Chapter 12

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Ambrose looked up from the toxicology report, trying again to understand all the whys. Why had this happened? Why hadn’t anyone known it would happen and why was the woman who stood before him responsible for it? He considered his own culpability in bringing her to the Palace, swearing silently at himself.

She’d performed her task too well. Dynan no longer suffered from the extreme reticence that had marked him the whole of his life. For Liselle’s help, Ambrose had promised her a title. There wasn’t supposed to be anything else to it. The reward, which Liselle agreed to, was a marriage to Gauvin Telaerin, a second cousin to Ambrose and fourth in line to the throne.

“What do you want?” Apparently, her aim was a good bit higher.

“I don’t want anything, Your Majesty.” She stood before the desk composed but pale. Liselle was quite skilled at hiding what she really felt. Ambrose remembered a woman very much like her.

“Well you can guess easily enough what this looks like to me.”

“It isn’t,” she said and ran her teeth over her bottom lip. “It isn’t at all what you think.”

“You drugged him. You made it look to him like he’d been with you, when in fact you were not, and then you told him you were pregnant, when you aren’t. What exactly would you have me think?”

Ambrose held up his hand to stop her from answering, uncertain the tears in her eyes were real or feigned. He’d asked her to fake a relationship with his son, so he shouldn’t be angry when she did too good a job of it.

“You also managed to see to it that rumor of the supposed pregnancy was leaked and now word of it is spreading as though it was fact. You convinced Dynan to go to your father to ask for your hand in marriage, which I might have been bound to accept had he been successful. He wasn’t. He was stopped this morning and confined to the property.”

Ambrose glanced over her head to the two men who stood behind her by half a room length to make sure that was in fact the case and both nodded. Brendin and Roth, who’d just gotten back from a trip he wasn’t talking about only moments ago, were operating in full damage control mode, trying to head off the speculation and rumors before they could spread. An exercise in futility. In a matter of hours, the news that Dynan had gotten a girl pregnant had made its way outside Cobalt’s boundaries even, to other Systems, so it was certain anyone of importance here had already heard it.

“I admire and respect your father too much to cause him any more embarrassment. In approximately two months time your marriage to Gauvin will proceed as originally planned. He’s been given an injection of a kind that will prevent him from fathering any children for the next six months, by which time it will be obvious that the rumors aren’t true. Gauvin doesn’t know any of this. The injection was given by a military physician who told him it was part of a new regimen. He won’t find out unless you make it necessary.”

Liselle gasped at that. “I don’t want—”

“What you want is of no concern to me”

“I’ll tell Dynan the truth.” She bristled, completely misreading the situation she was now in. “I’ll tell him you brought me here to be with him and you approved. I’ll tell him—”

“You won’t ever speak to him again.” Ambrose saw that she didn’t believe that. “Those access codes you once had have already been changed. You won’t see him again either. Gauvin is hardly here anymore now that his father’s health is failing. On the few occasions he does come here, you won’t be with him.”

“I didn’t mean to fall in love with him.” She fought back more tears. She was shaking too. Ambrose almost believed her.

“You could have killed him with that drug. The traces we found in the wine glass were only a few mirokens shy of lethal. Fortunately for you, I believe your ignorance instead of the appearance of intent. And love had little to do with any of this, except perhaps love of power.”

She meant to deny that too. “That’s not ... I was afraid I wouldn—”

“You can accept the offer you’ve been given, or you can spend the rest of your life with the Sisters of Faith at their temple on Altair. Right along with another traitor to the Crown. She had an interest in drugs too.”

He nodded imperceptibly to Roth who came and took Liselle by the arm. “He won’t believe you. He’ll blame you for this and he won’t forgive you for it,” she said as she was pulled away from the desk. “He knows me too well.”

Ambrose watched her go, keeping doubt from his face. Once she was out of sight and the door closed, he leaned back in his chair and put his head back to stare at the ceiling. “He won’t forgive me.”

“He’ll blame Dain first.” Brendin moved to stand at the desk. “But you know they can’t stay mad at each other for long.”

