Read Online The Spirit Lens by Carol Berg - Free Book Online

answer more quickly than I. “Lovely Susanna, I fear indelible bruises on your innocent soul must result were his company forced upon you.”
    Lady Susanna laughed, a throaty ripple that issued from a deep center, and then kissed the fop on his flaxen head. “Sweet Ilario, innocent? Me? You must quit all indulgence in wine. I’ll leave you to your fiendish visitor, but rest assured, naught can bruise my soul. I am well hardened.”
    She had scarce vanished, when she poked her head back around the doorjamb, her eyes glimmering with pleasure. “One matter of interest, Sonjeur de Duplais. Our son, Edmond, returns home tomorrow on leave from his posting in the south. You needn’t fear; he is reliable and discreet. Yet I would not have him . . . compromised . . . by awkward situations. You understand.”
    She didn’t wait for confirmation, but glided out of sight in a whisper of silk. Ilario gazed after her, as if admiring the afterglow such a luminary must leave behind. “Is any woman so much a vision of Heaven’s angels? How fortune leads us. . . .” Then he lifted his head abruptly. “I could have had her, you know. She wasn’t highborn. Even an offside pedigree such as mine would have raised her up. Yes, she’s a few years older, but egad . . . this fossil she’s got instead! Eugenie says Conte Olivier was His Majesty’s first commander. Taught him everything about leading troops and bedding down in muck and staying on his feet in a battle. He was Soren’s first commander, too, but I doubt he taught the shitheel much. Soren believed he knew everything already.”
    Eugenie de Sylvae—Ilario’s half sister—had been but a child when wed to King Soren, Philippe’s predecessor and an even more distant cousin of mine. When Soren fell in a miscalculated raid on the witchlords of Kadr, he had not yet bedded the girl, much less begat an heir. Through a happenstance of Sabrian custom, my fifteenth cousin, a wild young duc entirely unprepared for the throne, had inherited the demesne of Sabria. To preclude any dispute of his position, Philippe had immediately wed Soren’s child widow, inheriting her virginity, the support of her powerful relatives, and her bastard half brother, Ilario. My overly sentimental mother had insisted that political necessity had grown into a true love match between Philippe and Eugenie—despite the burden of the ridiculous half brother. But who could say what love meant, especially in such rarified circles? I doubted my mother knew.
    “Thanks be, young Edmond got his mother’s wit as well as her looks,” mused Ilario. “Old Olivier has the cleverness of a turnip in anything but war making and wife picking.”
    Feeling the press of time, I dropped my voice. “I’ve judged that Mage Dante’s talents will . . . suffice. And he agrees that the level of magic the glass signifies is extraordinary.”
    Ilario bobbed his fair head and clapped his hands. “Excellent, Portier. I knew he would work out.” As if he’d thought of it. “Go to it.”
    “If we are to be partner agentes , the three of us must agree on our next steps.”
    He flared his straight nose and stretched his long saffron-colored legs in front of him. “Heaven’s messengers, I near piss myself when he glares at me, and these are my favorite hose.”
    My royal cousin had insisted that Ilario was trustworthy and that his close bond with his half sister could help us discover the truth. I could accept that, but playing nursemaid to the fop would test a saint’s patience. “You must attend, Chevalier. It is your duty as a Knight of Sabria, your sister’s champion, one might say.”
    “Oh. Quite right.” He jumped to his feet and inhaled until his bony ribs threatened to pop the buttons on his gold waistcoat. “You understand, Portier, Eugenie could not have done this thing—conspired. It is not in her nature.”
    I had never seen him so somber when he wasn’t frighted out of his wits or reeling drunk. Thus I found