Chapter 1
Ranjit Blake had traveled for nine days, but when his destination came into sight, he stopped, wary. Something unusual was happening at the town wall, and Ranj’s instincts always snapped alert at anything out of the ordinary.
He started walking again, but this time it was a measured pace that took him slowly closer to New Canton while circling at the same time for a better look. Teams of oxen dragged great stone blocks towards a gap in the wall, a rent at least twenty feet wide. A scaffolding had sprung up around it, and people struggled to winch and maneuver more stone into place to rebuild the wall.
It would not be a strange sight if not for the fact that they shouldn’t need to do any such work. Every year, Ranj made a visit to New Canton to see his younger sister, so he knew the city had a patron Prince who could repair such damage swiftly and effortlessly. So why were people and animals sweating and heaving at it instead?
Perhaps the Prince had ordered them to do it as punishment. He edged nearer, but by the time he was sure his sister was nowhere among the unfortunates at work, they had noticed him and one or two glared in his direction, so he headed for the city gates. After the long journey, a meal and a bed would be very welcome.
“Your name and purpose here?” a guard at the gates asked him.
“Ranjit Blake. I’m here to see my sister, Sobha Singh.”
The guard glanced at the pistol Ranj wore at his right hip. “Is this a visit?”
Odd question. He carried nothing else except a bedroll across his shoulders, a few spare clothes and the last of his food supplies inside it. Anyone wanting to live and work in a city would bring more possessions, so he nodded brusquely.
The guard hesitated as if weighing the merits of more questioning, then gestured Ranj in. Out of the corners of his eyes he glanced at the other guards nearby, in case any of them planned on detaining him further, but they didn’t seem to notice him. Two of them talked in low voices, and the others looked as tense as if expecting an inspection at any moment.
The last time Ranj had been in New Canton, he’d heard a statue of the Prince was soon to be unveiled in the center of the town, so he avoided the location although it meant a slightly longer route to Sobha’s house. She lived above the carpentry workshop she owned, and when she opened the door to his knock, all the tension fell away from him. She hugged him tightly, and she smelled of freshly sawed wood. Ranj gave her a gentle push back inside before following her.
“Why were those people repairing the wall?” he asked without preamble as he shut the front door.
“The Prince left town a few days ago.”
“For good?” Must be, he thought, if the people weren’t waiting for him to return.
Sobha shrugged as if to say she didn’t know. “Sit down, bhaiji,” she said, and vanished through a curtained doorway. “I’ll get you something to drink.”
The front room was where she met with customers, so although it was small, it was comfortably furnished, the walls paneled with intricately cut pieces of wood. Ranj sank into a padded chair and stretched his legs out, though he wasn’t relaxed just yet. So that was why the guard at the gate had asked if he was only visiting. If they didn’t expect to see the Prince again, they’d need to defend themselves, and anyone who could use a gun was welcome.
But it was unusual for any Prince to abandon a town he ruled, especially one so much in his thrall that they’d put up a damned statue of him. The Princes were all fiercely possessive of what they owned. Ranj could hear Sobha at work in the kitchen beyond the curtain, so he got up and went in to ask if she knew what had made the Prince leave.
She had finished stirring sugar and dried fruit slices into a glass of water, and she held that out to him, but his attention had gone to a painting on the wall. He’d never known Sobha to have any interest in art, or need for it. The painting was of the cruise ship which had brought their ancestors to Avalon, but the only other picture he’d seen of the ship had been from a bird’s-eye view, so that ship looked small and lost in a world of water.
This painting was from a completely different perspective, and it made Ranj feel as though he was in the ocean staring up at the ship as it loomed high before him, spattering froth. Massive and imposing, it looked ready to burst out of the frame of the picture. He looked for an artist’s signature and saw the letters KF in one corner.
“This wasn’t here last year.” He took the glass from Sobha. “Where did you find it?”
“A customer didn’t have enough money for a commission, so I accepted it in lieu of payment.”
Ranj didn’t like that at all. She couldn’t eat art, and the idea of anyone taking advantage of his sister’s generosity made him want to find the customer and have a little chat. He hadn’t had any choice about sending Sobha to New Canton when she was only twelve, but that didn’t mean he had to put up with her being treated shabbily.
Maybe now she would come and live with him in Solstice Harbor, though. His hometown was a great deal safer than it had been fifteen years ago, and if New Canton had lost its patron, Sobha might not want to remain here.
