Chapter 16

Lucien was no stranger to magical mischief.

Throughout Carlot, his sovereign domain along Izeland’s western frontier, more than a few enchanted oddities still lingered in dark corners. Generations of constant exposure had left its people far less disturbed by the arcane than most.

Nor had Lucien ever been an especially manageable child. Driven by morbid curiosity, he had once made a habit of tasting even lethal poisons simply to satisfy an impulse. Whether through deliberate experimentation or violent necessity, that reckless streak had made him intimately familiar with dangerous enchantments. Historically, however, magical pranks had amounted to little more than cheap illusions and petty nuisances, none of them serious enough to obstruct his ambitions. That was precisely why he had never made any genuine effort to acquire a mage of his own.

But this potion?

Lucien sat on the edge of a sturdy walnut desk with his arms folded, his fingers digging into his throbbing temple. A heavy silence smothered the room until, without the slightest warning, he flung one arm outward.

Crash!

A southern-style geometric vase with a gold-plated rim hurtled through the air and shattered against the stone floor. The gathered retainers flinched as one, while those caught beneath the burst of porcelain shards scrambled frantically backward. The atmosphere inside the chamber thickened at once, growing so oppressive that every breath felt like inhaling lead.

Despite his notoriously prickly temperament, the prince rarely displayed the full extent of his volatility in public. On rare and terrifying occasions, however, he seemed determined to suffocate everyone within reach. Dawn, it appeared, had ushered in precisely such a moment.

After hastily retreating from the ceramic shrapnel, Mailot parted his lips, only to press them shut again in profound distress. As one of the few unfortunate witnesses to the sheer depravity of the previous night, the aging scholar remained thoroughly disoriented.

The night had been an absolute, maddening catastrophe. The cursed potion’s effects had returned despite their certainty that the matter had been resolved, stripping Lucien of his reason and leaving him utterly compromised. As though that were not disastrous enough, Lord Marsas had suddenly been spotted mobilizing the cavalry stationed at Oullet.

Lord Marsas was Bastian’s father-in-law.

Oullet served as the southern gateway to Ostervelt, the territory encompassing the capital and its surrounding lands, and the forces garrisoned there were substantial. It was not a unit that broke formation without explicit prior authorization. With Lucien’s elder sister, Arabella, currently away, only one target could have compelled Bastian to risk such a reckless military gamble.

He meant to kill Lucien himself.

Yet the loyalist troops the prince could mobilize within the capital were dangerously few. Worse, their commander was out of his mind half the time.

That damned magic potion.

Mailot could only conclude that they had walked straight into a trap. He cursed himself for ever believing that pathetic, dim-witted mage had produced a proper antidote. They should never have lowered their guard.

Although he had immediately ordered the mage dragged back to the castle, they could hardly remain idle while the kingdom teetered on the brink of disaster. Besides, entrusting the matter to that incompetent spellcaster a second time seemed unthinkable.

When the potion’s effects had flared the previous evening, violent dizziness and blinding headaches had left Lucien incapable of keeping himself upright. Abandoning his lord in such a vulnerable state had felt deeply treacherous, yet in a fortress crawling with potential spies, Mailot could not easily entrust the prince’s safety to anyone else.

His deliberation had been brief, driven by sheer desperation.

“Your Highness, I will go to the Gaecrux delegation,” he had promised the prince, who lay slumped with one hand shielding his feverish eyes. Mailot had intended to secure another mage, someone far more capable. “Since only Sir Gosrick and I know you are here, you should be safe for a short while. Do not open the door for anyone. Do you understand?”

Disaster had struck during that very window of absence.

When Mailot learned that Sir Gosrick had mistakenly sent the captive mage to the prince’s private chambers, his stomach plummeted. Horrific visions of the spellcaster murdering the incapacitated prince swam before his eyes. The reality awaiting him after he threw open those heavy wooden doors had been far worse.

The mage had been crawling across the rug, half-naked and drenched in bodily fluids.

Mailot squeezed his eyes shut and swallowed hard, forcefully banishing the graphic memory. It had been profoundly unexpected because, despite his devastatingly handsome and aristocratic appearance, Lucien was remarkably chaste.

