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Erya operated under a similar idea, with officials limited to three terms and their term periods were four years instead of five.
All in all, Jasper Feroz had only four years left as prime minister. Could an alliance with the Empire give Prime Minister Feroz a way of extending his own rule beyond those four years? Not a bad gig, even though it would mean becoming a puppet for Emperor Naram Suen in New Rosanthe.
The man hadn’t struck Caelan as being particularly conniving, scheming, or oily. At least no more than the next politician. Would he sell out his own people to keep his comfy job?
“What’s your opinion of Feroz?” Caelan inquired quietly.
Rayne didn’t look overly surprised by the question. He put down his pen and plucked his glasses off his nose. With the hem of his T-shirt, he proceeded to wipe his lenses clean while he gathered his thoughts. This was one of the things that he loved about Rayne, though it tended to drive the impatient insane. Rayne never blurted out the first thing that came to his mind when someone asked his thoughts or opinion on a topic. It might take him a couple of minutes to organize his thoughts, but Caelan always knew that he was getting a thorough, well-considered response when Rayne spoke.
“I have met the man in person only twice—once while he was the Minister of the Interior and once after he was appointed to the position of prime minister. The first time was during a welcome banquet that was to kick off a round of new trade talks between Ilon and Erya. The second time was after the first night of celebrations to mark the thirtieth anniversary of Queen Amara’s coronation. Most of my interactions with the Ilon government have been through other ministers and the prime minister’s numerous assistants.”
“And…” Caelan prodded with a growing smirk as Rayne laid the baseline for his opinion.
Rayne carefully slid his glasses back on his face and leaned forward, lowering his voice so that Caelan could barely hear him. “The man is an ass.”
Caelan’s loud bark of laughter was like a gunshot in the silent library. He slapped his hand over his mouth to hold in the rest of his shocked laughter. His eyes watered and he blinked rapidly to keep Rayne in focus. That was not the answer he’d expected to receive at all.
“That is not to say the man isn’t smart or talented,” Rayne quickly tacked on. “He is a career politician and has held a large number of high-level positions during his lifetime. Each of his elections have been won by relatively large margins. He is friendly, outgoing, and charismatic. But he is also loud, boorish, rude, and overbearing. All of those negative qualities grow infinitely worse with the application of alcohol.”
Sitting back in his chair, Caelan rubbed a hand across his mouth as he turned over what Rayne said. Overly friendly, loud, and a bit pushy were Caelan’s impressions—but then, everyone treated him different. At the time, he’d been the Crown Prince Caelan Talos of Erya, the future ruler. People either saw him as a pushover as compared to his mother, or they simply wanted to get on his good side early in hopes that he’d remember them fondly when he ascended to the throne.
He was pretty sure that Rayne tended to get a better taste of the truth, but even that was flavored with a dose of ass-kissing since Rayne did have the future king’s ear.
Caelan dropped his hand to the table. “Do you think it might be a mask?”
“A ruse to get people to lower their defenses and trust him?”
Caelan nodded. “Or at least underestimate him.”
A slow smirk tugged up one corner of Rayne’s lips and his eyes sparked with dark amusement. “That is a definite possibility. I didn’t take him for an idiot or a fool, but I wouldn’t classify him as someone who plans long term. I could be wrong about that.”
Caelan shrugged. “Or maybe we’ve both become so paranoid that we’re constantly looking for things that aren’t there.” He sighed. “Rayne, we’re too young to be this pessimistic.”
“I call it being realistic,” Rayne said with a sniff.
“Is that what your boyfriend would say?”
Rayne attempted to wipe his expression clean, but Caelan knew the man well enough to pick up the tiniest hint of a smile as he picked up his pen again. “My boyfriend loves me exactly the way I am, regardless of whether I’m a pessimist or a realist.”
Yes, that was very true. It took being in the same room with them for five seconds to see that Eno loved Rayne with every fiber of his being. He wouldn’t change a single thing about Rayne, and while Rayne didn’t always show it, Caelan knew that Rayne felt the exact same about Eno.
And it was a painful reminder of why they’d hidden their relationship from him in the first place. Seeing how happy they were, Caelan was all the more reluctant to put either of them in danger. Not just because they were two of his closest friends and had become family to him, but he also wanted to protect their love as much as he wanted to protect his own kingdom. As fucked up as everything was in Thia, he wanted one beautiful thing to be deemed sacred and untouchable. Right now, that was Rayne and Eno’s love.
Scratch that. He wanted two beautiful things.
He also wanted Drayce with him always.
But he wasn’t going to be able to protect shit if he didn’t figure out what the Empire was plotting, where the godstone was located, or how he was supposed to stop the Goddess of the Hunt in the first place.
Tamping down another weary sigh, Caelan sat up and dragged over the book he’d been skimming for the past hour. He’d been reading a story of how Kaes had been born as a set of twins. Things kind of got weird from there and his brain sort of glazed over the details, but the story was an unlikely explanation of why Zyros was pissed at all the gods in the first place.
From the corner of his eye, he spotted a young woman in a lavender top and ripped jeans walking in their direction. An olive-green backpack hung on one slumped shoulder, and her black hair hung in a wild mass of curls about her head. She was just one of the many university-aged people filling the library, carrying about stacks of books. Most appeared to be alone, their concentration locked on their work.
But she was one of the few he’d spotted more than once as she moved around the open space.
He and Rayne had selected a table near a rear corner that allowed Caelan a good view of the entire library as people entered as well as put his back to a wall. When he’d spotted her the first two times, he’d been willing to brush it off as coincidence, but now that she was walking toward them for a third time, he wasn’t quite so positive.
The gods noticed and at least perked up a little, seeming to come out of their collective pout. He had to agree that this was a bit more interesting than digging through yet another book.
