Tomorrow's Kingdom (14 page)

Provoked into momentarily forgetting the rather precarious position in which he found himself, Lord Atticus's watery eyes bulged again—this time with indignation. “Do not compare
me
to some lowborn piece of refuse,” he huffed, puffing out his soft chest. “I am a lord of impeccable breeding—one day to be the greatest nobleman in all the realm!”

“And yet instead of announcing yourself at my gate, you slunk over my castle wall in the dead of night, murdered my soldiers in cold blood and raced toward my kitchens to … what? Abduct my cook? Raid my larder?”

Lord Atticus's pasty face went blotchy with embarrassment. “I didn't
mean
to make my way to your kitchens,” he muttered.

“No?” said Mordecai, his dark eyes glittering. “What did you mean to do?”

When the future “greatest nobleman in all the realm” mashed his fleshy lips together to show that he had no intention of replying, Mordecai slowly and deliberately turned his head and stared at the fireplace poker—the tip of which was nestled deep within the glowing embers of the fire. Then, just as slowly and deliberately, he turned his head back around, fixed his gaze upon the reluctant young lord and hissed,
“Answer me.”

Though still firmly tied to the chair, Lord Atticus yelped and jerked as though he'd just been jabbed with the business end of the poker. Then, his words running together in his haste to spit them out, he cried, “Imeanttorescuethequeen!”

“Who set you to this evil, treasonous task?” barked Mordecai, who already knew the answer. “What did he hope to accomplish by it? And are you quite sure that kidnapping my beloved betrothed was the
only
thing you meant to do?”

Eyes bulging—
again
—Bartok's terrified idiot heir opened and closed his mouth several times, but nothing came out.

Ignoring the death rattle of the dying New Man, Mordecai shuffled closer to Lord Atticus. As he did so, he casually lowered the wine goblet and gave it a vigorous swirl so that the young nobleman had a good view of the nose.

“Are you sure you didn't also mean to cause
me
mischief, my lord?” asked Mordecai softly. “Are you sure you didn't mean to murder
me
in cold blood—just as you murdered my soldiers?”

Though the accusation pushed Lord Atticus to the brink of tears, he did not deny it. Instead, he squeezed his eyes shut and moaned, “Why are you torturing me like this? If you do not want money, for gods' sakes, tell me:
What do you want
?”

Amazed and disgusted that the spoiled young lord
could indulge himself in feeling “tortured” when the results of real torture sat not three feet away from him, Mordecai said, “I want information. I want cooperation.”

Lord Atticus stopped moaning and reluctantly opened his puffy eyes. “What kind of information?” he muttered, more petulant than wary. “What kind of cooperation?”

“The kind that will allow me to outmanoeuvre that pack of noble worms that wriggle around to your father's tune,” replied Mordecai serenely as he gave the goblet in his hand another swirl. “The kind that will see your father destroyed utterly.”

The young lord gaped up at Mordecai like some goggle-eyed bottom-feeder. “See my father destroyed?” he said, speaking as slowly as if he were trying to decipher words spoken in a foreign tongue. “What do you mean? Do you mean … do you mean that you want me to
betray
my father? You want me to help you
ruin
him?”

“Yes, my lord,” said Mordecai, who actually had a more permanent form of destruction in mind. “That is exactly what I mean.”

At these words, a violent spasm ran through Lord Atticus's wine-thirsty body. Mordecai idly wondered if the boy was going to vomit again.

“P-please,”
whined the panting nobleman after the worst of the attack had passed. “You don't understand what you're asking! My father—he's not like other fathers. He'll never forgive me if I betray him.” Then, as though the thought had only just occurred to him, a look of utter horror settled upon his face and he screeched, “Never
mind forgiving me—he will
kill
me if I betray him! He will actually kill me!”

“And I will ‘actually' kill you if you do not betray him,” said Mordecai, resisting the urge to laugh aloud at the nobleman's histrionics. “But first—”

He casually waved his hand in the direction of the now silent and still (but still nose-less) New Man.

Lord Atticus hung his head and sobbed freely.

Mordecai let him sob. He knew the worm was going to agree to his terms because he was a coward and weakling, and he would do anything to save his pathetic noble hide. Moreover, he was too thick-headed to realize that he would not actually be
saving
his hide, only delaying the skinning process.

At length, Lord Atticus's sobs ebbed. Raising his head, he sniffled loudly and said, “If … if I cooperate—if I do all that you ask of me—what will I get in return? Besides my life, I mean?”

Mordecai laughed at this very Bartokesque question. Then he took a long, slow drink of wine from the goblet in his hand, wiped his mouth with his sleeve, leaned very close to the piss-scented young lord and whispered, “You will get the chance to keep your nose.”

NINETEEN

F
OUR DAYS LATER
, Lord Bartok stood in his imperial palace chambers fingering the parchment in his hands. Though the broken wax seal bore the imprint of Atticus's ring and though it was written in Atticus's atrociously sloppy hand, Lord Bartok questioned its authenticity. For one thing, though it contained spelling errors, it contained too few to have been written by Atticus alone. For another thing, it was too clever by half. Since when did Atticus offer suggestions that were even remotely insightful? And when was the last time he referred to the queen as anything other than “the bitch”? His gaze dropping to the parchment once more, Lord Bartok read the most telling passage for the umpteenth time:

... the queen is in my safekeeping, and the criple is dead at last, murdured in his own bed. As I am weery to the bone and also wounded, I will be delayed in delivering her (the queen) two you. Meantime, I beg you to stay where you are. Do nothing to
raise the suspishuns of General Murdock for I think he will not react well to the death of his master ...

