Chapter 10

Lucien’s voice dropped into a dark mutter. “We sent that idiot back in one piece, didn’t we?”

He was neither kind nor righteous, and as far as the kingdom’s citizens were concerned, he honestly did not give a single damn about them.

His carefully cultivated public image was nothing more than exquisite wrapping paper, meticulously fashioned through the painstaking efforts of his exhausted staff. Mailot, in particular, had nearly torn out enough hair during the process to account for every inch of his premature baldness. The elegant wrapping was critically important, of course, but draping a lump of rotting meat in fine silk did not magically make the flesh fresh.

How much money, time, labor, and bloody sacrifice had they poured into transforming someone who barely qualified as human into a convincing imitation of one?

Lucien’s deplorable way of speaking and his tendency to strike whenever something displeased him had never fundamentally changed. Nevertheless, he had learned to present himself as more courteous, restrained, and refined than almost anyone else in the capital. Without that talent for deception, he would never have risen so far.

In that respect, the love potion had been catastrophically effective.

Gosrick did not know whether the foul magic had tampered with Lucien’s primal impulses, his practiced restraint, his patience, his common sense, his values, or some deeper psychological mechanism buried beneath them all. He only knew precisely what had happened.

It had begun during an evening banquet hosted by Bastian, the King’s second child and eldest son, following a modest hunting excursion. Earlier that same day, at dawn, Lucien had consumed the drugged wine.

Until the banquet erupted into violence, they had remained uncertain whether anything was truly wrong with their liege. Lucien had violently seized an attendant after accidentally drinking something foul mixed into his cup. Although his reaction had been grossly excessive, it had not fallen entirely beyond the range of behavior his seasoned retainers could understand.

Furthermore, being ordinary humans, none of them had detected anything definitively wrong with the wine. They found no trace of conventional poison and eventually concluded that the vintage might simply have tasted strange that day, or that Lucien’s accumulated exhaustion had left him unusually irritable.

He remained sensitive and on edge throughout the day, but they attributed it to the stress of the previous night’s events. Since Lucien rarely bothered maintaining his perfect public facade before his inner circle, no one recognized the sinister change for what it truly was.

At the banquet, Bastian lifted his jeweled cup and laughed mockingly.

“Lately, the entire kingdom seems capable of singing only your praises. Lucien, Lucien, Lucien. It’s exhausting, honestly.”

He poured more liquor into his mouth, spilling droplets down his chin. The King’s children were hardly close, and Bastian had always spoken in that abrasive, condescending manner. Under ordinary circumstances, such petty remarks would never have provoked Lucien.

“I heard you claimed the greatest prize on this hunt as well. A wild boar with a single arrow, was it?” Bastian’s drunken smile widened. “Tell me, are you certain you actually did it? Hmm? You’re a greater hypocrite than any simpering court girl.”

Normally, Lucien would have dismissed the crude insult with manufactured modesty and a gentle, forgiving smile. Instead, he stared directly into his half-brother’s flushed face.

“You talk too much.”

Gosrick and Mailot were not the only people in the grand hall who thought they had misheard him.

Bastian blinked in drunken confusion. “What did you say?”

Lucien did not so much as flinch. “I said you talk too much, Brother. Your voice isn’t pleasant enough to justify the effort. Why do you insist on stuffing your mouth with liquor and food all day until your breath reeks? You piggish bastard.”

Mailot nearly fainted on the spot. Gosrick froze where he stood.

Naturally, one of Bastian’s loyal attendants was the first to react. He lunged forward and seized Lucien’s arm.

“How dare you! Do you have any idea whose presence you stand in?”

Lucien’s glacial blue-gray eyes moved slowly from the attendant’s reddened face to the presumptuous hand gripping his arm. At that exact moment, Gosrick understood instinctively that he had to stop whatever was about to happen, regardless of the cost.

Lucien’s voice was soft enough to chill the blood. “Whose presence? And who, exactly, are you?”

Bastian’s mouth twisted into a rancid, ugly smile. “Do you find my words amusing, you vulgar, base-blooded wretch?”

