Chapter 30

It glowed in the darkness, watching Kosha as though it had been waiting for this exact moment. Their encounter unfolded in an old, dimly lit archive steeped in the musty scent of aged paper.

In the end, then, it was because of Lucien that Kosha came face-to-face with It.

***

A profound weariness settled over Mailot as he watched the middle-aged apothecary tremble on the office floor, cowering beneath the murderous glare of the golden-haired prince seated on the edge of the desk. Lucien’s fingers twitched around his glass, and the white-knuckled strain of his grip betrayed a desperate urge to shatter the crystal against the apothecary’s skull.

The man had certainly made a mistake, though perhaps not one grave enough to warrant having his head cracked open. Unfortunately, the events of the previous night had left the entire household reeling, and responsibility technically rested with the man now kneeling before them. He was, after all, Lucien’s personal apothecary.

The cowering man had no idea how chaotic the night had been. Barely two hours had passed since Mailot, who ordinarily labored beneath an unending mountain of work, had finally found a moment to close his eyes.

An attendant had roused him with the alarming news that Eydric urgently required his presence. Since the young knight was not the sort to summon others recklessly in the dead of night, Mailot had immediately sensed disaster. Still half-asleep and dressed in nothing but his robe, he stumbled into the drawing room and found Eydric standing there, entirely unable to conceal his distress.

The sight of the normally composed knight so visibly shaken banished every trace of Mailot’s drowsiness. For one terrible instant, he feared that some unspeakable calamity had occurred.

“Something has happened to His Highness,” Eydric reported, his voice drawn tight with dread.

A sudden chill raced down Mailot’s spine. When he followed the knight and realized that they were heading directly toward the mage’s residence, his gnawing unease only worsened. Upon entering the room and finding Lucien collapsed on the shabby floor, Mailot briefly panicked, convinced that the mage had finally revealed his true nature and murdered the prince.

Of course, it took no more than three blinks for him to realize the situation was nowhere near so dire.

Absurdly enough, the prince was merely fast asleep.

He was sleeping securely in the mage’s arms, no less.

Although Kosha looked stricken with helpless bewilderment, he cradled Lucien with the utmost care, holding him as though he were something unimaginably precious. The mage had seated himself on the cold floor, drawn the prince’s upper body into his lap, and even draped a blanket over Lucien’s lower half.

“What on earth are you doing?” Mailot demanded.

Despite looking as though he might burst into tears at any moment, the mage answered with surprising composure.

“He was too heavy. I couldn’t move him onto the bed.”

Naturally, that had not been what Mailot meant.

As it turned out, Eydric had also been awakened by the mage’s urgent summons. The knight had been staying in the neighboring room as part of a temporary arrangement to keep Kosha under surveillance. At a loss for what else to do, the mage had apparently pounded frantically against the wall until Eydric woke. After examining the prince, Eydric concluded that the matter lay beyond his ability to handle alone and promptly reported it to the advisor.

Once they finally managed to haul Lucien into the bedroom, Mailot aggressively interrogated the mage. He pressed Kosha about why the prince had visited his room and what exactly the two of them had been doing, but the mage could only stammer, entirely unable to produce a coherent answer.

His visibly swollen lips and flushed cheeks, however, strongly suggested a very particular sort of midnight activity.

Regardless of whatever had occurred between them, Lucien awakened just as dawn began to break, exactly as the mage had promised. While his vassals had spent the entire night frantic and sleepless, the prince appeared to have enjoyed a deep, peaceful rest. His already flawless face looked almost offensively radiant.

Mailot stood beside the bed and watched as memories of the previous night gradually resurfaced across that bright, rested face. At first, Lucien merely appeared dazed. Then his brow furrowed, as though he had become entangled in a maze of complicated thoughts, before his expression hardened into something terrifyingly rigid.

He immediately ordered the apothecary who had prepared the previous night’s sleeping draught to be dragged before him.

Now, that same man knelt on the floor, weeping as he endured a brutal reprimand for the draught’s failure.

“Y-Your Highness, please. If you would only grant me one more chance…” Unable to withstand the suffocating atmosphere any longer, the apothecary bowed until his forehead nearly touched the floor. His voice quivered with naked terror. “I didn’t realize your tolerance would build so quickly. If you permit me another attempt, I will make tonight’s draught much stronger.”

“Enough.”

Lucien tightened his grip around the glass until it seemed likely to shatter in his hand. His voice vibrated with tightly restrained fury.

“Where the hell do you get off spouting such nonsense?”

He swallowed another curse through clenched teeth and swept his hair back in a habitual gesture. The inevitable order followed moments later.

