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I shook my head. “No. He must have wanted fresh air after having too much to drink last night.”
“Must be,” Mia said, then nodded to me and walked on.
I headed to the big house, walking straight to the dining room, now that I knew where it was.
“Anton!” Lefric greeted me as soon as I stepped into the room. He leapt to his feet and rushed to throw his arms around me. “I was getting worried about you.”
I hugged him back, but asked, “Why were you worried about me?”
Lefric leaned back with a frown and said, “You know. Dmitri?” He whispered the name, peeking back over his shoulder to Peter and Neil.
I broke away from his hold and walked to the table where my friends sat. The tables were arranged differently for breakfast, more spread out. The Sons all sat at one table, while Magnus, Vikhrov, Olympus, and some of Olympus’s brothers sat at another. The children from the night before were at the third table with women I assumed were their nannies and women who must have been wives of Vikhrov’s sons or his daughters. Premila sat with them, deep in conversation with a woman who must have been Vikhrov’s daughter, judging by her coloring. Ox and Katrina were nowhere to be seen.
“Dmitri was so drunk by the time I got him to our suite last night that he threw up a few times, then passed out,” I told my friends as I sat on a cushion Lefric had apparently left free for me by his side.
I looked carefully at Peter to see if talking about Dmitri still made him queasy.
Peter seemed a little withdrawn, but I assumed he was getting used to having Dmitri back in his life, because his color was better than it had been for days, and he didn’t flinch at Dmitri’s name.
“I guess he’s still sleeping it off,” Sebald said, offering to pour coffee for me.
I was so eager to have coffee again after almost a year—even before traveling in the eastern forest, we’d run out of coffee in Meadowbrook, thanks to the deprivations of the Dying Winter—that I almost didn’t catch his statement.
“Actually, he was gone when I woke up this morning,” I said, accepting the sugar bowl when Lefric handed it to me.
“Gone?” Peter asked, an edge of worry, or maybe hope, in his voice.
I shrugged and repeated, “Gone. Even Mia didn’t know where he was.”
My friends looked as perplexed as I’d felt when I’d realized he wasn’t in bed.
Until Jace said, “Good riddance. Maybe he realized we all hate him and he buggered off.”
Something about the statement hit me wrong. Not enough for me to tell Jace off, but I felt awkward about Dmitri being dismissed out of hand. He really could be important to our cause, and I knew he wasn’t lying when he said he had vital information to share with us.
But even more than that, I felt…I wasn’t certain…I think I felt sorry for him. Like me, in essence, he didn’t have any family left, because Mikal wasn’t speaking to him. Like me, he couldn’t seem to connect with anyone in a meaningful way. Everyone in the eastern forest feared and respected him, but I hadn’t heard a single one of the wild wolves refer to him as a friend.
As soon as the though struck me, I shook my head and took a long, fortifying gulp of coffee. I’d been out in the wild for too long. I needed to spend some time with my friends in a civilized place to remember who I was and to stop feeling sorry for assholes.
“What was the outcome of searching Eneko’s quarters last night?” I asked so I would stop dwelling on miserable things.
It was exactly the right question to ask. Everyone at the table lit up, even Gennadi and Avenel.
“They found so much evidence of Eneko’s guilt!” Lefric said, almost squealing. “He had a stamp like the one we found at Gregorius’s house, and reams and reams of letters in locked boxes under his bed.”
“What kind of spy keeps correspondence from a king under his bed?” Neil asked with a scoffing snort.
“What king of spy doesn’t destroy those kinds of letters?” Jace asked, sounding even less impressed with Eneko than he was with Dmitri.
“A bad spy, I guess,” Sebald said, pouring some of the coffee for himself.
“The things that were found in his quarters all but prove Eneko was responsible for Gregorius’s death as well,” Lefric went on. “Except for one problem.”
“What problem?” I asked, helping myself to sausages and what looked like fried cinnamon bread from plates in the center of the table.
Lefric grew even more excited, if that was possible. “The evidence we found in Gregorius’s house before we left for Hedeon suggests that there were two other conspirators working with him,” he said. “One of them was definitely Eneko. Olympus and I kept the letters we found in Gregorius’s house with us on the trip to Hedeon—”
“It sounds like Eneko might have gone looking for those letters when Lefric and Olympus were gone,” Sebald interrupted.
