Duke of Minds (Master of Monsters Book 4)

by Stephen L. Hadley

  “My lord,” Leo continued. “There’s no need for any unpleasantness. Come with me, and the rest of your house will be free to return home, undisturbed. You have my word.”

  Again, the baron whispered something. This time, however, he must have spoken loud enough for those nearest to overhear. A dozen or more of his servants whirled, staring at their lord in disbelief. The woman beside him was likewise astonished. She staggered and seemed to deflate. Her shoulders quaking with inaudible sobs, she reached up and pulled the man into a deep, tearful embrace.

  When at last the woman released him, the baron smiled. He leaned over, kissed her brow, and then began to pick his way carefully between the servants. The guards at the fore appeared especially reluctant to let him continue. But eventually, they too made room for him to pass.

  Baron Rudd made his way toward them, pausing a few feet from the nearest of Macnair’s men. He met Leo’s gaze then. The man’s eyes were hard and fierce, though not with the anger Leo expected.

  “Very well, Your Excellency,” the man said, bowing stiffly. “Here I am.”

  Leo answered the baron’s bow with a simple nod.

  “Macnair,” he said. “Have some of your men escort the baron’s entourage home. Bring him to the Ministry. He and I have many things to discuss.”

  ***

  From Baron Rudd’s grimace, he obviously expected to be marched right into a cell. Instead, Leo led him to the private dining hall where he hosted his weekly meetings.

  Leo pulled out a chair as he passed it then rapped his knuckles on the carved, wooden back.

  “Sit,” he instructed, taking his usual seat at the head of the table. There were two chairs between his and Rudd’s—far enough that he didn’t need to worry about the man lashing out but close enough that he could judge his reactions without squinting. He watched coldly as the baron sat, then reclined in his own chair.

  It was several minutes before the servants arrived with food and wine and Leo passed them in silence, studying the man’s face all the while. As barons went, Rudd was remarkably average. He looked to be in his early forties, with thoughtful brown eyes and hints of gray beginning to lighten his hair near the temples. His face was square and relatively youthful aside from a few early wrinkles on his brow. Leo couldn’t recall seeing him before, but the man’s features were the forgettable sort he might easily have overlooked at past balls and galas.

  “So,” Leo said, sipping the wine placed before him. “Was it your idea? Or did one of the counts recruit you?”

  Rudd didn’t answer. Instead, he stared at the plate of food that been laid out for him and pushed it toward the center of the table.

  “I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about, Your Excellency,” he said.

  “I’m afraid you do,” Leo countered. He set his wine aside and began to eat, never once taking his eyes off the man. “And please, don’t insult me by denying it further. I dealt with one of your men precisely because I wanted to see what you’d do. Or do you expect me to believe you’d simply abandon your estate on a whim?”

  Rudd sighed, smiling wearily and eyeing the plate of food he’d just pushed aside.

  “If that’s true,” he said. “Then why am I sitting here?”

  “Because you haven’t answered my questions yet.”

  “Then we’ll be sitting here a great deal longer.”

  Leo scowled, grabbing a handful of grapes from his plate. He didn’t eat them. “I could have you tortured,” he suggested.

  “You could,” Rudd said, shrugging. “And no doubt I’d tell you everything. I’d say anything I thought you wanted to hear. But the fact that you haven’t already resorted to it means you’re trying not to be that kind of Duke.”

  “It’s becoming more attractive by the minute.”

  Rudd chuckled. “That’s understandable. But, permit a question? What do you stand to gain by knowing? Suppose it was Count Grey who asked me to undermine you. What good is that knowledge? It gets you no closer to achieving your goals.”

  Leo returned the grapes to his plate and took up his goblet instead. He sipped it, glaring.

  “What the hell do you know about my goals?” he said.

  “Plenty,” Rudd said. He met Leo’s gaze at last and grinned. “Any half-wit could guess them. You need to defeat Grey, Bordeau, and all the rest. And you need to keep Ansiri from devouring itself in the process. Unfortunately, harming me is the worst possible step you could take to achieving that.”

