Dain's mouth tightened, a pensive look in his eyes. "The Courts aren't thinking beings, nor are they omniscient," he said, pitching his voice low. "If one of us tried to kill the other outright, or gave the order for such a thing to be done, it would respond. Like many deals, though, with enough unorthodoxy and creativity, there are ways to get around it. People have before."

"Does she have a command geas?"

"She's not known to have such a thing," Dain said. He put one of his wing-hands over the hand I had pressed to his chest, his palm warm. "But I've been thinking, ever since you asked why I left you after open court. Why did I leave you alone with her, when we both believed that she might pose a great danger to you? Why did I go and fuss with paperwork for three hours, when I already knew that I'd be able to ask Alluin if there was anything pressing I needed to attend to?"

I watched him, my eyes flicking between his, the intensity of his golden wolf's gaze almost hypnotizing.

"She told me to do it," he said, something hard coming into his eyes. "That's the only reason. My mother told me to, and I did."

49. Puzzle Pieces

Chapter 49

Puzzle Pieces

I didn't have the wherewithal to be a normal person, and while Dain had to deal with all the tasks of being the Regent, he was unwilling to leave me. He therefore conducted the day's business out of his sitting room, with me mostly curled up in his bed (Kamharida having gotten the sheets changed for him), listening to the cadence of his voice as he spoke and occasionally dripping tears onto his pillow. Before the day was out, the entire palace knew that something very bad had happened to me, and that for incomprehensible reasons Dain had not stuck their bloody heads on pikes as a warning to the rest.

Alluin came up to the palace late in the evening with a handful of wildflowers he'd picked in a field on the way up from the garrison and an extremely nice bottle of scotch. I sat on Dain's lap while he told me about each of the flowers, and sipped at the single malt scotch out of a coffee mug borrowed from Kamharida, since Dain only had two alcohol glasses in his rooms.

Dain filled Alluin in on our command geas theory, and Alluin shared some similarly strange things he'd discovered in the past few days: gate guards with no memory of their days, a flicker-bird that had gotten flown to death without its handler knowing how many times it had been sent with letters, and the fact that the Queen's journey to Lyraniorn had been put together six weeks ago, without his knowledge. He'd only figured it out when he'd seen a requisition paper with his signature, which he had no memory of reading or signing.