He seized Lucien by the collar and hauled him roughly forward. The fine fabric stretched taut between them before tearing with a harsh rip that sounded almost like a scream.

Under ordinary circumstances, Lucien would have stepped back or laughed the matter aside, immediately defusing the volatile situation. But that day, the potion still held him firmly in its grip.

He lowered his gaze to the hand clutching his ruined collar.

“Base-blooded.”

In one swift, fluid movement, Lucien seized Bastian’s wrist and wrenched it violently backward.

The bone snapped.

“Aaaaargh!”

Bastian’s agonized scream shook the banquet hall, drawing every horrified eye toward the high table. There was no time to intervene. Lucien’s long fingers closed around the heavy silver fork resting beside his plate. He caught the wrist of the attendant who still clung desperately to his arm, slammed the man’s hand flat against the polished oak tabletop, and drove the fork straight through it.

Crunch.

The grotesque sound of flesh parting and metal scraping bone echoed through the cavernous hall. More than half the fork vanished into the servant’s hand, leaving only the ornate handle protruding above the mangled, blood-soaked meat.

It was merely a dining fork.

Its tines were sharp, but they should never have possessed enough force to pierce a human hand so completely.

Lucien had driven it through with pure, unadulterated brute strength.

Everyone needed several agonizing seconds merely to comprehend the violence that had unfolded. The servant himself appeared equally stunned. His scream arrived a full heartbeat late.

“Aaaaargh!”

The piercing cry ended the commotion as abruptly as it had begun, plunging the banquet hall into a silence as deep and suffocating as a grave. Gosrick stood utterly paralyzed, with no idea how to salvage the rapidly deteriorating disaster.

Bastian finally shattered the stillness. His voice trembled violently, and his face had drained of every trace of color.

“What have you done? You bastard! This is unthinkable.”

The servant curled inward on the floor, bloody foam gathering at the corners of his mouth.

Lucien laughed softly, behaving as though nothing of consequence had occurred. He pressed the man’s head against the floorboards and lightly patted the back of his skull with an open palm.

Tap, tap.

“He didn’t seem to understand how to bow.”

No one dared answer.

Lucien gazed down at the writhing servant. “See? Now he bows quite well.”

Dark crimson blood pooled across the table, spreading over the polished wood in a slow, gleaming sheet. Yet the hand pressing the servant’s head against the floor remained as impeccably clean and elegant as ever. A moment later, Lucien rose smoothly from his chair.

“Well then, Your Highness, my dear elder brother. My head aches in more ways than one, so I shall take my leave.”

Even in retrospect, the entire evening remained a waking nightmare. That incident confirmed beyond any reasonable doubt that something was profoundly wrong with their liege. It took another full day to determine that the root cause was magical.

During that tense interval, Lucien caused one more catastrophic incident.

After overhearing a lower-class day laborer snickering and gossiping about the banquet, Lucien attacked him with a rusted shovel, beating the poor fool without mercy until he hovered on the brink of death.

Mailot had screamed during the frantic aftermath.

“A shovel? You should have cut his throat! And for heaven’s sake, where did you even find a shovel?”

It was a distinctly unfortunate sentiment to express regarding the battered victim, but Mailot’s cold reasoning was not entirely irrational.

Had a noble knight simply executed a laborer with one clean stroke of a sword, the brutal act would at least have appeared orderly to outside observers. People might have assumed that a legitimate sentence had been carried out for some lawful and justifiable offense.

Beating a man nearly to death with a shovel, however, was fundamentally different.

It resembled neither lawful punishment nor the dignified conduct expected of a knight. It was mindlessly barbaric, exactly the sort of gruesome spectacle guaranteed to provoke relentless gossip.

They had been forced to act immediately, silencing both the horrified witnesses and the traumatized victim.

“He said the shovel happened to be lying nearby,” Eydric had explained.

The adjutant, who had finally managed to calm Lucien that chaotic day, could only shake his head in absolute despair.

Lucien had always possessed an abrasive temperament, but he had known precisely how to conceal it when necessary. Under the potion’s insidious influence, every flare of anger transformed instantly into physical action. Every ugly thought that entered his mind became something he violently carried out.