No, it didn't sound at all like Atticus—except perhaps for the part about being weary and wounded, for the boy had ever been the most infernal complainer.

What it sounded like was someone talking
through
Atticus.

And Lord Bartok knew who that someone must be as surely as he knew that his only living son was now a walking dead man.

Deliberately setting the parchment down on his desk, Lord Bartok rested his elbows upon the table and touched his lips to his gracefully clasped hands.

When he'd sent Atticus after the cripple, he'd known that something like this might happen, of course. Yet what choice had he had? It simply would not have done to allow his own flesh and blood to loll about guzzling wine like a common sot while lesser men undertook the rescue of a queen. Theirs was the greatest noble family in the kingdom and had been since before the beginning of recorded history. It was each Bartok man's responsibility to bring the family more land, more riches and more glory than the Bartok men who'd come before him had done.

Unfortunately, time and again Atticus had demonstrated not only that he lacked the ability and temperament required to improve upon
anything
that had been done by those who'd come before him, but also that he was in full possession of every single quality required to drag a family into utter ruin.

The spectre of his noble descendants scratching a living out of the dirt or bending the knee to some jumpedup New Man was the stuff of nightmares for Lord Bartok. By sending Atticus to rescue the queen, he'd given his son a chance to banish those nightmares—either by finally proving himself worthy or by signing his own death warrant.

Lord Bartok frowned now, his pale eyes like chips of ice beneath his silvery brows.

Though the knowledge that Atticus had done the latter caused Lord Bartok the father a measure of genuine grief, Lord Bartok the patriarch saw it for what it was: an opportunity to start over. After all, he was not so old that he could not father more sons—sons who would hopefully be better suited to their elevated positions in this world.

And though the royal woman upon whom he sought to father them was, at present, most likely warming the bed of the lowborn cripple who'd forced her into marriage, with some shrewd manoeuvring, she'd soon be a widow free to marry
him
and warm
his
bed.

Whether she liked it or not.

TWENTY

L
ORD BARTOK MAY HAVE
been comforted if he'd known that at that particular moment, Persephone was not warming
anyone's
bed. Rather, she was standing with her back pressed against the wall of a barn, her dagger clutched tight in one sweaty palm. Across the nearby yard, all was still and silent in the thatch-roofed cottage where the farmer and his wife slumbered.

In the four days since her dramatic escape from Mordecai's black stone castle, Persephone had done everything she could think of to elude trackers, and she'd eaten almost nothing at all. To her intense disappointment, the panniers slung across the haunches of her stolen horse had contained no food or hunting weapons, only a ridiculous feathered cap, a riding crop and an empty silver flask. Unable to hunt, with no provisions and too wary (and proud) to beg, she'd thus been forced to rely on foraging. The first day she'd found a sugarberry bush and a handful of mushrooms. The second day she'd found nothing; the third she'd come across a stunted stalk that
boasted three scraggly ears of wild corn. Yesterday she'd passed by an orchard, and even though the apples had been small, green and bitter she'd forced herself to eat half a dozen of them. She'd gotten a stomach ache for her trouble and it had hardly made a difference, anyway. Her body was crying out for sustenance—
real
sustenance. Her last real meal had been on the evening before the ship had dropped anchor in the deserted cove; she could feel herself weakening and her ribs were beginning to protrude.

Fearing for the life of the baby if she did not eat soon, she'd decided to take a page from Azriel's book and “borrow” what she and the baby needed to survive.

Adjusting her grip on the dagger now, Persephone slipped through the open barn door. The moist animal smell inside evoked powerful memories of the owner's barn where she'd laid her head for four years' worth of nights, but Persephone paid these memories no mind. Instead, she hurriedly tiptoed past the slumbering goats, geese, cows and sow. Coming to a halt before the chicken coop at the far end of the barn, she slowly eased open the wire door, leaned over and lifted one of the chickens off her roost so gently that the creature did little more than cluck softly in her sleep.

Relieved that it had been so easy—and feeling a burble of near-hysterical laughter at the thought that Azriel was no longer the only chicken thief in the family—Persephone turned …

And froze at the sight of the now-wide-awake sow glaring up at her from between the boards of its stall,
looking quite as ill-tempered as the owner's sow had ever looked.

Without warning, it began to squeal.

Loudly.

“Reeeee,” it squealed. “
REEEEEEEEEE
!”

“Shush,” whispered Persephone frantically. “Shush!”

But the sow would not shush. Indeed, in addition to squealing, it began to snort and charge around in small, frenzied circles as though to demonstrate how it planned to trample her if it but got the chance. Thoroughly alarmed by the cacophony, the chicken tucked under Persephone's arm began clucking at the top of its lungs. Its clucking awoke the rest of the chickens and also the cow, goats and geese.