“It was not his fault.” Stefan glanced at me once, then looked away again. “In those days, the aristocracy did not wed for love. It was a union of political expedience. But while my father was away on one of King Charles’s campaigns, she allowed my uncle to seduce her. And upon my father’s return, my uncle, his own brother, poisoned him.”

I swallowed. “Um, isn’t that the plot of—”

“Yes,” he said before I could finish. “It is very like it. But although I was my father’s only son, I was no Hamlet. I was a man grown and a knight in my own right, a Knight of the Cross with the Red Star. I was a member of a branch of the order affiliated with a hospital in Prague that specialized in occult afflictions. When my father’s spirit appeared to me in a dream, crying out for vengeance, I knew it was a true vision.”

I set my glass of water down carefully on a marble coaster, trying not to let it clink. “I see.”

“My uncle was everything my father was not,” Stefan continued, still not looking at me. “Craven, ambitious, untruthful. But he could be charming, and he knew how to evoke pity. He was born with a twisted leg, which prohibited him from service in his majesty’s army. When I returned to my ancestral home of Žatlovy, I stood in the great hall and accused him of my father’s murder. He denied it. He denied it vehemently.” He looked back at me, pupils surging to eclipse his irises as his voice turned savage. “And then he laughed and told me I could never prove it.”

My shield flared from a spark to a buckler-size disk.

Stefan closed his eyes, regaining control. “Forgive me.”

“No, it’s all right,” I said. “I’m sorry. I want to know, of course I want to know, but I didn’t mean to pry.”

He opened his eyes. “You didn’t.”

I cleared my throat. “So you killed your uncle?”

“Yes,” Stefan said simply. “I struck him down then and there, with the very sword my father wielded at the Battle of Crécy. In a fit of pure rage and loathing, I killed my uncle, a defenseless cripple. Acting out of the depths of my profound and abiding love for my father, with the commandment to honor him blazing like a beacon in my thoughts, I exacted vengeance. I killed his treacherous, villainous, murderous brother in cold blood.” He stretched out his hands, contemplating them. “I have sought to relive that moment a thousand times in my memories. To this day, I do not regret it. Although,” he added, “I can still hear my mother’s screams.”

I swallowed again, wordless. I wanted to ask what had happened next, how Stefan had become Outcast, but my throat was too tight.