Kordas and Hakkon continued to talk through the meal, though much of it was coded. It was fairly safe to talk openly here, but Kordas was not taking any chances that someone might decide to try Farseeing or a scrying spell on them as they ate. Unlikely—but possible. Besides, he and Hakkon had gotten used to phrasing their conversations with double-meanings, and in the Empire, that was a good habit to keep.

Although Kordas did not know Hakkon’s full story—that had died with Kordas’s mother, the Lady Lyantha, and Hakkon himself didn’t know most of it—he knew enough. Lyantha’s sister had run off with someone in a situation almost exactly like the popular song “Black Jack Davy.” Unfortunately their idyll had not lasted very long. She turned up with a toddler in tow about two years after Lyantha had married Lord Valdemar. She had come here, to the manor, knowing she was not welcome back home. Lord and Lady Valdemar would have taken her in, no questions asked, no shaming and no blaming, but she had merely begged them to take Hakkon into their household, and vanished again. Had she gone back to her lover, once she no longer had a child to worry about? No one knew; she had never been heard from again.

Lyantha had added Hakkon to the household pod of children, then taken him as her page. Lord Valdemar might have been considering legitimizing Hakkon as his heir, but while Hakkon was still among the pages, Kordas had been born.

And from that point, there had never been any question but that Hakkon was going to become Kordas’s protector and guide once the Emperor summoned him.

“You know,” he said thoughtfully, as Hakkon carefully peeled his apple in one single strip, “I’ve never asked you if you resented being made my watchdog for all those years at Court.”

Hakkon snorted. “You could not pay me enough to put up with the never-ending stream of garbage that comes out of the Court,” he said immediately. “There is no title high enough to compensate for having to deal with that conniving toad on the Conquest Throne. Besides—”

He put the knife and the apple down, and half-turned to stare directly into Kordas’s eyes.