The Sinful Young Master

Chapter 480: Enemies and friends

Milan had been pacing the pavilion for the better part of two hours.

Andrion sat in a cushioned chair with his legs crossed and his cup balanced on his knee, tracking his brother’s movement back and forth across the tiled floor with the resigned expression.

He didn’t know what was going on and he couldn’t do anything about the situation. It had been a long time since he had felt this way. For as long as he remembered, he had always controlled his emotions and dealt with things, but right now, he couldn’t compose himself.

“Twenty nine days,” Milan said, not for the first time.

He moved from the eastern end of the pavilion to the western end and turned and moved back. “Twenty nine days and we have received no word. No letter. Nothing from any scout or traveler who has passed near the Depths. Nothing from the camp that General Caelum established out there. Nothing.”

“I am aware of how many days it has been,” Andrion said.

“The Emperor gave him thirty days.”

Milan turned at the wall and came back the other way.

Milan’s voice grew sharper as he said, “If Jolthar does not return today, the mission is considered failed. The terms of the arrangement expire. Every charge against him is reinstated and this time the Emperor will not offer alternatives. Richardus will make sure of that. He has been waiting for this outcome since the moment Jolthar accepted the mission in that hall.”

“Milan.”

“And Tekkora – all of it, everything he built, everything Lady Cleora has worked for – it becomes vulnerable the moment those charges are reinstated because everything was contingent on—”

“Milan,” Andrion said again, firmer this time.

Milan stopped walking.

He stood in the middle of the pavilion with his hands clasped behind his back and his jaw tight, looking at his brother with the expression of a man who knew he was spiraling and couldn’t fully stop himself.

Andrion uncrossed his legs and sat forward, setting his cup down on the low table beside him with a small deliberate sound.

He looked at his brother with an expression that was unusual on his face, the habitual lightness of it set aside in favor of something more direct and more honest.

“Listen to me,” Andrion said.

“I have watched Jolthar Kaezhlar walk into a rigged trial and dismantle it with his words. I have watched him stand in the street while five hundred elite soldiers surrounded him and smile at them. I watched him transform into a dragon in the middle of this city, which is not something I will ever fully recover from, and destroy an imperial deployment without taking a serious injury.”

He held Milan’s eyes steadily.

“I watched him accept a mission that every person in that imperial hall believed was a sophisticated method of execution, and I watched him walk out of those doors without a single moment of visible doubt.”

He paused, giving Milan a moment to understand his words.

“That man is not dead in the Dreadland Depths,” Andrion said.

“I do not know this because I have information you lack. I know it because of everything I have seen him do since he arrived in this city.

Some people are simply not finished yet. You can feel it in them.

Jolthar is one of those people and the Depths has not finished him.”

Milan looked at his brother for a long moment.

Then he walked to a chair and sat down in it, heavily, he finally let himself cool down and regained his calm composure.

He didn’t pick up a cup.

He didn’t speak.

He sat with his elbows on his knees and looked at the tiled floor of the pavilion and did the thing he had been avoiding doing, which was simply waiting.

Outside the pavilion, the capital went about the ordinary business of a city that mostly had no idea what was happening in a corrupted wasteland three days’ ride to the east.

People moved through markets and argued over prices and conducted the ten thousand small negotiations that made up the texture of daily life in a place this size.

And somewhere beyond all of that, on the other side of the Veil, in a broken castle surrounded by a swarm of pale creatures, a young man from a border barony stood in ruined stonework and looked up at the last thing he had come here to kill.

***

The courtyard sat at the heart of the Akupa residence like a carefully kept secret.

Blossom trees stood at measured intervals, their branches heavy with pale pink flowers that caught what little breeze moved through the capital that afternoon, sending the occasional petal drifting down onto the cushioned mattresses arranged beneath them.

A musician sat in the far corner playing something low and unhurried on a stringed instrument, the kind of music that existed not to be listened to but to fill silence so that silence never became uncomfortable.

Tea had been poured.

Incense burned somewhere nearby, its smoke threading upward in a thin line before the air dissolved it.

Jazmin Akupa reclined on the central mattress with the easy authority of a woman entirely at home in comfort.

She was dressed simply for a duchess, which still meant considerably better than most people managed at their finest, and she held her tea in one hand with the loose grip of someone whose mind was already elsewhere even before the messenger appeared.

The man who entered the courtyard moved with that particular quality of urgency that people develop when they have been told the contents of what they carry are important and have taken that information to heart.

He crossed the courtyard at a pace that was not quite running but contained running’s intention, stopped before Jazmin, and bowed with the letter extended in both hands.

“My lady. It is marked urgent.”

Jazmin set her tea aside and took the letter.

She broke the seal with one practiced motion and read.