  “I fail to see how.”

  “Then you’re a fool,” Rudd snapped. His eyes narrowed. “Think about it, Your Excellency, if you’re even capable of such a thing. The nobility is the only thing keeping Ansiri in line. This charade of yours has turned the counts against the so-called Duke. Right now, the barons and all the rest have held their tongues, waiting to see who will triumph. They’ve tolerated your childish flailing and your abolitionist sentiments. But the moment you harm me—the moment they feel unsafe or that their titles no longer protect them—they will turn on you like a pack of ravenous hounds. The second you touch me, you’ve sealed your own fate.”

  Leo said nothing for a long time. In fact, he remained silent until he’d finished the last drops of his wine.

  “That’s true,” he said. Setting the goblet aside, he leaned forward and smiled. “Or, rather, it would be true, if I had any interest in preserving Ansiri.”

  He stood and knocked loudly on the table. At once, the door to the hall opened, and a trio of elven guards entered.

  “Find a cell for Baron Rudd,” he instructed.

  One of the elves nodded and waved the other two forward. The baron surged to his feet, sputtering in disbelief.

  “Should I assign someone to interrogate him?” the lead elf asked.

  Rudd began to thrash, struggling against his captors as he fought to look back at Leo.

  “Don’t bother,” he said. “He told me everything I need to know.”

  Chapter Six

  Cirilla still wasn’t speaking to him. Leo sought her out almost immediately—after he’d finished his breakfast, of course—but no sooner had he entered the parlor where she sat than she rose and announced that she wasn’t feeling well. He watched her go, grinding his teeth in frustration, then stormed off in the opposite direction.

  If she didn’t want to be involved in his scheming then so be it. He’d been on his own for years before she came into his life. He would manage on his own if need be.

  He roamed the ducal palace for a time, doing his best to keep from inflicting his poor mood on the unfortunate servants who crossed his path. Such efforts drove him away from the main hallways and residential quarters toward a few less-traveled passages. And that was how, drawn by the sounds of clashing wood and grunted exertion, he found himself standing in the doorway of a well-padded training chamber adjacent to the guard barracks.

  The room held roughly a dozen people. Most were elves, though he was thrilled to note that there were two men present as well. The pair sparred together, but the mere fact that they’d deigned to share a room with the non-humans was encouraging.

  Leo didn’t watch them long, however. His attention was quickly drawn elsewhere, to a corner of the room where the clattering of wooden replica swords was replaced by the flashing gleam of dull-edged blades.

  Nyssa stood at the center of the action, though danced might have been closer to the truth. The trow dodged and spun, her body contorting as she evaded the blows Atarah and Fanette aimed her way. Mostly she sidestepped, her long, platinum hair spreading like a fan from the speed of her movements. But occasionally, when one of her students managed a more precise attack, she lunged and swatted the dull blade aside with a gloved fist.

  It was a hypnotic display, and Leo felt as though he could have watched it for hours. He’d seen Nyssa in action, of course, both when training and fighting for real, but those had been brief, utilitarian affairs. And on those rare occasion
s when he’d witnessed longer, more enduring sessions, they’d most often involved frequent breaks as the trow stopped to correct the form or technique of her students. This was different.

  “Your Excellency!” exclaimed one of the two men, hastily saluting as he noticed Leo’s presence. The rest of the room’s occupants quickly followed suit. The only exceptions were the trow, who watched Leo attentively from their corner.

  “As you were,” Leo said, gesturing emphatically for the group to resume. They soon did so, albeit a tad reluctantly, and he soon noticed many of the trainees watching him as they sparred.

  He was about to go—not wishing to distract those who his life might soon depend—when he spotted Nyssa eyeing him from the corner. She was whispering to her apprentices. Then, with a subtle gesture, she set the pair to stretching and surreptitiously made her way toward him.

  “Leo,” she said softly. “Is everything all right?”

  “Fine,” he assured her. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

  It was clear from her expression that she didn’t fully believe him, but Nyssa did not press him further. Instead, she nodded at the corner. “Care to join us? I know it’s been a while, but you look like you’ve got a lot on your mind.”

