Keirth seemed to misunderstand her reaction. “Not because I wanted to watch her.” He turned to face her. “I didn’t watch. I mean, maybe I... maybe I sometimes sort of kept watch, just to make sure she was okay. But that was all.”
No wonder he didn’t want to lie with women. No wonder Keirth saw the relationship between men and women the way he did.
Keirth turned back to the stream. “But that night, by the time I realized something was wrong, it was too late. He had a knife. He was so quick. She never even had a chance to scream.” His fists clenched. “I wanted to kill him then. I tried. But he knocked me out. He was too strong for me. I...”
Ariana grabbed one of his hands, prying his clenched fingers apart to put her own into them. She squeezed his hand, and they were quiet for a long time.
“She hated the nobility, you know,” Keirth said. “Sometimes other women she worked with would be reading the nets, looking at the gossip over who was marrying who or what matches were good ones, and all of that. And she wouldn’t listen to it. She’d get up and leave. She said it was all chintz and lies. She said the whole lot of them cared about nothing except the way things looked, but that underneath, everything was rotten.”
Ariana bit her lip. Maybe that was an accurate assessment of the nobility.
“Once,” Keirth said, “she got very upset when she found out the prince was on planet. She made us catch the first ship off world we could. Said she didn’t want to be anywhere near Gulien.”
“She called him by his first name?” Ariana said. That was a little odd, wasn’t it?
“I think so,” said Keirth. He shook his head. “That’s what I mean, though. She was unbalanced in some ways. I loved her. I never wanted her to die. I would have done anything to protect her, but sometimes I think the life she lead, nearly starving, giving herself to all those men... It damaged her. And then it killed her.”
Ariana gripped Keirth’s hand tight. “I’m sorry.” Even though she knew the measly phrase was hopelessly inadequate.
* * *
Night had fallen on Scranth. Risciter moved quietly in the shadows, tiptoeing up to the makeshift cottage he’d seen Miss Gilit enter an hour or so ago. The darkness felt like a comforting blanket. Risciter liked the darkness. He liked to move easily, without being noticed. He felt safe in the shadows.
It was actually sort of laughable, the fact that they’d gone to a brothel. Risciter wasn’t sure what he’d expected. He’d feared that he’d overestimated Miss Gilit’s pride, and that his leaks to the nets wouldn’t keep her from home. He’d worried that he’d follow the tracking signal on the ship right back to the planet Wendo. He wasn’t sure what would have happened if she had gone back, and if she’d told the universe what she knew about him. Most likely, she wouldn’t have been believed. But she might have been. And, in any case, if stories like that were floating around about him, it would be damaging. And it would make what he did harder.
Risciter had learned a long time ago that it wasn’t what he actually did that mattered. It only mattered what it appeared that he did. He’d become quite good at appearing to be the model duke. He knew that his reputation was his best defense against anyone discovering what he really was. People were quite easily duped. They believed what was in front of them. The right attitude, the right dinner conversation, a smile and a wink, and they thought him charming and harmless. They were like pawns in a game of chess. He moved them where he liked, used them to distract from what his real moves were.
The darkness and the remote setting reminded Risciter of his home planet. His family had an estate in the country. It was where he’d perfected his real moves. He’d started small, he remembered. His younger sister Ritra was in possession of a little dog. The dog yapped a lot, and the servants thought it was annoying, but Risciter hadn’t had emotions towards the dog one way or another. It was perhaps the fact that he once heard the butler muttering something to himself about drowning it that gave him the idea. But perhaps the idea had simply bloomed in his mind of its own accord. Risciter wasn’t sure. He was young then, couldn’t have been more than seven or eight. Once the idea occurred to him, he couldn’t get it out of his head.
He didn’t want to capture the dog and have it make a lot of noise, because his yaps were so piercing it would likely bring people running. So his first step was to make friends with the dog. That had been easy. Dogs and people were very much the same in that regard. They were eager to believe you were friendly. They wanted to trust you. He brought the dog scraps of food. He learned where to scratch behind its ears to make its tongue hang out of its mouth and make it grin stupidly.