Which was why Neph was cursing. He wasn’t precisely disobeying Roth, but he was undoing something the prince had begun. Something, in fact, that Roth believed he had accomplished. Something that it was taking all of Neph’s abilities to stop. Mercifully, Roth had been too busy securing the castle and the city to ask where his Vürdmeister was. Besides, he had sixty meisters to command now, three of them Vürdmeisters almost as powerful as Neph. If Roth had sent men after him, the small servant’s room Neph had commandeered was isolated enough that they had never been able to find him.

His work—his petty deceit, and rebellion, and gamble for the Godking’s favor—lay stretched out on the bed. She was a beautiful girl—not that the Godking needed another beautiful girl—but she had spirit. Fiery, intelligent, and best of all a widowed, virgin bride, and a princess. Jenine Gyre was a prize indeed. A prize to crown the Godking’s harem. A prize Neph had snatched from the very jaws of Death.

Every Vürdmeister as old as he was knew volumes about preserving life, of course. It was in their own self-interest as they grew old. But I am a genius. A genius.

His plan had crystallized as Roth had ranted, meaningless words exploding from the boy like diarrhea. As usual. His cut had been fortunate. Just one side of the neck, not so deep that it cut the windpipe. Neph let her bleed until she was losing strength, then tickled a little tendril of magic against her diaphragm to push the air from her lungs, two more to close her eyes, a fourth to seal the wound on her neck, some quick movement to take attention away from her body so no one would notice that she was still breathing, and the girl had been his.

He’d killed seven serving girls looking for the right kind of blood for her. Sloppy work. He should have done better, but it had been enough. He’d decided to leave the scar. It gave the princess a certain something. And as a finishing touch, he’d found a girl in the city who looked like the princess and had her head mounted over the east gate with the rest of the royal family’s. If you got the right color of hair and styled it correctly, all you had to do was beat the face enough, and it could look like anyone’s head. Still, he thought, he’d done brilliant work, even if it had been exhausting.

Tomorrow morning, the Godking would arrive and he’d dispense either favor or punishment to Roth Ursuul. Either way, Neph would prosper.

Something made him pause before he went out the door. Something felt odd outside. He walked to his window, threw open the wooden shutters—no glass for the servants’ rooms—and stared through the hole into the ghastly Cenarian statue garden.