“What if Dynan finds out I’m the one who brought her here and told her to get close to him? It’s pretty obvious Dain knows.” Ambrose looked at Brendin without raising his head. “Dynan will find out. What then?”

“He won’t find out. If Dain knows he won’t say anything to him. We’re going to monitor her com and we’ll monitor Dynan’s. I’m sure Liselle would rather be married to Gauvin, than married to the temple. Her father has been instructed to reiterate that message. She’s a lot of things, but unintelligent isn’t one of them.”

Ambrose swiveled himself around to look out at the waning day, at the slant of sunlight playing across the broad slope of the Palace lawn, reflected back by the glare of snow on the ground. The winter seemed endless.

“It’s all written too.”

“What?” Brendin asked because he’d muttered.

Ambrose shook his head and didn’t repeat it, not wanting to get into a discussion about the word of Alurn Telaerin, or the truth of those words. While his son’s memory had been wiped clean, Ambrose’s had not. He remembered what his father said. He knew what was in the book he’d destroyed and while one catastrophe had been avoided, there were others lurking in the shadows.

“I suppose I shouldn’t care what he finds out about me after I’m gone.” This time he spoke to the ceiling. “But I hope he never finds out about this.”

“After you’re gone? Ambrose, what are you talking about?”

Absently, he waved a hand, hoping to deflect attention away from the truth he’d veered too close to. “Maybe when he’s my age, doing this, and he’s gotten some perspective on what it’s like. I know how much I detested my own father, Brendin. I don’t want Dynan to end up feeling the same way about me. Not over this.”

“He won’t. You’re nothing like your father.” Brendin was adamant and nodded to the desk. “Is it still there?”

Ambrose knew what he was talking about and opened the drawer where it was kept. He searched under a stack of papers and books before he found it at the bottom. He drew out the long, supple rod of weir wood, three, nearly four kem long. Weir wood was a strong, dense kind of wood that was difficult to break. Not impossible though. His father kept it oiled to keep it from drying out. Ambrose supposed he’d replaced it every once in a while, the ones that didn’t actually break in use, but they all looked the same.

“Do any of your children know what this is?” Brendin demanded in a tone he didn’t normally use.

“No.”

“So they’ve never seen it. Will they?”

“No.” Ambrose pushed to his feet.

“There’s your answer. He used to beat you with that thing. I remember when you put Dain over your knee, what, thirteen years ago now, you were practically in tears over it.”

“All right—”

“You’re nothing like Dionin.” Brendin ignored the cues that Ambrose wanted to end the discussion. “You’ve been an amazing father to your children. I happen to know that all four of them adore you. This little bump in the road isn’t going to change that.”

Ambrose waited for him to finish this time and then waited again to make sure the sermon was over. It was nice to hear, but didn’t do much to alleviate the responsibility he felt for his son having his heart broken.

“And maybe one day,” Brendin went on, not finished after all, “we’ll learn how to recognize a conniving bitch when she walks in the door.” He held out his hand, nodding to the switch. “Give me that.”

Ambrose handed it to him and watched while Brendin snapped it in half. It didn’t give until he bent it all the way over. Brendin flung the pieces into the fire and watched them burn. Ambrose watched with him, feeling more satisfaction from it than he expected while the flames blackened the wood. He hadn’t seen the thing in thirty-six years.

Xavier walked in, joining them before the rod was consumed. He recognized it too. There’d been more than a few occasions when the Lord Chancellor had stopped the King’s execution of punishment. Xavier watched the wood burn and frowned a little.

“I haven’t seen that since you were thirteen.”

“It was in the desk.” Ambrose knew a lecture was coming on by the raised eyebrow.

“Shall we burn him in effigy next?” Xavier told Ambrose once when he was twenty-five that he was a grown man and had to stop blaming his father for everything.

The flames took certain hold of the rod. “No. This is enough.”

The Lord Chancellor handed him a comboard, nodding him to the open file. “It was a long time ago.”

“It was in the desk.” He decided he’d read instead of listen to a sermon about letting go of the past.

Xavier looked to the fire again and refrained. “Dain is arriving at Beren.”