Total pages in book: 109
Estimated words: 104842 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 524(@200wpm)___ 419(@250wpm)___ 349(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 104842 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 524(@200wpm)___ 419(@250wpm)___ 349(@300wpm)
“What’s wrong with him?” I asked.
“I suspect there are many issues.”
A lot of people thought Zev was all brawn and no brains, but nothing could be further from the truth. Plus, he’d been the head of the king’s guard for centuries, so the idea that anyone, besides Gideon, knew the mind of Messina Maedoc better, was madness.
“Like what?” I prodded him.
“What to do with his third-born son, for starters.”
“He’ll banish Alrek, don’t you think?”
“How can he?”
When I turned to look at him, I saw he was watching the king, so I had a moment to study Zev. He was handsome in that way that belonged on the cover of romance novels, with his shoulder-length dirty-blond hair, gray eyes, chiseled features, and stubble. He had a golden tan year-round, his shoulders were broad, and all of him was covered in hard muscle. Taken all together, he was a beautifully rugged man. I wondered often if, after Gideon, he would ever allow himself to be loved again.
“Don’t you agree?”
I’d missed something. “Sorry?”
He was scowling. “I said, if the king were simply going to banish him, why have Varic bring him back? Why not let him roam the world?”
A reasonable question. “Why do you think he didn’t?”
“Because anyone could grab Alrek and use him to leverage the king,” Zev explained. “Messina Maedoc cannot allow another to kill Alrek. He would appear weak. Better to kill him himself and make an example of him.”
“Example like what?”
“Kill Alrek here, at the palace.”
When Nerilla had been killed, I was bloodthirsty and lost and would have agreed that yes, Alrek should die. Because even though he hadn’t hurt Nerilla or me, he hadn’t helped either. But now, more than a year later, I knew better. Nerilla would have hated Alrek dying in her name, and I didn’t like the sound of it either.
“I don’t think the king should kill him.”
“Well, it’s not your choice. It’s the king’s and, of course, Varic’s.”
“You’re speaking very nonchalantly of killing the king’s child,” I pointed out to Zev.
When he looked at me, all I read on his face was boredom. “His son from a courtesan,” he reminded me. “Don’t be overly sentimental.”
“His life has value.”
“Does it?”
I was going to say something, but he groaned and shook his head as if he couldn’t stand having this debate with me.
“You with your human sensibilities believe that every life is important. I was raised in a time when the whole was far more important than the individual. All that renaissance thinking of yours.”
I smiled at him. “That’s me, a renaissance man.”
He went back to looking at the king, and so did I. At the moment, he was leaning against a wall near one of the stone balconies facing the sea. It was a beautiful sight, but I doubted Messina was actually seeing it right then.
“You know, since the majority of the iceni in Decimus’s holding will be under the age of a hundred, I suspect your power may work well there.”
It was a whopper of a subject change, but Zev tended to do that. He worked through so much in his own mind, sometimes I couldn’t follow his train of thought at all. Like now. “Sorry, could you rewind and share with the class?”
“You are tedious.”
“I know, but—what?”
“Your power,” he enunciated, “that you told me all about, should work there.”
“My power?”
He nearly growled because the fact that I couldn’t always keep up with his pinball-machine brain annoyed him. “Did you not tell me that in New Orleans, when vampyrs were around you, your presence had a calming effect on them? That they didn’t seem to want to fight?”
Oh. That power. “Yes.”
“I think that has to do with the age of the vampyrs.”
“You do?”
He nodded. “I do. And it makes sense.”
“How?”
“Well, I believe that because you are young—by human as well as vampyr standards—your power would skew to those of your same age and younger.”
“You’ve thought about this.”
He shrugged. “It doesn’t take up my every waking moment, you understand, but in the library of the hypogeum, there are many answers about matans, and others have experienced your barrier, as well as the calming of tempers.”
“These are things written in Latin and Old Norse, aren’t they?” I muttered. Isabella had been translating for me at the time, and Varic had read up on matans as well, but until I had time to learn a new language, I myself was in the dark.
“And Homeric Greek, or Epic Greek, yes. If you want to read them, you will need to either study or take someone down there with you.”
“Or I could find someone who reads and writes ancient languages and have all the old scrolls and whatever else is down there about matans, and anything else that looks interesting, translated,” I said absently.
“Yes, of course.”
I looked at him.
“What?”
“That’s something I could have just had done?”