As a scion of the Carlot nobility, Mailot had watched over Lucien since the boy was ten. Named successor to the Lord of Carlot at only seven years old, Lucien had always possessed a refined face and a physique that outpaced those of his peers. Naturally, every conceivable temptation had reached for him.

As the future lord, he had required a proper sexual education. Among the nobility, that certainly did not mean a curriculum devoted to abstinence. The primary duty of any ruling class, after all, was vigorous reproduction.

Nor was Lucien the sort to recoil from carnal matters out of bashfulness. Had he desired it, he could have drowned himself in indulgence, with entire rows of courtiers waiting breathlessly to assure him that he could behave however he pleased. That was precisely why Mailot had found it so baffling when the prince showed no interest whatsoever, regarding the subject instead with simmering irritation.

“Insert, shake, ejaculate. In the end, isn’t that all there is to it?” Lucien had once grumbled, his brow furrowed with genuine disgust. “Do you actually find that enjoyable?”

Delivered with absolute, deadpan sincerity, the question had left Mailot speechless.

“I… I did not find it quite that boring, actually,” he had stammered in his own defense.

“If your life is so terribly dull that even something as tedious as that entertains you, then do try to spend your time more meaningfully, Mailot.”

The memory of the young prince patting his shoulder in a rude, sharply measured rhythm still stung.

Perhaps Lucien was not temperate at all. Perhaps he was simply a predator driven to madness by an entirely different form of stimulation. He thrived on the kind of thrill in which hot blood sprayed and human lives hung in the balance. Having cut his teeth on active battlefields from an early age, the prince likely found that visceral, life-or-death intensity far more exhilarating than the safe, predictable mechanics of ordinary sex.

This is why children should never be sent to war, Mailot thought grimly.

Since arriving in Osterbrache to seize his claim to the succession by force, Lucien had lacked the time for carnal dissipation anyway. During the four grueling years he had spent grinding his life away in an effort to reclaim the Eastern Seven Stars, a campaign marred by one bloody blunder after another, a deranged adjutant had once shoved a prostitute into his command tent. No one would have considered it a stain on Lucien’s character had he simply looked the other way and satisfied himself for a single night.

Instead, Lucien had erupted with the force of a thunderstorm.

He demanded to know whether war was some fucking game, dragged the adjutant out of the tent by his collar, beat him half to death before the entire encampment, split the man’s flag with an axe, and demoted him on the spot. After that horrific public spectacle, Lucien’s unit had voluntarily transformed itself into the strictest abstinent military force in all Izeland.

Regardless, a reserved lord was infinitely preferable to an excessively licentious one. The bloody struggle for the throne in Osterbrache was exactly as Lucien had declared. It was no game. Sex remained the cheapest and easiest snare for dragging a great man into ruin, and until now, Lucien had navigated every such trap flawlessly.

That reality made the events of the previous night profoundly inexplicable.

For Lucien to lay a violating hand on the mage, even while mistaking him for a male prostitute sent by Bastian, was utterly shocking. Of course, the mage’s appearance was rather distracting.

Mailot violently derailed that line of thought and cleared his throat with a low, rumbling cough, forcing his attention back to the crisis.

“So, to summarize the situation.”

Eager to conclude the tense meeting, Mailot began to pace. Although Lucien radiated a terrifying and volatile sensitivity, the prince was at least entirely sane. His madness had vanished the instant dawn broke, dissolving as cleanly as a dispelled illusion.

“First, the matter of the magic potion remains catastrophically unresolved. My assessment is that a severe complication occurs sometime between sunset and sunrise.”

He raised one finger to mark his next point. “Second, that godforsaken Oullet cavalry breached the East Wing, only to retreat inexplicably before dawn. It was undoubtedly Bastian’s doing, though his true motive remains unclear. Since Lord Marsas met privately with Your Highness immediately after sunrise and returned safely to his garrison, it appears they intend to overlook this particular transgression.”