He sipped his drink, thinking over his plan—she’d need her tools and furniture, which meant they couldn’t simply pack up and leave overnight—and she cleared her throat. “Someone angered the Prince,” she said, “so he stormed out through the wall.”
Ranj stared at her, wondering whether that tale had somehow become distorted in the telling, because it was difficult to believe. People walked on ice around the Princes, careful not to displease them, but this Prince must have been utterly livid if he’d smashed straight through the wall.
“What happened to make him do that?” he asked.
Sobha shrugged again. “No one knows.”
Chances were, Ranj thought, it was something completely unimportant which the Prince had taken as a great insult to his pride. “And what happened to the human who pissed him off? Dead?” He expected to hear yes, and horribly so.
Sobha looked wary. “He’s alive, but …”
She was hiding something, and he knew it. “What?”
“I suppose you’d have found out sooner or later,” Sobha said flatly. “It was Peter.”
Ranj set the glass down with a thud. “Peter Cleary?”
Sobha nodded. “Please don’t do anything reckless—”
Ranj ignored that and went to the door. He was outside at once, and headed with fast angry strides for Peter’s house.
***
The house was on the other side of the town, and by the time Ranj made his way there, it was evening. Like most of the other buildings, Peter’s house was dark. The pall hanging over the town was palpable as smoke now that Ranj knew the reason for it—an infuriated Prince was capable of leveling a town just as he’d destroyed part of the wall—and people stayed quiet in the hollows of their homes, as though they hoped not to be noticed.
The smell that came from Peter’s house struck him at once. Wet paint. It wrinkled his nose even before he saw what was painted there—a circle, the sign of ostracism. A good thing he didn’t give a shit what the townsfolk thought of him. He knocked on the door, but it took far too long before the door creaked open, and of course everything inside was pitch black.
“Peter?” he said.
The intake of breath was sharp and sudden. “Ranj?” No mistaking the shock in the voice. “What are you doing here?”
“Can I come in?”
“Oh, sorry.” The door swung the rest of the way, and Ranj shut it behind him. Peter turned away and a match rasped against sandpaper with a pungent whiff of phosphorus. When a flame unfolded, he slid a soot-blackened glass cover back on the oil lamp.
“It’s good to see you again.” He shook the match out. “I wish it was under better circumstances.”
The front room was as small as the rest of the house, and used more for storing supplies than for entertaining visitors. Ranj sat on a wooden crate and said nothing, because he didn’t trust himself to speak. Even in the poor light, the scabbed wound that cut through Peter’s lower lip was obvious. Ranj planted his hands on the edges of his makeshift chair, his nails digging into the wood. No wonder Sobha had been so reluctant to tell him about this.
“Would you like a cup of tea?” Peter sat on a barrel. “We make it from roasted barley—”
“Shut up,” Ranj said, without heat. “What happened?”
Peter shrugged. His fireplace was empty of anything but ashes, and over his clothes he’d wrapped a red woolen blanket around his body. He was as tall as Ranj, but he hunched inside the blanket, as if bracing for an attack.
“I’m sure you’ve heard,” he said. “He hit me and left town. That was two days ago, and everyone’s afraid he’s deserted us.”
Ranj opened his mouth to say great, good riddance, let’s hope he never comes back. Then he closed it again. The people wanted him back—their patron, their protector, their vicious bastard Prince—and they didn’t care what price they had to pay for it.
“What are they doing about it?” Keeping his voice level was an effort. “Other than treating you like a pariah.”
Peter shook his head, as if he was too tired for a stronger response. “Like I said, they’re terrified. And some…well, most people didn’t believe me when I said I’d done nothing to displease him.”
“Course you did nothing!” He didn’t need to see Peter’s hands, the knuckles smooth and unmarked, to know Peter hadn’t thrown so much as a single punch. Peter was as familiar to him as one of his own family, not only as a peacemaker—as calm as Ranj was volatile—but as someone who had a gift.
It wasn’t one most people noticed, because although he worked hard and willingly, he had no particular skill in education or medicine. He had something rarer, the ability to make his lovers happy, and not merely in bed. Whenever Ranj had told him of an accomplishment, Peter had been delighted and proud of him, without a trace of envy. When Ranj failed at something, Peter listened and consoled him, with the end result that Ranj felt confident he’d succeed the next time. Peter could make anyone feel valued and wonderful.
