But the game had been played out before any of them even knew it was in play at all. Now they could only ride along with it, and wait.

16

16

The game was played…

Something about that phrase nagged Alberich as he fell into an uneasy sleep, but it wasn’t until he woke the next morning that he realized where he had heard it last.

And it was only after the recollection jolted him that he realized that there might be a connection between where he had heard it first, and Selenay.

He had the flash of memory as he moved into wakefulness, and it brought him alert all at once, his mind moving from a standing start into a full gallop.

The game is about to play—It had been that stranger talking to Norris last night. He could hear the voice clearly in his mind. It had been a well-educated voice, and if there was one thing that it was hard for the well-educated to do, it was to counterfeit being a member of a lower class than their own.

The similarity of phrases was what had given him that shock to the system. What if the girl they had been talking about, the one Alberich had assumed was simply wealthy and plain, had actually been Selenay? And that the young man being tutored in seduction had been the Prince of Rethwellan?

It fit. It certainly fit. Untried, sheltered, accustomed to flattery but not to the kind of practiced seducer Norris was, she would be easy prey for a man of Norris’ experience—or one coached by him.

And Selenay, alone in all of the Court, was the only young woman who would have been sheltered from such men. There was the irony; if she had spent any time among her peers, she would have seen attractive young men use their looks in such an unattractive way—and young women do the same.

Or—perhaps not. She had been the Heir, and even in the Court, that might have protected her.

Odd as it might seem, the cads in Court circles saved their wiles for two sorts of women—the lower-class girls that they seduced and abandoned, and the unattractive, wealthy ones they seduced and wedded and abandoned on their estates in the country, while they came back to Court to enjoy themselves unencumbered by the inconvenient wife. They wouldn’t have dared to use those ploys on Selenay.

Still, she had been sheltered in another way. From the time she had been Chosen, she had been at the Collegium, and not the Court. She never saw the intrigues among her peers, because she was among another set of “peers” for whom intrigue was simply out of the question. Even when the occasion had called for it, she hadn’t spent much time socially in Court circles, she spent her social time among Heralds. Or at least, she had until she’d become Queen.