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Nicolo looked at me and a smile slightly tilted his lips up at the ends. “You’re wondering why Wylder would ally himself with another spoilt royal?” he suggested, reading my face. “Given his abhorrence for Balduin?”
“I wasn’t going to phrase the question quite like that but I suppose the question still remains the same.”
To my surprise, Nicolo smiled the sort of big genuine smile I hadn’t seen since this affair began. “By the Great God you’re learning, woman. Who would have thought?” I gave him a well-pronounced frown to which he chuckled. Then he continued, “well, you’d be right to ask.” He nodded as he smiled at me again and there appeared an expression of pride in his eyes. “You pay attention smartly, Charlotte. It may not always be wise for a squire to be too clever but I like it… for now, at any rate.”
“I don’t imagine you would like a silly squire,” I answered with my eyebrows arched. “I do believe you lack the patience for one.”
“True, Charlotte, very true.”
I cleared my throat, wanting to return to the subject at hand. “Then Wylder and Princess Alder are allies?”
Nicolo cocked his head to the side. “I wouldn’t call them ‘allies’ necessarily. More a case of ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’.”
“Interesting.”
“They both dislike Prince Balduin and would rather see him dead than on the throne. Of course, once Balduin is dead, then Alder and Wylder have very different ideas of what should happen next. Alder believes she should be queen, with Prius as her puppet king.”
“Wouldn’t Princess Hazel and Princess Laurel come before Princess Alder in the succession? They are older, no?”
“Yes, and they should watch their backs.”
I nodded and grew quiet for a few seconds until something else occurred to me and I looked up, only to find Nicolo still watching me with that amused expression. “What, sir?” I asked.
“I’m quite sure you haven’t exhausted your arsenal of questions?”
I laughed. “I… haven’t,” I finished and then glanced down a bit bashfully.
“Well, come on then, what’s the next one?”
I smiled at him and found I really enjoyed the easy comradery between us and strangely enough, it seemed even more casual than it had before ‘the incident’. “What does Wylder want by murdering the prince?”
Nicolo shook his head. “I really don’t know. I suppose Wylder’s just a man with ideas of his own. Old soldiers see a lot of the world—sometimes they see too much and that gives them funny ideas about how things ought to work.”
I decided not to pass comment on this. Maybe Iwaslearning.
“Who goes?!” called a voice from the castle walls as we rode up to the closed gates.
“Master Nicolo and a company of the King’s Guards!” Nicolo shouted back, his tone of voice warning the guards not to make this difficult on him and us.
‘King’sGuards’ I noted. Just as it was the ‘King’s Tower’ in which the Old Queen lived. She was widely considered our greatest monarch and had outlived any other by over a decade, but such things change slowly, if at all.
The gates swung open without any more back and forth. When Master Nicolo was waiting, then you acted fast and asked questions later. Stable boys hurried out to take our horses while pages rushed from the doors of the keep that dominated the courtyard, anxious to show us every hospitality.
“Almost as if they were expecting us,” muttered Nicolo as he faced me with one eyebrow drawn.
We entered an impressive hall at the same time as the duke and his royal wife, who entered from the other side. As we met them, we all knelt and lowered our heads and Nicolo bowed, but his spine was rigid and his shoulders were tense.
“Your Grace, Your Highness,” he said, facing them both. “Thank you for making us welcome.”
Duke Prius opened his mouth, but it was his wife who spoke first. “Nicolo, what an unexpectedpleasure.”
It might have been my imagination, but I thought she stressed the word ‘pleasure’. Whenever the princesses came up in conversations between Nicolo and their brother, I got the impression there was history there, and the way Princess Alder looked at Nicolo seemed to confirm that history.
The way Nicolo looked back at her was much less friendly. “You were missed at the Masque last night.”
“Sadly, we were unable to attend,” replied Princess Alder, speaking for the duke again. “But surely, you have not come all this way to chide us for that? You must have ridden through the day.”
Nicolo didn’t mince his words. “Then I suppose you haven’t yet heard the news?”
