MPNS Ch 89

Chapter 89

The ball still raged on in the banquet hall, the night far from spent.

“When does Your Reverence intend to make a graceful exit?”

“That sounds perilously like ‘leave at once,’ which vexes the mind.”

Lucian’s words fell like frost, expressionless and keen; Grand Master Oryx Ziments only laughed as he answered. Nearby, Yurih Kishchin—the Pope’s out-nephew and left wing of the Holy Order—nearly let his jaw drop.

There was reason for his shock. Despite his stalwart looks, Oryx Ziments was famously shy and apolitical; he was not the sort to snap back at anyone’s remark—least of all like this. Yet from the moment he arrived at the palace, something in him had shifted, just so. However exalted a Grand Master he might be, to trade barbs with the Duke of Turun—founder’s-equal of Ossinis—was unlike the prim, etiquette-bound Oryx.

Lucian, meeting the barb with a lifted brow, replied,

“For one who snatched the first dance from its rightful partner, Your Reverence shows a surprising faculty for social nuance.”

“That the partner of His Highness Nikiel was myself seems to gall you sorely, my lord.”

Chuckling, Oryx plucked a silver goblet from a passing page’s tray and downed the distilled spirit in a single draught. Yurih, watching, was astonished yet again.

Oryx then turned his back slightly, whispering something for Lucian’s ears alone. Yurih strained, but distance—and Oryx’s turned shoulders—left him guessing.

Lucian, for his part, had wondered for some time why the “Pope’s cur” was picking fights with him in particular. Tensions between the Temple—which claimed only divinely endowed sacred power wrought true miracles—and mages, who worked magic by channeling ambient mana, were evergreen. But the Oryx Ziments in Lucian’s memory was timid; bold, needling provocation was not his manner.

Moreover, a man so dutiful to the Pope’s will, so uninterested in anything beyond it, stealing Nikiel’s first dance was curious indeed. The thought of that sultry Bweika with Nikiel—by a Grand Master who, if he dared romance at all, must do so in shadows, even at cost of a bastard—made Lucian’s nape prickle, the scales there threatening to rise, his pupils itching to narrow into slits.

“Has Your Reverence received a death notice? Doing what you never do gives cause for concern.”

“Such solicitude. If you have care to spare, fix it plainly at His Highness Nikiel’s side.”

This petty nothing’s manner and words scraped at him. Oryx acted as though intimate with Nikiel, though they had no evident bond. Lucian’s brow tightened. Oryx, unbothered, leaned in to murmur once more, just for him.

“This is no time to sibilate like a serpent robbed of its prey. The crown prince has returned. You know as well as any that there is something peculiar about His Highness.”

“…”

Lucian fell silent. Yes. Raphael Ossinis, for all his show of stout virtue, often struck one, up close, as a fruit sound on the skin yet spoiled to the core.

But with Nikiel’s worse reputation as a screen, Raphael’s incompetence and cruelty passed quickly from public memory. True to the son of an ineffectual king, Raphael was impulsive, selfish. Yet such defects were always drowned by the scandals Nikiel was said to spark.

It was so only the year before last. At Harvesttide, when folk would buy candles to light their homes, Raphael bought up the capital’s pig tallow and beef tallow ahead of the end of the autumn reaping, using the fat for bait in a grand hunting meet. Paupers, left without coin, could not buy wax tapers at all. The uproar—that a crown prince endangered his people’s livelihood for sport—died swiftly when Nikiel was shamed for allegedly being caught in an outdoor tryst with a lady near the Temple by a passing cleric. The lady’s name, the specific Temple, even which cleric saw them—none of it was ever known. Thus were Raphael’s small-minded blunders so often smothered beneath his brother’s infamy.

Oryx patted Lucian’s shoulder once, turned, and drifted away. Lucian at last looked to where Raphael stood, smiling amid a ring of great lords. Handsome enough—like the king—but the face could not shed its arrogance.

