“Anything else, Your Majesty? Attend to the fire in the hearth, perhaps? I can stay and—”
“No. I’ll tend to it. You’re dismissed.” She closed the door reluctantly behind her.
The room was chilly, but the king digging logs out from the pile and getting his hands dirty? His expertise was in keeping his hands clean. He was anxious for her to leave.
“I can do it,” I offered and knelt on the thick rug before the hearth to pull kindling from the leather sling beside it. I stirred the hot embers with a poker and set the dry sticks on top. The small flames licked upward.
The clink of glasses sounded behind me. I glanced over my shoulder. Montegue was staring at me, a drink in hand. A second filled glass sat on the table waiting for me. I turned back to the hearth and grabbed a log.
There was a long silence, and he finally said, “So, none of your kisses with the Patrei were true?” My spine stiffened. I thought this conversation would happen in the morning. Not now. He should be with his guests, but I suppose the king did what he wanted when he wanted.
“I already told you. Anything you saw was only—”
“Yes, I know, part of your job. But you said it was a pleasant way to pass the time.”
I shrugged indifferently. “I suppose his kisses were passable, but nothing about them was lasting or really mattered. I’ve already forgotten them, to be honest.”
Forgotten. A word he valued when it came to Jase.
“Tell me more … What was the Patrei like?”
It was always on his mind. He still battled Jase’s ghost. Killing him wasn’t enough. His obsession with the Patrei made me understand more than ever why Paxton had to produce a body. Even if I had to endure the horror of a dismembered hand wearing Jase’s gold ring a hundred more times, I was grateful for Paxton’s clever deception. It was all that kept Jase safe and gave him time to recover. I poked the coals, and sparks flew upward. Could I lie convincingly in detail to Montegue about Jase? Could I say he was a greedy, arrogant coward when I knew Jase was the exact opposite of all those things? Simply saying I hated him was one thing, but having to go into the details of who Jase had been was another.
“You knew him longer than I did,” I answered. “You probably knew him far better.”
“But I was never a guest in his home. I never ate a meal with him, never punched him, held a knife to his throat, or arrested him and dragged him across the continent. You spent many intimate moments with him.”
I heard his emphasis on intimate, and the question the single word held. Was there more than a kiss between us?
“Yet, in spite of the time spent with him, I failed in my ultimate goal—and the conceited ass reminded me of that fact every day. You, on the other hand, killed him. You beat him at his own game, and managed to do it without even getting your hands dirty. I’m the one who should be asking you questions. You achieved your goal, while I did not. And for a Rahtan, that is not an easy admission.”
I heard the wheeze of the couch as he settled into it. I stood and he motioned for me to join him. I sat on the opposite end. It didn’t take much to distract him from his original question. It always came back to the fantasy, the world a mark builds, the sense and value they make of their lives, the story they’ve invented that must be fed: You are shrewder, wiser, more worthy.
Let the illusion bloom.
That was my job.
As I sat down, I had to toss only one small morsel to him, a simple query for him to tell me everything. How long have you been planning this? Because if I knew anything after engaging hundreds of merchants in the jehendra, it was that everyone had a story that they burned to tell, the true story they believed no one else could ever get right, the injustices they endured, the unserved accolades they deserved. As a thief on the streets, I had become proficient at listening to them, nodding, agreeing, prodding them along, watching marks lose sight of this world as they drifted into another. And with every word I listened to, I gained their confidence. At last, someone who understood them.
Montegue’s focus shifted from me to the fire, the fantasy alive in his gaze. He was pleased that I had asked, and leaned back, propping his feet up on the low table in front us and lifted the small glass of amber liqueur to his lips. He gulped it back and poured another.
The story unraveled seamlessly, as if he had told it in the darkest corner of his mind a hundred times, which I was sure he probably had. It was a story that held equal parts of bitterness and pride. That was what he wanted me to hear, the triumph of his cunning and patience, but there was another part to his story I knew he didn’t mean to reveal to me. His crippling need. It churned inside of him.
Disdain. Now I knew why he said he understood it. The word was a choking vine winding though him. I listened, nodding, even as I chilled at the depth of his jealousies. Their roots twisted deeper than I expected.
The plan had been forming in his head since he was twelve years old, and was revised as time passed. It became an obsession for him. For eleven years.
“You were practically a child,” I said, trying not to sound too shocked.
“Successful plans take time,” he answered. “Of course I couldn’t proceed with any plan while my father was king, but I always knew that one day Tor’s Watch, the arena, all of it—would be mine, but I couldn’t do anything about it until my father was dead.”
“Did you kill—”
“My father? No. That was just more good luck. It was how I knew the gods didn’t want me to wait any longer. They wanted me to have all this, and then when I met Beaufort, I knew the gods wanted me to have even more.”
The gods favored Montegue? How lucky for him. I wasn’t sure if even he believed it himself, but he had to
paint the picture of his rightness, the sheer holiness of his plan. If he said it enough times, it would become true.