  “I do,” he admitted. He was about to decline—it would hardly be a morale-boosting experience for his guards to watch him embarrass himself—when another thought occurred to him.

  Sometime soon, be it months, weeks, or even days, he would find himself standing on a true battlefield. Not an alley or the deck of a ship where he could rely on his cadre of slaves-turned-allies to guard him, but a horrifyingly real, blood-soaked plain strewn with more corpses than the Isles had seen in centuries. Most of the men present would not be there with him; they would have to remain behind to guard Cirilla and the capital. Their admiration or lack thereof would be irrelevant.

  His skills, on the other hand, would not be.

  “Let’s do it,” he said.

  Nyssa’s brows lifted. Evidently, she had not expected him to accept the offer. But, now that he had, she grinned, caught him by the sleeve, and dragged him along the edge of the room to the far corner.

  Atarah and Fanette looked up from their stretching but did not stop. The rest of those training, however, did. They exchanged glances, a few whispering back and forth as Leo unbuttoned his jacket, folded it, and tucked it unobtrusively out of the way.

  He could feel the eyes upon him as he wandered over to one of several elaborate stands the lined the back wall and selected a weapon. Neither of the first two he tried felt right; the first was too short while the second felt more akin to an oversized club than the rapier he was accustomed to. The third, however, felt a little better. It was still felt clumsy in his hand. The hilt and tang of the dummy saber had been fashioned from blackened iron to better simulate the weight of a real weapon and weighed slightly more than his usual one. But, all things considered, it wasn’t bad.

  He moved slowly, methodically stretching and slicing his way through one of the warm-up routines Lucius had taught him aboard the Unity. There were a handful of steps he’d forgotten and, without fail, he remembered each one the second he’d skipped past it to the next. Regardless, he tried not to let it bother him. It was a warm-up, nothing more. The point was to loosen his muscles, not demonstrate how much he knew.

  It wasn’t until Leo had crossed the full breadth of the room and turned to make the return trip that he realized the men were still watching him. More than that, even, many seemed to be evaluating him like they might a fresh recruit. Some grinned—likely those unaware he even knew how to hold a sword—but most watched him with a sort of bemused thoughtfulness.

  He lost his place at the sight of their watchful expressions and straightened. And then, before he even had a chance to speak, Nyssa was at his side once more.

  “Enough staring, you lot,” she said. Her voice, for all its teasing, carried just a note of gentle chastisement. “What say you give us the room, yeah? I’m sure the Duke has enough to worry about without you staring at his ass the whole time.”

  Her words coaxed sporadic laughter from the watchers, enough that even the elves who might have balked at following a trow’s implied command merely shrugged, returned their weapons to the racks, and headed for the door. When the last of them had gone, Nyssa trotted over and shut it behind them.

  “Ready?” she asked.

  Leo grinned, shifting his grip on the training sword and giving an experimental jab. “I haven’t even warmed up,” he pointed out.

  “Oh? And I suppose the counts will just wait until you’re ready?”

  He snorted, shifting less-than-gracefully into a defensive stance. It proved to be a good choice. From the corner of his eye, he spotted a flicker of movement and turned just in time to see one of the trow—Atarah or Fanette, he still couldn’t tell them apart without looking closely—lunge at him. She’d traded out her dulled blade for a short, almost squat looking training saber, but the sight of her attack startled him every bit as much as an actual knife would have. Batting her swipe aside on instinct, he backpedaled.

  “The fuck are you doing?” he yelped.

  Neither retreating nor his outburst did him any good. The trow pursued him, wooden blade at the ready, and this time her sister joined in. The pair swung at him in unison. And although Leo succeeded in blocking the blow aimed at his head, he could not evade the one that smacked him hard on the thigh.

  “You need to attack,” Nyssa advised. She spoke dryly, but Leo could hear her smile without needing to look. “Focusing on defense was fine to start. But unless you plan on letting us do all the work, you need to be comfortable with more.”