It was like witnessing the feral Lucien of ten years earlier.

No, the situation had been far worse.

Back then, Lucien had at least been young enough for stronger adults to restrain him. The current Lucien was entirely beyond anyone’s ability to control.

To prevent further bloodshed, they had effectively placed him under voluntary house arrest. Lucien had not been pleased, but he eventually agreed to the terms. It was a small mercy that, despite his uncontrollable temper, he retained the core ability to reason.

In the end, he was forced to remain locked inside his quarters while his exhausted subordinates cleaned up the devastation and hunted down the elusive mage responsible. Considering Lucien’s usual level of physical activity, the strict confinement must have been torturous for him as well.

Gosrick had genuinely feared that once they captured the mage who created the potion, Lucien would unleash all the rage he had accumulated and beat the man into a bloody pulp.

Back in the present, Mailot laughed again, his exhausted expression utterly vacant. “Of course. I suppose beating him and strangling him a little qualifies as sending him back unharmed.”

“He shouldn’t have been so pathetic.” Lucien’s voice carried a perfect, chilling gentleness.

This time, everyone in the room silently agreed.

“That is true,” Felon admitted. “I was concerned from the beginning. He seemed rather incompetent.”

Felon had trusted the mage less than anyone else from the moment they dragged him in.

Incompetent, was he?

Gosrick had occasionally entertained the same thought, yet he found himself speaking in the young man’s defense. “I am not certain that assessment is entirely accurate. He did appear to be laboring under a considerable misunderstanding.”

“A misunderstanding?” Mailot repeated.

Lucien’s icy gaze shifted toward Gosrick as well.

Though the prince said nothing, Gosrick felt instinctively that those piercing blue-gray eyes had been studying him with lethal intensity for quite some time.

Perhaps even the faintest shred of sympathy for the mage had irritated Lucien’s notoriously sensitive nerves. If suspicion were a physical disease, Lucien would have been a terminal patient permanently confined to his deathbed. He had been that way since early childhood.

“He seemed to believe that Your Highness is naturally kind and good-natured,” Gosrick explained, choosing every word with extreme care. “He thought the potion he created had transformed a genuinely kindhearted man into someone violent. He also firmly believed that was the only reason you beat him.”

Silence settled heavily over the room.

No one appeared willing to speak first.

Only Lucien moved, raising his glass to his lips with an entirely unreadable expression.

“Hmm.”

Mailot suddenly became deeply absorbed in looking anywhere except at his liege.

Lucien’s flawless mask of gentleness and propriety had been painstakingly crafted by the very people standing in that room. Yet confronting the undeniable success of their own deception often filled them with an instinctive, churning revulsion. After all, they knew the real Lucien far too well.

“That might be true,” Mailot finally conceded, breaking the thick tension. “Fortunate, I suppose. But why would he feed such a volatile potion to someone he believed was so inherently good?”

Who could ever truly understand the twisted, alien workings of a mage’s mind? Mailot waved the matter aside and swiftly steered the conversation elsewhere, behaving as though the inconsistency held no real importance.

Gosrick studied Lucien’s impassive expression for a moment before shaking his head. “In my judgment, he truly seemed to know absolutely nothing about the assassination plot. Rather…”

He hesitated, mentally weighing each word. He worried that he was allowing far too much personal opinion to influence his official report, but the final judgment was not his to make.

“He appeared deeply remorseful toward Your Highness,” Gosrick continued. “It also seemed that he held a considerable amount of genuine affection for you.”

Once again, suffocating silence wound its way through the room. No one found an appropriate response quickly enough to fill the void.

Mailot bit hard into the inside of his lip, while Felon stared intently at the ceiling as though the plaster had suddenly become the most fascinating sight in the world.

At last, a light, breathy laugh broke the stillness.

Lucien leaned crookedly against the heavy wooden desk and drained the remaining liquor from his glass. Even a vicious sneer looked exquisite upon his sleek, aristocratic face.

He rolled the empty pewter cup smoothly between his long fingers, then delivered his final verdict as though sharing an immensely amusing joke.

“That fellow truly is a moron.”

***