“Get him out of my sight, and find me another apothecary.”

Two knights seized the man, who had all but collapsed onto the floor, and dragged him away like a prisoner.

Mailot released a long, heavy sigh. “Finding an apothecary who is both skilled and trustworthy will not be easy. It may take some time.”

His tone plainly suggested that this entire affair was unnecessary.

In truth, Lucien agreed with him to some extent. That logical concession did absolutely nothing to lessen the deep, crawling unpleasantness beneath his skin. Irritation gnawed at him so fiercely that he wanted to seize the nearest person and force them to shoulder the blame.

He had always possessed an unusually high tolerance for medicine, but he had never expected the carefully prepared sleeping draught to lose its effectiveness so soon.

When he opened his eyes the previous night, profound darkness had filled the room. The unexpected awakening should have alarmed him, yet the first thought that entered his mind had been something else entirely.

How the hell did that mage know I suffered from insomnia?

What were the two of them doing? No, did the mage truly suffer from insomnia as well?

I had to see for myself.

Rational considerations, such as the possibility that his actions were excessive, intrusive, or entirely unnecessary, held no power over him. If anything, realizing that he had suppressed the urge all day only made it burn more fiercely as the hours passed.

For security reasons, every lock in the servants’ quarters used the same key, and Lucien naturally possessed one. Drugged and trapped in a haze, he had clumsily shoved his feet into his shoes, snatched up the key, and made his way toward the mage’s room.

Everything after that was a blur he could scarcely remember.

No.

That was not true.

The truth was that he remembered it with humiliating, vivid clarity.

He desperately searched for an excuse, insisting to himself that he had merely done what seemed necessary at the time. Yet the excuse was meant for no one in particular. He could not even understand why the need to justify himself persisted, but it refused to leave him.

Still dazed by the lingering effects of the sleeping draught, he had briefly wondered whether he was drifting through another dream.

But it had been far too soft, far too damp, to be anything as fleeting as a dream.

Stop it.

Lucien squeezed his eyes shut and forced those useless, wretched thoughts from his mind.

Just stop thinking about it. Who gives a damn whether it was damp or anything else? What business is that of mine?

Besides, had the mage not shuddered as though he had been violated before knocking Lucien unconscious? And he had dared to do it with magic, of all things.

Granted, the spell had allowed Lucien to enjoy a rare night of deep, sweet, dreamless sleep, but that was beside the point. If anything, that profound rest had only made the memories of the previous night more vivid, robbing him of the ability to dismiss them as nothing more than a hallucination.

His mind was cruelly, painfully clear.

“Then what would you have me do about tonight’s medication, Your Highness?” Mailot pressed, breaking through the prince’s turbulent silence.

Lucien should have hesitated.

It was not that he lacked a plan. Rather, he doubted whether it was a sound decision or, more precisely, whether it was appropriate to voice such a suggestion under the present circumstances.

“The mage can put people to sleep perfectly well without any medicine, so what’s the problem?”

His deliberation lasted only a fraction of a second before the words spilled from his mouth.

There were no other options.

Or perhaps he simply had no intention of looking for any.

Mailot’s brow creased with immediate distaste. “Pardon? Are you suggesting that we rely on magic again?”

Why had they gone through so much unnecessary trouble in the first place, if not because of that very magic? Its safety had not even been verified.

Lucien could see that Mailot wanted to recite every one of those valid grievances, but he dismissed them without a second thought.

“That mage. Where is he now?”

Where else would the mage be but in his own room?

Mailot regarded his lord with weary resignation before answering the trivial question. “I presume he is in his room. I was informed earlier that he had fallen asleep.”

“Sleeping?”

The sharpness of Lucien’s response sliced through the office. His expression suggested that such a thing was completely inconceivable.

The mage was frail. After remaining awake all night, surely he was entitled to close his eyes if nothing urgent required his attention.

Mailot studied Lucien with a mixture of confusion and growing unease. “Shall I have him awakened and brought here?”

Lucien sank into a heavy silence, as though wrestling with a decision of monumental importance. At last, wearing the expression of a man who had committed himself to some grave course of action, he slowly rose from his seat.

“No. Go find yourself a new apothecary.”

He waved one distracted hand and headed for the door.

Although his gait appeared deceptively casual, there was an unmistakable urgency beneath it. Mailot stared after him, utterly bewildered by his lord’s abrupt decision to abandon the meeting and storm out.

“Where are you going, Your Highness?”

Lucien offered no answer.

For some reason, however, a dark and ominous intuition told Mailot that he knew exactly where his master was heading.

***