Anyone…that was the problem. A year or two, and Peter would start to look elsewhere, his attention turning to the next person who needed him. With the exception of the Prince, Ranj thought grimly, because Peter would never have dared to leave him. No, the end of that particular dalliance would be the Prince’s decision.
Though Ranj had never expected it would be delivered by the Prince’s fist. Now that he thought about it, Peter was lucky to be alive. A beating was the least of what one of the Earthborn Princes could deliver.
“You didn’t need to do anything,” he said. “They’re all vile, you know it.” They were monsters, and if a few lent their protection to certain human settlements, it was because they received tribute in turn. Ranj had no doubt the Prince had fucked Peter’s brains out as payment.
“He never seemed that way.”
Ranj gave it up as a useless line of discussion. “Never mind. So he’s gone—for now.” There was nothing the people of New Canton could do if the Prince decided to raze their town in a fit of temper, and that made him all the more determined not to let his sister or Peter be part of that devastation. “Do you want to leave? I could take you to Solstice Harbor with me.”
“No.” Peter was always soft-spoken, but there was nothing hesitant in the refusal. “I live here.” He started to smile, but winced at what that did to his mouth. “It’ll be all right. If he returns, I’ll stay out of his sight. And if he doesn’t, I’ve collected some food. I can take it as tribute, to apologize for anything I might—”
“Wait.” The mention of tribute was almost enough to distract Ranj from the disgusting prospect of Peter begging forgiveness from the filth who’d brutalized him. “You know where he is?”
“I know which direction he went. He left a trail a blind man could follow. No guarantee he’s still anywhere there, but at least I’d be doing something. And maybe he’s still watching over us from a distance.”
Amazing, how people continued to hope for the best after such treatment. “Yes,” Ranj said. “We’ll go tomorrow, first light.”
“We?”
“You distract him.” He touched the butt of the pistol holstered on his hip. “I’ll do the rest.”
Peter stared at him as if he were a stranger. “Dear God. You’re not serious.”
“Why not?” Ranj leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. “Peter, listen to me. If he’s so unpredictable, he’s a danger to your town. But if he’s dead, none of you will live in fear of him again. Don’t waste any more of your food or your sympathy on him.”
Peter’s gaze flew to the door and window, as if checking those were tight-shut. “But what if you don’t kill him?”
Ranj’s pistol was one of the best turned out by the Solstice Harbor armaments works, but he still needed twenty seconds to reload it. At best. And if he didn’t kill the Prince instantly, it wouldn’t matter if he could fire again three seconds later, because the Prince’s power was faster. If a human set out to kill a Prince, there was only ever one attempt, because after that, either the Prince was dead or the human was.
The latter happened about a thousand times more often than the former.
“I won’t take aim unless he’s in flesh form,” he said. There was no way to injure a Prince who was in earth form instead. “And I never miss. I’ve no doubt dragging a Prince’s corpse into town will meet with mixed reviews, as Mayor Stuyvesant would say, but no one will grieve him for long.” There would be no chance that anything like this would happen to Sobha, and almost as importantly, the townsfolk wouldn’t treat Peter like dirt again. They would all know what happened to anyone, even a Prince, who beat him.
The lamplight threw a gleam on Peter’s face, on the sweat filming his skin. “This is murder.”
“Murder is the deliberate and unlawful killing of a human. We’re not talking about a human.” Ranj was the captain of the town guard of Solstice Harbor, and he’d memorized the laws, not that anyone needed to justify protecting people from a rabid beast. He tried to speak more gently, anyway. “What are you worried about, Peter?”
Peter swallowed. “He was a good master. I keep thinking if we wait…or better yet, if we figure out what made him angry so we can make sure it doesn’t happen again—”
“Why do you keep blaming yourself?” To hell with being gentle, and only a warning gesture from Peter made him speak quietly. “He’s not your master, either. He doesn’t own you, he never did. And since we’re dealing in what-ifs, you prepared for him to hit you again?”
He’d suspected more injuries under the red blanket, and he knew it when Peter’s hand lifted to his side. The gesture was obviously an involuntary one, and Ranj guessed it meant a cracked rib or two.
“He never did that before.” Peter stared at the floor. “I thought I was going to die.”
The lip would heal and the ribs mend, but he wasn’t likely ever to forget the terror that his life was about to end in agony. A pity the Prince wouldn’t experience what he’d inflicted on his victim, but Ranj could deliver the next best thing.
