“My older brother. Always stronger. Always better at everything. After the High Priestess broke him back to his Birthright Purple Dusk and sealed him up inside himself, he wasn’t stronger or better anymore, was he? No one was going to listen to him anymore, were they? But they still didn’t listen to me, either.” Brock looked at Jared with eyes full of hatred. “The others would have listened to me if you hadn’t been there. I would have been the dominant male in the group if it hadn’t been for you. She would have trusted me.”

Jared studied Brock. How could the strong man he’d known on the journey become this whining boy? “The link with Garth,” Jared said slowly. “It not only hid your true nature, it also helped you act as Garth would have acted, say what he would have said.”

Brock nodded, his mouth curving in a sly, nasty smile. “I’m the one who thought of that after the Priestess put the compulsion spells around me that would make sure the Gray Lady bought me. Being brothers, it was easy to make a link that would meld our psychic scents so that the bitch-Queen couldn’t separate one from the other. I even made him place the first couple of buttons, since no one paid any attention to the mind-damaged male. But he started fighting me, defying me. After a while, all I could do was keep enough of the link so that I wouldn’t be discovered.”

Hold it back, Jared told himself. Leash it. Save this rage for the fight ahead. “You brought them to Ranon’s Wood. You brought these carrion-eaters from Hayll down on my people.”

“If she’d been captured at the ambush like she was supposed to, we wouldn’t have come to your precious village at all. If anyone brought them here, it was you.”

“Get out of here,” Jared said too quietly. “Get away from my people. You belong with those Hayllian bastards.”

Brock pouted. “If I’d known she was going to give us real freedom, it would have been different.”

“Get out.”

The pout twisted back to nastiness. “You’re going to die, Jared. All of you are going to die, and all the words in the Realm aren’t going to change that.” Brock bared his teeth in a smile. “Maybe once the High Priestess is done playing with Lia, they’ll let me have her for a while. I’d like to take a long, hard ride between her thighs.”

Jared clenched his fists and his teeth.

Hold it back. Keep it leashed. Striking out now would bring the Hayllians in faster, and Thera and Lia needed as much time as they could get to prepare this Queen’s gamble.

Looking a little disappointed at getting no reaction from Jared, Brock raised his hand in a mocking salute. Then he flinched and put a hand to his head.