for destroying their own people. It had taken Pyre—the Jester—showing her what the villages along the border really, truly looked like for Tempest’s eyes to open to the truth.
No, it took so much more than that.
Shame welled in her belly that she had not believed what she’d seen when she had seen it. It had been obvious the villagers were not fighters. She thought of Rina and little Aspen running their bakery without a care in the world. Except they did have a care in the world; all around them, their people were dying, the men going out to defend them and never returning. When all this was over—if there were any Talagans left at all—the number of women compared to men of marriageable age would be terribly out of proportion. It would be difficult to repopulate the Talagan people.
Perhaps their low female population had doomed the shifter race in the long term without any need for a war at all. A dark thought indeed. She glanced at the king from the corner of her eye. The fact that he planned to bring the South Isles into the mix was worrisome. She’d swallow her hat if he didn’t have some scheme to invade the South Isles, too. Temp rolled her neck. That was the last thing the kingdom needed.
“You would think the shifters would know that attacking in this way will only lead to their demise,” the king’s youngest son drawled from his father’s left-hand side. “I guess they are too stupid and lazy to come up with a smarter plan of attack.”
“Lazy and stupid,” the crown prince replied, then sloppily drank from a goblet of wine. “They are beasts. Monsters. Of course they are lazy and stupid!”
Tempest barely kept from rolling her eyes. The king’s stupid sons were spouting unintelligent rubbish again. How surprising.
“Damn right,” the younger son replied. The two princes continued along their increasingly insulting topic of conversation, which had absolutely nothing to do with the politics spoken about by the adults around them and everything to do with flaunting the ignorant views that their pampered upbringing and privileged lifestyle afforded them. Tempest wanted nothing more than to bite out a retort, but she didn’t.
Silence sometimes was an ally.
Tempest held her tongue even though it pained her. She struggled to believe that the younger prince was just one year her junior; she felt decades older than him. Tired, too. Had she always felt this way? Or just since she’d met the Jester? Even though she loathed the kitsune, at least she wasn’t as naïve as before.
She blankly gazed at the two princes. Thank the stars she was never as stupid as those two. The crown prince certainly lacked the handsome, striking features of his father, and was dull to a fault. He was rarely seen without a glass of wine in his hand and was prone to weasel himself out of any and all responsibilities that might otherwise have been put on his shoulders.
Tempest watched as King Destin’s nose wrinkled when the crown prince gurgled down the remains of his goblet and let out a resounding burp. The king made no attempt at hiding his disgust of his eldest son.
Her attention moved to the younger prince. She liked him even less, but for different reasons than his elder brother. He seemed altogether more calculating, cunning, and sadistic. She recalled him tormenting animals as they grew up. And not even two days prior, Temp had caught him harassing a pretty servant girl in the corridor, threatening to have her dismissed if she did not come up to his room after the banquet. She hid her smile at the memory of how she herself then threatened the prince in a shadowy alcove after the servant girl had fled.
The younger prince caught her eye and lifted his goblet to her. Tempest didn’t return his salute. She knew what it really meant. She’d caught him unawares and was now within his sights. Temp wasn’t afraid of him, but she knew better than to underestimate him. Both of King Destin’s sons were unsuitable for the throne, that was to be sure.