Elsewhere, Raymond bent to pluck a blue rose from the marble floor.

“…”

He studied the slightly wilted petals without a word. It was the very boutonnière that had adorned Nikiel when he entered upon Lucian’s arm—such a blue could only be wrought by magic, and none could cast so vivid a hue but Lucian, Minister of Magic.

Thus Raymond was sure the flower’s owner was Nikiel. The color matched the prince’s eyes.

After a silent moment, he set off, rose in hand, heading in the same direction Count Gaspar had fled minutes earlier. Raymond had seen it all: Gaspar offering the cup to Nikiel, Yullan brazenly tossing back the contents in one gulp, then leaving the hall. Something was amiss.

From the start, Gaspar’s sudden proffer of a drink to Nikiel was odd. Raymond chose to follow the count—but the beast within urged him instead to chase after Nikiel, who had run after Yullan. If this continued, he might lose Nikiel to the northern hound forever.

He denied it.

‘His Highness is not blind. Why would he run after that reeking cur of the North? …And if he did—so what.’

The denial he had rehearsed for days rose again.

Shut in, absent from the world, Raymond had fought himself for endless hours, refusing to name the thrum in his chest, refusing to look at the desire flaring whenever he thought of Nikiel.

‘Me? For Nikiel Ossinis? If there’s any scrap of pride or conscience left, impossible.’

In truth, it was his first time tumbling into love; he held only stubbornness and pride, clinging to a futile refusal.

He had reasons. He had insulted Nikiel openly, repeatedly. Nikiel, who had endured such verbal blows, had at last raised a cold gaze against him—a look that seemed to say he would engage no longer. Panic surged then.

Before Nikiel, Raymond felt like an odious boor pawing at a keen, noble soul—too base to admit his baseness, throwing tantrums until he was spurned.

To confront this feeling, he would at least have to apologize. Otherwise, he could not bear the thought of the Nikiel who visited his dreams these past nights, soothing him… No—best not think of dreams.

A ballroom was no place to dwell on the Nikiel of his dreams, forever smiling sweetly at him. Hitching his frock coat to shield the ache tugging low in his belly, he scolded himself to choose—to stop drifting between half-admission and denial.

Thus he resolved to track Gaspar, ignoring instinct’s warning. Even with the foul thought clinging at his nape—that if he did not chase Yullan, disaster might befall, and Nikiel be lost—Raymond pressed on, like a reindeer gone astray.

Yet as he walked, an ugly feeling crept over him. By the time he confronted Count Gaspar, the killing edge of his beast’s pheromones hissed about him like heat.

Without pause, Raymond kicked the tree beside the fleeing count. It was thick as a pillar, yet with a crack like thunder the trunk split halfway through.

“Eek—!”

Smiling pleasantly, Raymond asked,

“In such haste—whither, my lord count?”

“D-D-Duke Boltwik—Your Grace—!”

He looked down at the count’s blanched, ugly face, still internally adrift.

‘Even now, go after that northern cur? Since when did His Highness cozy up to the damned whelp to go running after him?’

He even tried to resent Nikiel—within the limits his conscience would permit. He himself knew how groundless that resentment was.

While he sank into these thoughts, the count began to babble strangely, like no sane man.

“N-no—it was not I. The Great One—commanded it. I had no choice—”

Raymond, face unchanged, slapped him. The count’s eyes bulged; the blow had been, in its way, kindness—to snap him to his senses with a sharp cheek-smack. His hand was large; the clap of palm to cheek rang loud. Then, in a gentle tone, Raymond asked,

“Are you quite yourself now, my lord? Your sudden foolish prattle concerned me, so I administered a corrective.”

“U-ugh—ah—it hurts, it hurts, Your Grace—mercy—!”

“Mercy? Come now. All I desire is to know what you poured for His Highness. That is why I followed you.”

He smiled kindly again, as if to say: lie, and expect another slap. The count understood at once and shuddered in terror.