Donnel's Promise Read Online Free Page B

her small parlour, elegantly sprawled in one of the plumply upholstered chairs.
    ‘That was a farce.’ She flopped opposite him. ‘I now have more information about the castle’s system of drainage than I hope ever to require. However, I think we may assume I’ll be invited to future meetings — official ones at least. I’m not yet sure that I shan’t regret it. I assume you sent the message?’
    His lip twitched. ‘How did Vormer react?’
    ‘He said very little. They appear competent as a body, though not all contribute equally.’
    ‘It’s not an unworkable system,’ he agreed, ‘depending on new appointments.’
    ‘Which are made how?’
    ‘At Athan’s and Vormer’s discretion.’
    She frowned. ‘And now, I think, at mine. How would you like to be a councillor, Timon?’
    He jerked. ‘No! I … it’s not feasible.’
    ‘Why?’
    He shook his head.
    Risha studied him for a moment, then let her eyes wander around the small receiving room that adjoined her sleeping chamber. Lyse sat just beyond the doorway — observing proprieties, she had said, as if Risha and Timon were strangers rather than friends well accustomed to one another’s company. She felt a pang of longing for LeMarc’s informality.
    Muted light seeped through the long window and brought out the grain in the wood of the writing table and the bright, startling blue of Timon’s eyes. ‘Timon, how exactly are we related?’
    He blinked.
    ‘When we met in LeMarc you called yourself my kinsman. No one has ever said exactly how it’s so.’
    He looked uncomfortable. ‘It’s a distant relationship. I used the term loosely.’
    ‘And advised me against using it here, I recall. But—’
    ‘Your great-grandmother was my grandmother’s aunt. Apparently.’
    ‘Then our grandparents were cousins. Which means we—’
    ‘There is something of a tradition of illegitimacy on my side of the family. It taints perceptions a little.’
    Risha waved this away. ‘It hardly signifies.’
    ‘I can assure you, it does. And did.’ The raw bitterness in his voice made her pause.
    ‘Timon—’
    ‘Don’t.’ He held up a hand, then dropped it with a slight shrug of apology. ‘My mother’s volubility regarding her claimed connections didn’t serve to increase my popularity with my peers.’
    Risha thought back to her own lonely childhood, and to the cruelty of children towards outsiders. She made a sympathetic sound in her throat. ‘You had your mother at least.’
    ‘My mother.’ He ran a thumb down the arm of the chair as if the pattern of the fabric intrigued him. ‘My mother rather held it against me that I had the temerity to be born male. A girl of the royal line might at least have been pushed forward, given your notable absence, whereas a boy — especially a good-for-nothing, ungrateful, bone-idle, bone-headed scullion — could not. It didn’t stop her boasting,’ he added bleakly.
    She stared at him. ‘I’m sorry.’
    He shook his head. ‘As soon as I was old enough I sought refuge elsewhere.’
    ‘With Donnel?’
    ‘She once claimed that my father was one of his guardsmen. She probably made that up, too.’ He shrugged. ‘I had nowhere else to go.’
    ‘But my father took you in?’
    ‘I earned my place.’ He smiled belatedly, as if to take the sting from his tone.
    ‘Whoever your father was, your mother must be of the royal line, else why would your eyes be identical to those of my grandmother?’
    He said nothing.
    ‘Which might also explain how it was that you heard me when I called for help across an ocean.’ The mental link had been tenuous, and had left her with a skull-splitting ache in her head, but it had saved them, ultimately, from being overrun by Westlaw’s army.
    He looked down, his hands tensing in his lap. ‘That might be believable if we could repeat it.’
    Risha sat back. She had no energy to continue those experiments. But there had been three minds in the mental bridge that had carried her