“You won’t,” he said. “You will not be hurt again, not if I have anything to do with it.”
In the silence, rain drummed on the tiled roof and gurgled down the spout of the water barrel outside. Ranj was wondering where to go from there, because diplomacy and negotiation had never been his strong points, when Peter nodded.
“All right.” His voice was toneless, as if his fear was so great it had hollowed him out and left nothing behind. For a moment Ranj hesitated. If he failed, the Prince might retaliate by slaughtering the entire population of the town. Telling himself this was likely in any case, since the Prince seemed to have turned feral, didn’t help.
Don’t fail, then.
“I’m thirsty,” he said. “What happened to that tea you mentioned earlier?”
***
When he woke, rain still pattered down, which didn’t bode well for keeping powder dry but which might conceal the sound of a hammer cocking. Stretching, he rolled the knots out of his shoulders. By the time Peter had come around to agreeing with him, it had been so late that he’d decided to stay there. The town guards would be jumpy enough in the Prince’s absence, and might not take too well to a stranger walking around after dark. Besides, Sobha was far less likely to fall in line with his plan. Peter had offered his bed, but it was hardly large enough for two, so Ranj had slept on a double armful of hay in the front room.
At least he knew the Prince had never spent the night there. Peter’s house was barely furnished, while the Princes liked to loll on furs, admire themselves in mirrors. This one was no exception, since he lived in a great hall built on an island in the lake. Briefly, without real interest, Ranj wondered what would be done with it after the Prince was dead.
He bundled the hay into a net, by which time Peter was awake too. They mutually decided against breakfast. It was still dark, but best not to waste time, Ranj said, and Peter agreed, which was better than admitting that neither of them had any appetite.
Thanks to the cold—ostracism meant a lack of coal and kindling—he hadn’t bothered undressing, so while Peter got the basket of tribute ready, all he needed to do was clean his pistol. The pouch that balanced it on his gunbelt held bullets wrapped in oiled scraps, and the powder stayed ready in a brass funnel. His initials, RJB, were burned into the pistol’s stock.
He enfolded the pistol in a waxed cloth, and slipped it inside his jerkin. Peter was ready with the covered basket, and they left the house together.
At any other time, they might have had to talk or bribe the gates open, but now they slipped out through the gap in the wall. Towards the east, a paler blue stained the sky as the night began to end, though even in the dark, Ranj would have had little difficulty following the Prince. The trail was clear, as Peter had said. The ground was deeply rutted as if ships’ anchors had been dragged over it, and the trail led off into the foothills to the west. Good. He couldn’t hope to ambush anyone, let alone a Prince, on bare level ground.
As they reached the hills, the rain stopped and the clouds over the eastern horizon burned like white gold in a furnace. Peter looked in that direction more than once, as if he thought it was the last sunrise he would ever see. Ranj didn’t bother trying to reassure him. Talk was cheap, and if they were being spied on, best not to give anything away.
The trail ended. It snaked through a narrow pass and disappeared from sight under a wall of boulders that blocked the way. Obviously the work of a Prince, and equally clear that the Prince didn’t wish to be followed. Peter gave Ranj a look that said: now what?
Ranj looked around. Rainwater glistened on fresh wounds in the hills on either side, where rocks had been gouged away, wrenching out stunted shrubs by the roots. The barrier before them was three times the height of a man, and the moss-covered rocks piled so close he had no idea what was on the other side. The Prince, waiting?
Of course not, because no Prince needed to lay an ambush for humans. Still, it would help if he had an idea where the creature was. Yes, and it would help if he had a few tons of dynamite and a long fuse, for all the good wanting did.
But the pause gave him time to notice something else about the shallow trenches scored in the ground. He’d thought those were dark because they were so deeply dug by the Prince’s weight, but now he knelt, tugged off a worn glove, and ran a fingertip through one of the long rents. The earth was burned black, and he guessed that if not for the rain, he’d have smelled the scorching.
What had made a Prince storm off in such rage that a wall blew apart before him and the ground smoked in his wake? Ranj would never have blamed Peter, or any human a Prince chose to play with and degrade, but something had to have caused this. Even if that reason was simple and bleak as “gone as insane as his mother”.
Enough time wasted. He drew the other glove off, tucked both into his belt, and stepped up on the nearest boulder.
“What are you doing?” Peter whispered. “You don’t know what’s behind that.”
