Casket of Souls Read Free

theater?” asked Duke Malthus as he handed his wife Ania, Lady Kylith, and her niece Ysmay into their chairs.
    “I was just wondering the same thing myself,” Seregil remarked, settling cautiously into a rickety chair between Alec and Kylith.
    “Of course it is!” Kylith chuckled, tapping them both playfully with her fan.
    Malthus and Kylith were considerably older than Seregil appeared, but he’d known them both in their youth. Malthus had risen to become one of the queen’s senior exchequers. He had a short cropped beard but wore his grey hair to hiscollar—rather daring for a man in his position. Kylith, a former lover, was one of Seregil’s closest friends, and an unimpeachable source of society gossip.
    Seregil dabbed the sweat delicately from his upper lip with a lace-trimmed handkerchief and scanned the crowd, acknowledging those he knew—merchants and sea captains mostly—who puffed up among their friends at his notice. Even at this level of society, whom you knew, and whom you were known to know, meant a great deal. Seregil, the infamous Aurënfaie exile, had made his living playing that game in Rhíminee for a good many years now.
    He and his party were certainly attracting looks and whispers. Lady Kylith’s elaborately coiffed hair sparkled with jeweled pins as she murmured something to Duke Malthus. As always, she, Ania, and Ysmay were dressed in the height of summer fashion in light silks and jewels; here they looked like swans among ducks. Seregil supposed they all must. No doubt there were a few cutpurses in the audience below, sizing them up for later.
    Seregil and Alec cut quite a figure themselves, two handsome, lanky young men—one dark-haired, one fair—dressed in long linen summer coats stitched in gold, fawn breeches, and well-polished boots. Seregil’s long, dark brown hair was caught back with a thin red silk ribbon that matched his coat. Alec’s thick blond braid hung down the back of a coat the same dark blue as his eyes.
    Half-blood
ya’shels
like Alec aged a bit more quickly at first, but he still looked younger than his soon-to-be twenty-one. He had something of the fine ’faie features of his mother’s people, and was likewise beardless, but had his human father’s coloring.
    Seregil played the role of a dissolute young exile that was only half true; he wasn’t particularly dissolute, though he played the part well. He and Alec were well known for carousing with the young blades of the nobility and a good many not-so-young, like Kylith and Malthus. But they managed to stay just on the boundary of respectability, and when they happened to stray outside it, Seregil’s distant relation to the royal family made up the difference. Handsome, foppish,and exotic, the grey-eyed ’faie was known to be somewhat well connected but of little importance.
    Their true vocation would have raised more eyebrows than their dissolute ways, if it ever came to light.
    “I don’t suppose you’ve heard the latest news from the front?” asked Malthus.
    Queen Phoria was still at war with the Plenimarans; the army had left winter quarters two months ago and marched north again to the battlefields of Mycena.
    Malthus leaned closer to Seregil and lowered his voice. “The heralds will be announcing it tomorrow, so I suppose there’s no harm in my telling you. The Overlord sued for a parlay. Phoria refused. She’s sworn to drive the enemy all the way back to Benshâl and crush them on their own ground.”
    Seregil shook his head. “She means to end the endless conflict. Do you think she can do what her mother couldn’t?”
    “Prince Korathan seems cautiously optimistic.”
    The door opened again, and Lord Nyanis and his much rowdier party spilled in and noisily ascended to the far box. He and his companions had brought several pretty courtesans from the Street of Lights as their companions, and it was evident they’d all had a lot of wine. Among them was brown-haired Myrhichia from Eirual’s