Page 12 of Blood Singer

"Watch her," I said. "The Framaddi and their guards as well. If there's a subterfuge behind this, I want to find it."

Sanyra squeezed my shoulder once, brief and firm, and moved toward the door. She paused with her hand on the handle. "Don't terrorize the female at dinner, Kavan. Whatever is going on, I honestly don't think she's aware."

She left without waiting for my response.

I stood at the window for longer than I should have, watching the afternoon light shift across the rooftops of Argia, and tried to think past the sound of Leila's blood song still threading through my memory like smoke through a cracked door. The attraction had been immediate, not a choice but a fact, the way gravity is a fact. I'd looked at her descending that ramp and registered her beauty before I registered anything else. Sharp-eyed, nervous under the outward composure, covering her nerves with something that looked almost like amusement. And then her scent had hit me, and every disciplined thought I'd possessed had come apart.

That loss of control was what had ignited my fury. Not the attraction itself, which I could manage, but the certainty that the Alliance had engineered it. That they'd found a way to replicate the most sacred thing my kind could experience and were using it as a lever to ensure my cooperation.

It was too precise. Too targeted. A blood singer's scent, a blood song with harmonics, and a face my dragon had decided was worth guarding before I'd even learned her name. All of it presented in a small human female who'd looked directly at me when I accused her of treachery and said, with genuine offense, that she had no idea what I was talking about.

Even now, knowing what she had to be, I kept returning to the details of her. The way she'd held completely still when I leaned in close, not retreating, nails pressed into her palms and chin lifted. Not courage performing itself but actual stubbornness refusing to back down. The flush that had climbed her throat when I'd inhaled. The precise moment she'd decided to say something sharp rather than stay quiet.

That almost-smile. The ghost of it was still pulling at the corner of my mouth, and I was aware of that fact in a way I deeply resented.

But the song was different from Marion's. That was what kept snagging my attention when I tried to build a clean case for treachery. If the Alliance had manufactured this, how had they managed the undertones of the original? How had they taken notes lost to history and created something that resonated through my bones in a new key?

The possibility that moved through me in answer to that question was one I crushed before it could take shape. False hope was worse than no hope. I'd learned that the hard way.

A soft knock interrupted the spiral. "Enter."

Murdette stepped in, silver streaked hair pinned back, her expression reading me with the accuracy that came from centuries of practice. She'd been my tutor when I was young, my anchor when I became king, and for several centuries the closest thing I'd had to a mother. The look she wore now said she already knew something was wrong and was deciding how to approach it.

"You look like you've seen a ghost," she said, closing the door and crossing to my desk.

"Perhaps I have." The words came out rawer than I'd intended.

She pulled a chair close to the desk and sat, folding her hands in that patient way she had that always made confession feel less like weakness. I walked to the desk and sank into my chair, and the words came out before I'd decided to say them.

"The human diplomat. She smells like Marion."

Murdette's expression didn't change, but something in her eyes shifted, the way still water shifts when a stone drops into it. Not a ripple on the surface, but a disturbance underneath. "Marion," she said softly. "From the cliffs of Étretat."

"Yes." I sat back. The exhaustion that settled over me then was bone-deep. "I know it should be impossible. I know Marion died seven hundred and fifty years ago. But the scent, Murdette. And her blood sings." I paused. "Not exactly like Marion's. Marion's was a lullaby. Leila's is..." I couldn't quite find the word for it. "More."

Murdette was quiet for a time that would have felt uncomfortable with anyone else. With her, it just felt like thinking. "You believe the Alliance manufactured it," she said.

"What other explanation is there?"

"I don't know," she admitted. "But I'm not convinced that treachery is the only one." She leaned forward, her brown eyes steady on mine. "When I was young, back on Earth, we believed in things your modern Alliance would call superstition. Fate. Destiny." She let that sit for a moment. "We believed in the kind of magic that doesn't adhere to shape, form or logic."

"You think fate sent her." I cocked an eye at Murdette and earned a glare in return.

"I think you should get to know her before you decide." Her tone carried the gentle firmness she'd always used when she thought I was about to be my own worst enemy. "This female isn't Marion. You said so yourself. The scent is similar, not identical. The song is different. Perhaps this isn't about Marion at all. Perhaps it never was."

I had no counter to that. Just a long, uncomfortable silence.

"What do I do?" I asked, and it came out more honest than I'd intended.

"Talk to her. Watch her. Learn who she is, not based on what she smells like or what her blood sings like, but who she actually is." Murdette stood and smoothed her skirts. "You're a good judge of character. You've always been. Trust that."

She moved toward the door, then paused with the same expression she'd been deploying since I was seventy years old. Equal parts affection and warning. "And don't frighten the poor female. She's here to help, Kavan, whether you believe it or not."

After she left, I stayed at my desk with my palms flat on the polished surface, staring at nothing in particular. My dragon was still agitated, still pressing against my control with the low, insistent demand of an instinct that hadn't been wrong in nine centuries. Every rational argument I'd built against trusting what my senses told me was sound. Logical. Defensible.

And completely useless against the memory of Leila Hunter standing twenty feet away with the echo of Marion's scent in her blood and her own song running underneath it like a second river.

I pushed back from the desk. I had a dinner to prepare for.