“I’ll find out.” The familiar weight of his pistol was safe inside his jerkin, next to his chest, as he began the rise.
The boulders were slimy with crushed moss, and he feared a crash of falling rocks that might bring the Prince surging down on him. He dug his fingers into clefts, holding on as he tested footholds. Occasionally a rock shifted a little, but none of them rolled.
Then he was at the top. He glanced over, but there was no one in sight. Without turning away, he made a come-up motion with one hand, and Peter moved forward.
He waited where he was to help Peter with the full basket, so descending the wall took longer than he expected. Ahead of them, the gorge narrowed steadily to make a chokepoint, the hills rising on either side. Deep gouges showed in their sides, and rocks far too large to lift lay tumbled over the ground, along with broken branches. Flotsam and rubble. Higher, shrubs sprouted from cracks in cliff faces, wet leaves gleaming where sunrays struck them. Nothing moved except for water trickling down the cliff faces.
And there was no trail ahead of them, no signs to give an indication which way the Prince had gone. Clearly he’d taken flesh form before walking off…unless he was the barrier? Ranj’s skin shrank at the possibility that he’d clambered over a giant.
Don’t be an idiot. The Prince could have looked exactly like a wall of fallen boulders, but he’d have to have stayed in that shape and that position for weeks to grow moss. For now, he was nowhere in sight.
But if he’d taken flesh form and kept it, he might be only as far as a man could walk.
“Sit down,” he said. “And try to look relaxed.”
Peter’s expression said he’d never been further from it, but he couldn’t argue that the Prince needed to be lulled into flesh form. Ranj loaded his pistol, wrapped it again to protect it from damp, and tucked it into his belt.
“Wait till I hide,” he said, reaching for a thick branch, “then shout for him.”
Peter’s skin had gone milk-pale, but he managed a nod. Ranj slid the end of the branch under a flat chunk of stone, large as the lid of a crypt. He levered it up and positioned it against the base of a cliff, propped lengthwise at an angle. It was twenty feet away from Peter, and there was barely enough space beneath to fit Ranj’s body. Good. The only advantage of the Princes being so damned huge in earth form was that they never seemed to realize humans could hide in small places.
He dropped to the dirt. Despite his bearhide jerkin, stones in the damp earth dug painfully as he wriggled backwards beneath the slab, crawling out of the sunlight. His shoulders pressed against the unyielding rock above him. He tried not to imagine what would happen if that weight came down, crushing and entombing him at once.
But whether he was alive or dead, the shadow beneath the slab hid him. From where he lay, the narrow wedge of the crevice’s entrance faced the other side of the gorge, so Peter was out of sight too. His voice sounded disembodied as he called out.
“Master Sheruke.” The shouts were hollow as if they emerged through cupped hands. “Master Sheruke!”
They called him master, as if they were slaves. Ranj wished he’d thought to bring a horn, but better not to make the Prince believe he was under attack. A single person calling for him—a voice in the wilderness, as Mayor Stuyvesant would say—was far less threatening.
“Master Sheruke!” Echoes bounced off the cliff walls. Peter’s cries drowned them, hoarse and raw but full of desperate strength. “Master Sheruke!” Come on, you bastard. Since he lay on his stomach, his chin was buried in mud, cold foul mud like that which filled the eye sockets of the Earthborn Princes.
“Master Sheruke! Master Sheruke! Mas…”
The voice cracked and went silent. He gave up, Ranj thought in disbelief.
A tremor passed through the ground. Another followed and another, close on each other’s heels, echoes through earth. Pebbles shivered and clicked together. In the sunlight beyond the mouth of the crevice, a shower of droplets fell glittering, and over the thud of his heartbeat in his ears, he heard the deep unstoppable rush that was a Prince approaching.
From where he lay—and he didn’t dare wriggle forward yet—he could barely see the oncoming form thanks to the clouds it raised, but those seemed like dust, rather than the steam which rose off boiling mud. Was that good? He couldn’t be sure.
The Prince roared through the gorge in the shape of a landslide, flinging stones away on both sides as if they were weightless. Too late Ranj realized the danger. The trailing edge of the Prince’s form struck the slab above his head.
It was a glancing accidental blow to solid rock almost a foot thick, but the slab shuddered with the impact. The edge of it grated against the cliff face. Ranj buried his face in the mud to muffle involuntary sounds, and his heart slammed so hard against his ribs that it hurt.
