Iron and Magic (The Iron Covenant #1)(50)

Exasperation stretched his face. He looked up, as if searching for the heavens.

“Our marriage is a sham. Our alliance isn’t,” she said. “We need each other. When people look at you, they see a murdering butcher who betrayed his allies. When they look at me, they see an abomination who leads a cult and feeds on human sacrifice. But now we’re married and suddenly they see us as newlyweds. They assume that there must be something I see in you, some redeeming quality that made me love you and marry you. When they look at me, they see a wife. Surely, I couldn’t be that abominable.”

“Or I wouldn’t have married you,” he finished.

“Yes. Doors that were previously closed are beginning to open. The Red Guard guy is coming after ignoring us for months. The county sheriffs think that we are a lovely couple. Explain the problem with the Pack, so I’ll understand.”

“No.”

“I’m not asking for your thoughts and secrets. Just for facts. I’ll learn them anyway. Normally I’d pounce on a chance to explore your weaknesses, but right now I just want the Pack thing to go smoothly. I worked too damn hard for it. A three month-long bidding war, four trips to the Pack to woo them, almost ten thousand in extra herbs planted.”

“Did you go yourself to woo the Pack?”

She laughed. “Because I am so sweet and charming?”

He gave her a dark look. “Your people are eating out of your hand.”

“They are my people and I love them. They’ve proved their loyalty beyond anything I had a right to ask. There is no limit to how low I will sink to keep them safe.”

“Interesting choice of words.”

She faced him. “Accurate. I will do anything for them.”

“Good.” His smile was like the flash of a knife. “I’ll use it against you later.”

She rolled her eyes. “I’m so scared. I’ll have to go and find someone to sex me up right away just to keep my composure. Tell me, how did all this start?”

He didn’t answer. She strolled next to him.

“Roland found out he had a daughter,” Hugh said.

“I know the story,” she said. “The immortal wizard woke up after hibernating through the centuries of technology just before the Shift. He set about rebuilding his empire from the ruins of our modern world. He gathered necromancers and made them into the People. He hired an army and set a warlord to lead them. And he swore off having children, not sure why.”

“They always turn on him,” Hugh said.

Just like you? Maybe he had turned on Roland. Maybe not. There was something wistful in the way he said Roland’s name.

“He fell in love in spite of himself,” Elara continued. “And he had a daughter, but his wife ran away.”

“He tried to kill the child in the womb,” Hugh said.

She stopped and glanced at him. “What?”

“It didn’t work. Daniels is hard to kill.”

Elara recovered. “And then her mother took her and ran away with Roland’s Warlord.”

“He raised me,” Hugh said.

“The Warlord?”

“Yes. His name was Voron. He’d trained me since they found me in France. Then Kalina, Daniels’s mother, decided she needed his help, and it was all over. One day he was simply gone. That was her power. If she wanted to, she could make you love her.”

So his surrogate father had abandoned him to be with his boss’s wife and their child. That had to hurt.

“It didn’t last,” Hugh said. “Roland tracked them down eventually and killed Kalina. Voron escaped with the child. I thought Voron would come back, after her magic wore off, but he never did.”

“After Voron left, what happened to you?”

“I became the Warlord. Later Roland found out that his daughter survived.”

“How?”

Hugh shrugged. “She started using her magic. Daniels isn’t a subtle type. I could’ve brought her to him, but he wanted her to come to him, voluntarily, which was a lot more complicated. By that point, she had decided that Curran Lennart was her one and only. As long as they were together, inside the Pack’s Keep, I wouldn’t have made any progress. I had to get them to turn on each other.”

He was describing it matter-of-fact, in a detached voice.

“You lured them out of the Keep?” she guessed.

“Yes.”

“How?”

“Panacea. I wanted a lot of distance, so I went to Europe, to the Black Sea. I had a castle there, a quiet base for Middle Eastern operations. There are a lot of potent old powers in Arabia. Best to stay out of their way, on the outskirts.”

“Did Lennart and Daniels come?”

Hugh nodded.

“What was it like meeting her?” Elara asked. “What was Daniels like?”

“You wanted just the facts, remember?”

“Did she like your proposal?”

“No. We danced around for a while. Sparred once.”

“Is she good?”

“Yes.”

“Better than you?”

“Faster. Voron taught us both. It was like fighting myself. She’s a killer. If you take away her sword, she’ll pick up a rock. If you take away the rock, she’ll kill you with her hands. She zeroes in and doesn’t let go.”