“Indeed! Do you know the talk it will cause if I send my family away on a moment’s notice?” The king cursed again, unconsciously. “I know what they say about me. I know! I’ll not give them this to drool on, Brant.”

“Your Majesty, this assassin is not given to idle threats. For the sake of all that’s holy, he murdered his own apprentice just to make a point!”

“A sham. Come on, general. You were drugged. You didn’t know what was going on.”

“My body was afflicted, not my mind. I know what I saw.”

The king sniffed, then curled his lip as he caught the faint odor of brimstone in the air. “Dammit! Can’t those idiots make anything work?”

One of the ducts that carried hot air from the Vos Island Crack just north of the castle had broken again. He doesn’t appreciate how much the engineers save us every year by heating the entire castle with pipes embedded in the very stones. He doesn’t care that the turbines spinning in the wind rising from the Crack give him the power of two hundred windmills. That he smells brimstone once a fortnight infuriates him. Agon wondered what god Cenaria had offended to deserve such a king.

He should have pushed Regnus Gyre. He should have spelled it out to him more clearly. He should have lied to him about what would happen to Nalia’s children by Aleine. He could have served Regnus proudly. Proudly and honorably.

“Maybe you saw him kill a boy,” the king said. “Who cares?” You should. Regnus would have. “It was obviously some street rat he picked up for the purpose of impressing you.”

“With all due respect, sire, you’re mistaken. I’ve dealt with formidable men. I faced Dorgan Dunwal in single combat. I fought Underlord Graeblan’s Lae’knaught lancers. I—”

“Yes, yes. A thousand goddam battles from my goddam father’s time. Very impressive,” the king said. “But you never learned anything about ruling, did you?”

General Agon stiffened. “Not like you have, Your Majesty.”

“Well, if you had, general, you’d know that you can’t damage your own reputation.” He cursed long and unfluently again. “Flee my own castle in the night!”

There was no working with him. The man shamed Agon and should have shamed himself. Yet Agon was sworn to him, and he’d decided long ago that an oath measured the man who gave it. It was like his marriage; he wouldn’t take back his vows simply because his wife couldn’t give him children.

But did vows hold when your own king had plotted to take your life? And not in honorable battle, but with an assassin’s blade in the night?