But the cliff braced the slab of stone enough that it didn’t drop. As from a distance, he heard the tidal-wave rush subside, whirling to a halt, and he lifted his head to breathe again. The pit of his stomach filled with ice.
“Master Sheruke.” Peter sounded as if his throat had been scrubbed with sandpaper. “Thank you for your presence. I’ve brought tribute.”
“There’s no need for it. My people have given me enough.”
The voice was deep, with some quality Ranj couldn’t identify at first. Composed, that was it. Unnervingly so, given the pain the Prince had meted out with a generous hand. He sounded completely at ease, and jolts of anger flickered through Ranj’s half-paralyzed limbs. Careful not to make a sound, he began to inch out.
“Anything and all we have is yours.” Peter hesitated. “And if I displeased you in some way…”
“You’re not to blame.” The voice was still relaxed, but an edge slipped into it. “Did the Council send you here?”
Mud moved slickly beneath Ranj’s knees as he continued to push himself out from under the slab, and the sound, soft as it was, made him go still. The Prince was so close. He had to have heard—
A weight thudded into water with a heavy slosh. “No,” Peter said, and as he spoke, Ranj dug his elbows into the ground. The muscles in his arms and shoulders flexed. Broken stone scraped the top of his head, and then the roughness was gone, leaving cool sunlit air. “I came on my own,” Peter said, and again there was a splash, this time noisier as stones clacked against stones.
“But they hold you responsible?” The coldness beneath the calm was more obvious now—and growing as the Prince went on. “Why, because you were present when it happened?”
Almost there. Ranj forced himself to move with more caution than he’d showed in his life. One creak of leather or a stiff joint popping, and it would be over. Smoother than oil, he eased his way silently, and it was done. He knew without needing to look back that the slab of rock was just beyond his heels.
He also knew, from the sound of the Prince’s voice, that he lay a dozen feet away from violent death.
Don’t fail, then.
“Master, will you come back?” Peter asked. Thank you, Ranj thought. Keep talking.
He got to his feet, turning at once towards his enemy. The pistol’s grip was in his palm, but he didn’t unwrap it from its waxed cloth yet. He needed to cock the hammer, snapping it back with a click, and that sound had to be muffled, or he would die before he pulled the trigger.
“Of course,” the Prince said.
He stood with bare feet planted on damp ground. His back was to Ranj, and from behind, the Princes looked like men. But few if any humans would have gone naked, or been so unconcerned about it.
“Of course I will,” the Prince said again.
“People will be glad to know this.” Peter was on his knees, and that would have disgusted Ranj if not for the sight of what Peter did next—he scooped a handful of pebbles from the ground and tossed them, two or three at a time, into a little pool nearby. Ranj almost smiled as he cocked the hammer, and the waxed cloth slipped away like silk. The trigger was uncovered, and his finger curled around it.
“Was there any doubt?” the Prince said dryly. “I am the patron of the town, and I try not to neglect my responsibilities.”
Peter flushed. “May I accompany you back, Master?”
“You may not. I will return when it pleases me to do so. Is that understood?”
Peter nodded, silenced. He scrubbed his hands on the sides of his pants as if trying to clean off mud—or blot sweat—and his gaze never wavered from the Prince’s face.
Ranj raised the pistol, his right arm locked and steady, his left hand clasped over the gun to hold it steadier. He aimed at the back of the Prince’s head, at thick uncombed dark hair. If it was a moonless midnight, he wouldn’t miss, especially not at so short a distance.
“Good.” The Prince sounded mollified. “Go back to the town, reassure my people, and tell them their patience will be rewarded.”
Ranj wondered why that was necessary. What was there in the empty stretches of the foothills to hold a Prince’s attention, compared to a townful of puppies waiting to lick his feet? And even if a Prince grew bored and abandoned the people under his protection, why bother to dress it up in lies and fancy words?
Peter bowed his head. “Yes, Master.”
They’re done. Ranj’s finger tightened on the trigger. He’s going to leave. He still wanted to know why the Prince seemed in no hurry to return to his pedestal, but that knowledge wasn’t worth anyone’s life.
Instead he thought of his mother, of what had happened to his family nearly twenty years ago. He thought of Peter, once his lover and still his friend, beaten by a Prince. This Prince.
Don’t fail.
The memories flew through his mind, and in that instant the Prince started to turn away from Peter.
Ranj pulled the trigger.