Fool's Errand (2 page)

“You are,” said Azriel through his teeth, as he slowly unclenched his fists.

With a smile that showed his own perfect teeth to their best advantage, Mordecai shifted his gaze to the young soldier who was kneeling on Persephone's back. Licking his lips, he said, “Lift her head higher that I may watch her eyes—first as the scalp is peeled from the head of this Gypsy cockroach with whom she so brazenly defiled herself, and thereafter as her life's blood drains from the mortal wound that you shall presently inflict upon her pretty white throat.”

The young soldier on Persephone's back hesitated for only a moment before twining his fingers tighter in her wild, dark hair and lifting her head so high that her back was arched almost to the waist.

Mordecai leaned his bobbing head a little farther forward. Then, without taking his eyes off Persephone's face, he breathed, “Do the Gypsy.”

The smash-nosed soldier holding Azriel nodded.

“No—please! Your Grace, I'll do
anything
!” begged Persephone as she twisted and squirmed with all her might.

Mordecai sighed softly at this but did not rescind his order. The smash-nosed soldier, meanwhile, struggled to get a proper hold of Azriel's recently shorn auburn hair. Upon finally getting the grip he sought, he growled with satisfaction and set the blade of his scalping knife at Azriel's brow.

With a lopsided little grin, Azriel looked over at Persephone—his last goodbye.

Desperately—though in a voice as haughty, cold and noble as could be—Persephone cried,
“As a princess of the blood, I order you to release that man at once!”

In spite of himself, the smash-nosed soldier froze.

“Do him!” bellowed Mordecai in a sudden rage. “Do him now, you worthless piece of—”

His last words were lost in the strangled shriek he emitted as a strong hand yanked him backward by his dark, glossy hair—and a dripping dagger was pressed against his throat.

“I b-believe that you forgot about me again, Your Grace,” stammered the pockmarked servant.

“Unhand me at once, you interfering lowborn nobody!” screamed Mordecai. “Unhand me or I will see you slaughtered without mercy!”

In response, the trembling woman adjusted her grip on the hilt of the dagger she'd pulled from the throat of the dead soldier. Fixing her colourless eyes upon the soldiers that held Persephone and Azriel, she said, “Release the princess and her lover—”

“He's not my lover,” squeaked Persephone.

“Or your master is dead.”

“Release them and
you
are dead!” shrieked Mordecai as he feebly struggled against the humiliatingly iron grip of the woman made strong by years of toil. “Unless … unless, of course, this woman releases me,” he added in a deliberately less deranged voice. “If she releases me, you may release them.”

At this, the pockmarked servant cast an uncertain glance toward Persephone. “Your Highness?” she asked.

“Do not release
or
kill him,” said Persephone, who knew that she, Azriel and the servant were finished the instant the Regent was dead or beyond the threat of death. To buy time to figure out what to do, she added, “I would ask the Regent some questions before deciding what to do with him.”

At these words, Mordecai stopped struggling and looked down at her.

“By the scar I bear upon my arm, you know me to be the elder twin of the king,” she began.

“Yes,” replied Mordecai.

Persephone's heart leapt at the admission. “The night I was born, you could have murdered me in the birthing chamber and told the world I'd been born dead,” she continued. “Instead, you ordered a lackey with mismatched eyes to spirit me beyond the castle walls, there to kill me and dispose of my body. Why?”

“It was an error,” admitted the Regent as he impatiently thrust his gnarled hands into the pockets of his robe. “The Gypsy Seer had promised old king Malthusius a son, and it never even occurred to me that she might have been telling a half-truth. It was an exceedingly foolish mistake on my part—since Gypsies are known to be liars of the highest order—but that's as may be. The instant you slithered from between your mother's legs, I knew I had to get rid of you. It was that or risk having the nobility challenge my right to rule the kingdom on behalf of the weakling prince born second. Believing that disposing of you in plain view of those who'd attended your birth was too dangerous, I made alternative arrangements. In hindsight, of course, I see that I ought simply to have held a pillow over your tiny face and been done with it.”

“Since you later disposed of all who'd attended her birth, anyway,” said Azriel coldly.

“Not all,” corrected the Regent with a sinister sideways glance at the pockmarked servant who still held him fast. “Only all who mattered.”

“Including my mother,” said Persephone.

“Oh, I had no hand in her death,” demurred the Regent. “The queen died of childbed fever. So in truth, Princess, it was
you
who killed your mother—you and your brother, the king.”

As he spoke these last words, Mordecai yanked his hand from his pocket and drove it back toward the belly of the pockmarked servant. Azriel bellowed a warning, but Persephone didn't even have time to do that—she saw a brief flash of steel and then heard the surprised grunt of the servant as the Regent's hidden blade was buried to the hilt. With a grunt of his own, the Regent awkwardly twisted from the woman's failing grasp on his beautiful hair. Turning, he stabbed her again and again, punctuating each knife thrust with a jubilant cry,

“
FOOL! IMBECILE! TO THINK—THAT YOU—COULD BEST—THE MIGHTY—REGENT—MORDECAI
!”

It went on and on and on. When he finally finished punishing the lifeless body at his feet, straightened up and turned around once more, the Regent was beaming—and splattered with gore. “That useless, lowborn nobody thought she could best
me
,” he panted. “But she could not! And neither can you, Princess!”

“I don't care about besting you!” burst Persephone, who was shaking with horror. “I don't care about being a princess or about anything that goes along with it. I only want my companions and me to be allowed to live!”

“Your companions?” snorted Mordecai, his happy countenance vanishing at once. “Do you perchance mean this smug cockroach and the Gypsy brat you stole from my dungeon? Are these the
companions
of which you speak, Princess?”