The scholar raised a third finger and released a heavy sigh. “Third, there is the mage. His true identity and intentions remain entirely unknown, and an extremely unsightly incident occurred last night. The worst part of this disaster is that we cannot determine whether these three matters are independent or parts of a single coordinated conspiracy.”

Eydric, the massive soldier responsible for kidnapping the mage, stepped forward. “For the moment, Your Highness, I believe we should simply observe him.”

Lucien answered with a glacial glare.

Shifting uncomfortably beneath that stare, Eydric hurried to explain. “Had he possessed any genuine ulterior motive, would he not have attempted to flee the moment we untied him? Instead, he spent the entire day scrubbing floors. When Sir Gosrick and I brought him back here, he followed willingly enough.”

Lucien remained silent. His brow furrowed with renewed irritation as he ground his fingers against his temples. “Every single time, someone eagerly steps forward to defend that pathetic fool.”

His sharp, predatory gaze swept across the chamber. Sir Gosrick stood impassively beside the door, while Eydric wisely retreated a step and bowed his head in baffled submission.

Sympathy aside, the matter came down to cold arithmetic. They had to decide whether to kill the mage or keep him alive. Suspicion surrounded the entire affair in abundance, but they possessed no physical evidence. Their only concrete connection to the poisoning had been the servant who delivered the laced alcohol.

Three days earlier, while the castle dissolved into frantic uproar over Lucien’s failing sanity, that servant had been found hanging by the neck in the dungeon. At first glance, the death looked perfectly like suicide. Whether it truly was one remained a dark and unspoken question.

The treacherous bastards from Gaecrux plainly had no intention of cooperating, and Lucien refused to hand them political ammunition by babbling about his compromised condition. That left the mage as their sole remaining clue.

They could keep him alive for prolonged interrogation, attempting to placate or break him, or they could choose the cleaner method. They could slit his throat, sweep the corpse beneath the rug, and rid themselves of the headache altogether.

If the spellcaster died, the potion’s mischief would likely die with him. Any magical backlash caused by dissipating mana would be proportional to the caster’s abilities, and this particular mage appeared so hopelessly inept that a fatal reaction seemed unlikely.

Lucien also possessed legendary luck. Throughout his brutal life, violent gambles of this sort had always worked in his favor.

Perhaps it would be better simply to kill him.

Murder was infinitely preferable to being toyed with by an incomprehensible spell whenever the sun slipped below the horizon. It was the logical, ruthlessly efficient choice.

Yet Lucien hesitated.

“That fellow,” he muttered.

The wording was vague, but everyone in the room knew precisely whom he meant.

Mailot answered at once. “I cleared a vacant servant’s room in the East Wing and secured him there. He has been unexpectedly docile.”

The scholar offered the detail eagerly, hoping to lessen the prince’s murderous intent. When Mailot had last inspected the room, the mage had merely sat on the bed, staring ahead in a shell-shocked stupor. Mailot had seriously considered shackling him, but a strange prickle of unease stayed his hand. Instead, he stationed heavily armed guards outside the door.

Lucien stared down at the floorboards. “Bring him to me.”

Before anyone could obey, the prince pushed himself away from the walnut desk. “No. I will go to him.”

“Pardon?” Mailot stammered.

Although the sight of Lucien taking decisive action after days of madness should have been welcome, the scholar jolted in alarm and instinctively stepped into the prince’s path before he could stop himself.

Lucien’s narrow, razor-edged gaze descended upon the older man. “What is it?”

“Ah, nothing. It is merely that…” Mailot’s eyes darted nervously around the room. Aside from his complete lack of faith in the mage’s magical abilities, there remained the glaring and horrifying matter that no one wished to address. “Are you certain you wish to see him personally, Your Highness? That individual was recently subjected to a rather violent sexual act without clear consent.”

Ha.

Reading the panicked flicker in Mailot’s eyes, Lucien released a dry, utterly incredulous laugh. “Then what the hell would you have me do, Mailot?”

Was it not painfully obvious that he had to look the man in the eyes before deciding whether to spare his life or cut his throat?

“Do you honestly think I wanted that shit to happen?” Lucien snapped.