He walked out of Dorian’s eyrie, made sure his Ebon-gray shield was in place, and flew to the Healer’s eyrie.
Still early enough in the morning that Jillian wasn’t quite ready to greet the day, but she let him in, then hurried to the kitchen to start a pot of coffee.
“Help yourself to the coffee when it’s ready,” Jillian said. “I’ll just finish getting dressed.”
“Take your time.” He waited until she dashed for her room before going into the kitchen.
She was young, but he couldn’t talk to any of his men. Not yet. He knew how Rothvar, Zaranar, and the rest of them would respond to what might be in those letters—especially since they knew of the attempt to smuggle Rings of Obedience into Askavi. Jillian was young, but she was intelligent, she was family, and she could read the Eyrien language.
She returned, fully dressed, with her hair up in a kind of messy knot that he found oddly appealing.
He poured two mugs of coffee, filled her mug a third of the way with cream, then indicated the chairs at the kitchen table. “I need your help.”
“Of course.”
Not a daughter of his loins, but a daughter of his heart. She never called him Father, but she acted like a daughter—and anyone who tangled with Jillian swiftly learned how he felt about her.
“It’s delicate,” he said once they were seated. He called in the box he’d taken from Dorian and set it on the table. “I need you to read these letters to me.”
He huffed out a laugh at the look on her face. “Relax, witchling. They aren’t letters Marian has received from a secret lover.” All amusement fled. “If they are what I think they are, they’re much worse.”
She looked alarmed. “Maybe Rothvar . . . ?”
He shook his head. “I can’t talk to any of the men until I know what is in these letters.”
Before he could say anything, she put a tight shield around herself, then a second shield on her hands and forearms. As she riffled through the letters, she said, “You would have kicked my ass if I didn’t shield before I picked up a potentially dangerous object that came from an unknown place.”
“It’s good you learned the lesson,” he replied mildly.
“Hell’s fire,” Jillian muttered a minute later. “Based on the dates, the letters in this box go back years. One or two a year in the beginning, then more frequent until it’s one a month now.”
Did these letters from Terreille go back far enough to explain the change in Dorian and her ambitions for her daughter? Or had the earliest letters already been destroyed? The ones Jillian pulled out of the box had nothing more than an initial for the signature, but not all the letters were written by the same hand or signed with the same initial.
“Read the past two years.”
She pulled those letters out, put them in order from oldest to most recent, and then began to read them out loud. She tried to read them without her own feelings showing through, but with each letter her voice became sharper; her temper rose closer to the surface.
One writer was sharp and critical of Dorian not doing more to help other members of the family settle in Kaeleer—and even more critical about the lack of money available to support those family members when they finally arrived. What was the point of having a Queen—of sorts—in the family if she couldn’t bring wealth to heel?
The other writer sympathized with Dorian’s frustration over her daughter being an impoverished Queen. Wasn’t there some way to bring that young Warlord Prince to heel and gain access to his family’s fortune? Orian would never be able to achieve her full potential and rule a substantial part of Askavi without that kind of wealth.
The first writer again—and a veiled reference to Dorian soon having access to a Ring of Obedience so that Orian could control the defiant cock and persuade him to give her everything she desired.
Jillian dropped the last letter, drank the cold coffee, then thumped the mug on the table. Her eyes were so hot with anger, Lucivar tightened the leash on his own temper so that she could vent her feelings here and now.
“Your thoughts?” he asked.
“This is obscene,” Jillian snarled. She snatched up a letter and shook it at him. “This is what all of us left Terreille to escape. How dare that bitch threaten Daemonar with a Ring of Obedience? How dare she?”
Well, Orian didn’t remember that he has an older sister with a sharp temper and a wicked roundhouse punch.
“Where is she?”
Oh, no. Unlike Titian, Jillian had wanted to learn how to fight and use Eyrien weapons—and she had learned well. After she and Khary went to Little Weeble the first time, she decided she didn’t want to be a guard or a warrior as such, but she trained hard during her visits home and wanted him and Rothvar to teach her more. She didn’t explain why she wanted that training and neither man had asked. But they gave her the training—and they gave her an Eyrien war blade made by Kohlvar, the weapons maker, that was specially balanced for her hand.
He wasn’t letting Jillian anywhere near Orian and her mother.
“She’s mine to deal with,” he said.
She stared at him. “You’re going to let her live?”
That question was exactly why he hadn’t wanted any of the men to know about the letters before he knew the contents.
“How can you let her live?” she demanded in a tone that warned him that he’d damn well better be thinking of something else.
Shit. If Jillian was this riled, Marian was going to . . .
How long would his hearth witch refuse to sleep with him if he locked her in their eyrie to keep her from going after Dorian?
“If I had found a Ring of Obedience, neither of them would be among the living right now,” he said carefully. “But—”
“Did you search the whole eyrie?”
No, he hadn’t. He wouldn’t have had the option of exile for those two if he’d found a Ring, so he wouldn’t do a thorough search until they were gone. That was as much mercy as he could give them.
“The choice of punishment is mine, Lady Jillian.”
“None of the other Eyrien men would let her live once they knew she’d threatened one of them with that obscenity.”
“They have that luxury. As the ruler of Askavi, I don’t.” The truth was, if he’d still been in Terreille, he wouldn’t have hesitated to kill Orian for the threat. “Orian no longer has a future here. Exile will give her a second chance. If she shakes off these corrupt ideas, she has the potential to be a good Queen.”
“And if she doesn’t shake off these ideas? Or more to the point, if Dorian and her family keep pushing these ideas?”
“Then I doubt Orian will survive a year in Terreille.”
“A stay of execution, then.”
Would the Eyrien warriors who worked for him see it that way?
He put the letters back in the box and vanished it. “Jillian . . .”
“Yours to do. I know.” She sighed. “I won’t say anything. But that doesn’t mean I don’t feel exercised about the whole thing.”
“Really? I hadn’t noticed.”
At least that made her smile. When he pushed away from the table, she rose up on her toes and kissed his cheek. And then was cheeky enough to say, “Was I a dress rehearsal?”
“For . . . ?”
“Explaining this to your son’s mother.”
Jillian wasn’t wrong about that. After the first minutes of horrified silence, Marian raged—first at Dorian and then at him for, among other things, letting the bitch continue to draw breath when it was obvious that she had fully intended for Orian to use a Ring on their son.