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A cloth soaked in something floral-smelling covered Seth’s mouth. He drove an elbow back into someone’s gut and heard a grunt.
Seth spun, furious, hunting for assailants. Then all his anger disintegrated into a haze. He was falling.
As he hit the ground, he saw Raider’s face turn toward him, saw the glaze of his amber eyes, saw his lips part as he mouthed, Seth.
Then everything was gone.
CHAPTER 37
SETH DRIFTED TO semi-consciousness to the sound of nearby voices. With his eyes too heavy to open and his body too heavy to move, all he could do was listen.
“Don’t be absurd. It was the quiva.”
“And was it quiva the first night? Or the second?”
A weary sigh answered that. “Your temper, my prince, is clouding your judgment. This was the plan from the start: for me to test their relationship.”
“Your plan, I recall. Did you enjoy it?”
“Might we focus on our success? You have, at last, the means of commanding Zarina’s attention—”
“You make me sound like a child.”
Another weary sigh. From Malik, Seth’s hazy brain was beginning to realize. “At least let us focus on what we’ve learned. The Curator is clearly in love with him and, more importantly, was not wholly surprised by the quicksilver.”
“An accomplice, then?”
Accomplice?
Trying to wake up, Seth drew a noisier breath than he intended. The two men fell silent. When Seth blinked his eyes open, he found himself staring blearily at his lap. He was in a chair, his head hanging—and his hands were bound to the chair arms.
Seth’s head whipped up. The room spun.
“Easy,” Malik said.
Seth closed his eyes until the spinning stopped and the nausea subsided. He had to be calm. He had to think. He had to figure out what the hell was going on.
Subtly testing his bonds, Seth opened his eyes. He was in some kind of arcane workroom. Malik’s workroom. The arcanist, still in his finery from dinner, stood beside a worktable. The studied flirtation was gone. He regarded Seth with cool, dispassionate eyes. The prince at his side, however, was glaring.
“What the hell is going on?” Seth asked with as much calm as he could manage. He and Raider had been tricked. Drugged. No wonder the gathering had been populated by Rahim’s enslaved dancers. They had no choice but to play along with their master. “Where the hell is Raider?”
“You can’t guess?” Malik asked.
Seth stared at him. How the fuck would he be able to guess?
“Your lover,” Prince Rahim informed Seth, “is in the dungeon.”
The room spun again. Seth’s chest tightened. What the fuck was going on?
“What do you know about the death of Emperor Hassan?”
Seth focused on the speaker, Malik, with an effort. The arcanist was studying him, his eyes flicking away only when the prince started pacing. Malik displayed no such impatience but simply rested a hip against the worktable. Behind him, on the shelves above the table, stood rows of jars containing a wide array of powders and other materials.
Malik had never told Seth his specialty, but it was clearly divination. Diviners used the properties of various metals, stones, and organic matter to trigger reactions in items of study. They might determine the age of an object or learn whether a tissue sample showed signs of disease.
They also aided authorities with interrogations … by administering drugs that rendered suspects more vulnerable to questioning.
Seth thought back to the garden. He’d been drugged with quiva and maybe poppy. They had seized him and Raider by the gentlest and safest means possible: seduction. They had used Seth and Raider’s relationship to render them vulnerable.
