Talon swallowed hard. Mother Night! How would a defense-less boy like Gray handle crossing paths with something like Yaslana? “What about him?”

“How old was he when he was tortured?”

Talon rocked back on his heels, not sure what to think. “How did you know?”

Lucivar snorted. “I’ve lived seventeen hundred years. I’ve seen a lot of courts and a lot of men during that time. I know the look, and I know the feel, of a man who’s been tortured.”

“Fifteen,” Talon said. “He was fifteen years old and the most promising Warlord Prince to come along in a couple generations or more. Not as good with weapons as Theran, but stronger in other ways. He could have been stronger.” He sighed, feeling the old regrets. “Wasn’t much left of that promising boy two years later when I finally found him and got him away from the bitch.”

Lucivar just looked at him for a long time. “Ask the questions, Prince,” he said softly. “Ask the questions before it’s too late.”

Talon waited until Lucivar left the room before he drained the second glass of yarbarah. Then he corked the bottle and put a cooling spell on it. He wanted more, needed more blood, since he’d resisted asking for any—or demanding any—from the Warlord Princes in the court since the night Cassidy had freely given her blood.

“Too many warnings and not enough information,” Talon growled.

When he opened the door, he found Ranon on the other side.

“I came to tell you the Eyrien is gone,” Ranon said.

“In here,” Talon snapped.

Ranon came into the room, wary.

“What in the name of Hell happened today?”

“I don’t know,” Ranon said.

“You have no idea how much trouble we’re in, so don’t be playing games with me.”

“I don’t know!”

Frustration. Worry. Ranon wasn’t trying to hide those things.

“Then tell me what you do know.”

“I respectfully refuse to give you a shovel. Or a hoe. Or a rake. Or any of the tools. I Craft-locked the shed.”

Cassidy slanted a look at Gray, who had crept up to the flower bed and now stood a long step away from her.

Her hands throbbed whenever she lowered them. Her arms ached when she held her hands up. She shouldn’t even be out there. She should be in her room, resting. She’d slept for a little while after Shira finished the healing and helped her to her suite, but she didn’t feel easy about being inside the house. At least out here, there was the illusion of comfort.

Then the phrasing Gray used sank in and had her looking at him more closely—and had her eyeing the book he clutched to his chest like a shield.

“Is that one of the books of Protocol I brought?”