“Yes,” gulped Persephone, relieved that he did not appear to know about the girl who was currently hiding in the stables—or about the dog, horse and hawk who'd followed her so well and so far.

With a snarl, the Regent gestured for the young soldier to haul Persephone to her feet. Plucking the dagger from the cooling hand of the murdered servant, Mordecai thrust it so close to Persephone's face that she could smell the tang of fresh blood. “If you'd kept this blade to protect yourself instead of using it to save the life of the drab that now lies dead before you, you might yet have had a fighting chance,” he hissed. “But you did not, and so you and your so-called companions are doomed. Which is as it should be,
Princess
, for though I tried valiantly to make you see that servants are replaced as easily as smashed dinner plates, you are as stubborn as your peasant-hearted brother when it comes to understanding that there are those who matter and those who merely take up space. And that is why I know I will be doing the kingdom of Glyndoria a glorious service by sending you both onward into the afterlife.”

“Wait—what do you mean ‘both'?” gasped Persephone. “Do you mean that you intend to kill King Finnius as well?”

“Of course,” said Mordecai silkily. “How else can I become king except by disposing of the one whose backside currently warms the throne?”

“But … but it would be a wasted effort!” she cried. “The Erok nobility would never accept you as king!”

Mordecai smiled gloatingly. “You are wrong, Princess, for Lord Bartok has promised that once I announce his daughter's betrothal to the king, he will force the king's Council to name me heir apparent and to accept me as such. Thereafter, if the king should die—and I assure you that he will die, most agonizingly—I shall ascend to the throne.”

Knowing from experience that those in positions of power rarely responded well to being spat upon, Persephone bit her lip to keep from doing so as she frantically searched her mind for some way to save the king—and the kingdom—even if she could not save herself and her companions. Before she could come up with any clever ideas, however, Azriel made the situation a thousand times worse by loudly declaring, “Even if all that you say is true, Your Grace, you still can't be king. You're a cripple!”

TWO

A
T AZRIEL'S WORDS
, Persephone felt the blood drain from her face. There were easy ways to die and hard ways to die, and mocking the Regent for his terrible deformities must certainly guarantee the very hardest death of all.

“Azriel,” she breathed, giving her head the tiniest of shakes.

“But he
is
a cripple, Princess,” insisted Azriel with a deliberately provocative roll of his own powerful shoulders. “Even if he had other than base blood running through his veins—which he does not—how could he ever be king? Look at him—he can hardly hold up his own head!”

At this, the gore-splattered Regent lifted both his head and Persephone's bloody knife as high as he was able. Slowly, he began lurching toward the kneeling Gypsy and the smash-nosed soldier who yet held him by the hair. Inwardly cursing Azriel for a reckless fool, Persephone hissed his name again but he took no notice.

Instead, careless of the scalping knife that was now pressed against his throat, he absently ran his hand from the broad ridge of his chest to the hard flatness of his stomach—and kept talking.

“His Grace hasn't the strength and vitality to set him above other men,” he explained as he gazed placidly up into the livid face of the madman who was advancing upon him. “He could never wield a sword in defence of the kingdom or ride a great hunter or even dance at his own banquet. And he most
certainly
could never get an heir upon a suitable wife, for there is not a noblewoman in the realm who would willingly lie with him looking the way he does now. It matters not that his face is handsome and that he is powerful and rich. When even the lowest lowborn slattern in the kingdom looks at him, I promise you that all she can see are his narrow, crooked back, his skinny, twisted legs, his limp, useless—”

“Silence!” screamed the Regent. Savagely wiping spittle off his chin with the back of his shaking hand, he panted audibly and stared down at Azriel as though trying to decide what piece of him to slice off first.

Seeming bizarrely gratified by Mordecai's reaction—and looking so fearless that Persephone decided he was not reckless but utterly insane—Azriel leaned forward and whispered, “Let us go and I can change all that, Your Grace. Let us go and I can change
everything
.”

With an animal noise somewhere between a howl and a snarl, Mordecai slashed with the dagger.

Azriel jerked his head to the side so quickly that the point of the dagger missed him entirely and instead sliced open the cheek of the soldier who held him. As it did so, Persephone lunged against the hold of her own captor. When he did not let go, she flung her head back as hard as she could and was savagely gratified to hear the sound of his nose breaking.

Unfortunately, Azriel did not use the moment of distraction to try to escape. Even more unfortunately, he resumed speaking.

“Your Grace, I can see to it that you are made well and whole,” he murmured in a voice so seductive that Persephone found herself responding to it in spite of the rather distracting moans of pain issuing from the freshly injured soldiers. “Imagine—your back strengthened, your legs straightened, your chest broadened. Feel the raw power of your fists and the fleetness of your feet. See yourself leading the hunt astride the fiercest beast in the royal stables, bringing down a ten-point stag at full gallop with one arrow shot from your mighty bow. Envision yourself striding briskly through the halls of the imperial palace with your head held high with ease, setting every noblewoman in sight panting with desire, ready to claw out her sister's eyes that she might lie with you next—not for gifts or wealth or position but for the sensual pleasure of knowing you as the man you were ever meant to be. Imagine it all, Your Grace, and know that I—and I alone!—can make it happen.”

For a long moment after Azriel stopped speaking, Mordecai smiled down at the handsome Gypsy but did not seem to see him, so lost was he in the breathtaking vision of what could be.

Then his smile faded, and his dark eyes refocused and hardened.

“Do not play with me, cockroach,” he snarled, “for I know your Gypsy tricks will not cure injuries as old and as great as mine. Not even your blood will cure them—not even the blood of the very youngest of your tribesmen will cure them!”