  “I am!” Leo snarled. He slashed wildly and managed to drive both trow back a few feet. No sooner had he done so than Fanette—this time he was sure—rapped him sharply on the wrist. The shock of the blow knocked the sword from his hand while the pain drew a curse through his gritted teeth. “Damn it!”

  “We’ll need to work on your agility too,” Nyssa said. She walked over, plucked his dropped sword from the ground, and handed it to him. “There are thousands of elves and trow on the counts’ northern plantations. They’re hardly ideal troops but if the war drags on, they may begin conscripting them. So you’d best learn to fight them as well, just in case.”

  Grumbling, Leo accepted the sword and raised it.

  “What would you suggest?” he asked.

  Nyssa eyed him for a moment. His swift acquiescence appeared to have caught her off guard, but she soon smiled and waved her students aside. Selecting a sturdy wooden blade from the nearest rack, she donned an aggressive stance. Almost immediately, her smile solidified into an eager, merciless smirk.

  “I suggest you learn quickly,” she said. And with that, she attacked.

  Even before the trow moved, Leo knew how the battle would end. He fought hard, of course, and surprised the both of them by parrying more than his fair share of strikes. But it was readily apparent from the beginning that Nyssa’s skills far outstripped his own. He could guard himself adequately, even if every third jab seemed to slip past his defenses to leave yet another bruise, but over time his reactions slowed. Hers, on the other hand, only seemed to grow faster. And before long, he was panting and struggling to evade even the slowest of attacks. His shirt was soaked with sweat and the sparring sword in his hand felt more like an iron warhammer than the twig it more closely resembled.

  Leo grunted and stumbled as one of Nyssa’s gentle swats caught him on the knee. He was already off-balance when the blow landed and knew instantly that he would fall. Nyssa, however, was not about to show him any mercy. She flowed seamlessly into her next attack, wooden blade lifted high.

  And so, Leo did the only thing he could think to do. He threw his sword at her. From her flinch, Nyssa was clearly unprepared for his desperate move—not that being unprepared detracted from her grace in the least. She spun, abandoning her follo
w-up attack and deftly snatching the missile from the air.

  By the time Leo hit the ground and flopped, panting, onto his back, Nyssa stood over him. With a scowl, she aimed both swords at his chest.

  “Very clever,” she noted. “Though it’s probably not wise to throw away your only weapon.”

  Leo was too exhausted to smile. He closed his eyes and tried to rise, but the feeling of his sweat-drenched shirt sticking to the padded floor made him shudder and lie still.

  “It worked, didn’t it?” he managed at last. “At least it would’ve sliced up your hand.”

  “Yes, but you would be dead.”

  “Ah. Well. Say something nice at my funeral, won’t you?”

  Nyssa did not reply. Cracking open one eye, Leo was surprised to find her scowl had softened. In fact, her expression had grown almost somber.

  “Here lies Duke Leo VanOrden,” she intoned. “A smartass to the very end. His enemies died rolling their eyes.”

  He grinned. This time, when he tried to rise, he ignored the sickly feeling of damp cloth peeling from leather and climbed wearily to his feet.

  “I’ve heard worse,” he said. “Though I plan on losing my sense of humor over the next few decades.”

  “Gods forbid. Just promise not to do that move in a real battle.”

  He accepted his sword back from Nyssa. Rather than lift it, he leaned against it like a cane and eyed her seriously. “Fair enough. So. Don’t throw my sword away. What else?”

  Nyssa cocked her head and stared back at him. Though it was a few moments before she spoke, the intensity of her gaze made it clear that she was actively considering his question. Eventually, she shrugged.

  “Truthfully? I’m not certain. I hate to admit it, but Lucius did a decent job of training you. I doubt you’ll have any problems dealing with the men Grey conscripted. It’s elves and the other nobles you’ll need to watch out for.”

  “I don’t plan on leading any frontline charges,” he said. “So if I wind up fighting at all, it’ll probably be because we’re losing. I just want to make sure nobody tries to end the war with a clever ambush.”