Tyrant's Throne by Sebastien de Castell

Author:Sebastien de Castell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC009030 Fiction / Fantasy / Historical
Publisher: Quercus
Published: 2017-06-05T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

THE BOY AND HIS DOG

We stopped sooner than we should have, Filian being too tired and too heartbroken to continue. A better man than I would have been sympathetic to his plight. A more practical one would have killed him.

“You don’t like me, do you.” He didn’t bother making it a question.

I stared at him, willing his mouth to tighten into a sneer or his chin to inch up into a haughty scowl, giving me the excuse to slap him across the face, but he was too smart—or too innocent—to provide me with the necessary provocation.

“I don’t know you,” I said at last.

“And you don’t want to.”

I kicked at a mound, stubbing my toe on the broken branch concealed by the snow, then knelt to pick it up. “Find more of these,” I said. “We need wood if we’re to have a fire.”

He did as he was told, staying close and often looking back to make sure I hadn’t left him alone in this wilderness. His entirely natural and sensible fear bothered me; no one raised by Patriana, Duchess of Hervor, had any business exhibiting normal human emotions.

More troubling was that I found myself making dark calculations: at fifteen paces away from me, with his attention focused on the ground in front of him, it would take me four seconds to bridge the distance between us. Even with my hands firmly at my sides, the urge to draw my rapier, to let that swift, fluid motion extend into a killing lunge, gnawed at me. The tip of the sword would slide so easily through the boy’s back, just to the left of his spine, and come out the other side with his heart’s blood dripping along the length of the blade.

I tried to shake the image away, but that made the bracer of throwing knives inside my coat rub against my chest, reminding me that I needn’t even get close to the boy to do the job; he’d stuck to the little path and there was a clear line between us, no trees or branches to shield him. My first throw would embed a knife between his shoulder blades—enough to incapacitate, not kill—but the second and third would finish the job. Aline would be crowned. The country would be safe. And Filian wasn’t facing me, so I wouldn’t even have to see his eyes when the light left them.

The vividness of my visions unsettled me and I didn’t know if it was the traditional Tristian aversion to shedding royal blood, or because despite all the violence in my life, I had never before contemplated the murder of an innocent.

Saint Birgid, where are you when I actually need someone to scold me for thinking a blade could solve all the world’s problems?

A polite cough pulled me back: Kest, alerting me to his presence, which I’d managed to miss entirely—a sure sign that I was unlikely to make a good assassin. The urge to yell at him for sneaking up on

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