The Sword-Edged blonde by Alex Bledsoe Page A

taught me to play cards and was the worst dancer I’d ever seen. Something fell away inside me, too, and we grabbed each other in a long, intense bear hug that once would’ve embarrassed us both. A whole bunch of emotions I’d stuck in that dark spot under my stomach threatened to burst out, but with great difficulty I kept them in their place. Finally we broke apart and just grinned at each other.
    “You smell like a pond,” he said.
    “Where I live, everything’s been flooded for two weeks.
You
smell like a damn bouquet.”
    “It’s called bathing. All the kids are doing it. So did you have any trouble getting here?”
    “Not with that super-patriot you sent to find me.”
    Phil nodded. “He’s a good one, for sure. I’ve had my eye on him for a while.” He swallowed the rest of his drink and handed the goblet to Wentrobe for a refill.“Well, I’ll leave it up to you. We can drink and reminisce first, or I can tell you why I needed to see you.”
    “Why don’t you tell me what you want
while
we drink?”
    “That works.” He gestured at an overstuffed high-backed chair. I sank into it while he sat on the corner of the desk and picked up the picture of his wife. “You didn’t come to the wedding.”
    “Had a previous engagement.” In truth, I avoided information about Arentia so successfully that he’d been married for eighteen months before I even knew about it.
    “Well, that was six years ago, anyway. We tried to start a family right away, but it took a while. Eventually, though, we did have a son. Last year.” He met my eyes. “We named him Edward.”
    I must’ve had a great expression, because Phil only kept a straight face for about ten seconds. “No, I’m just kidding, we named him Pridiri.”
    “Good,
that
won’t get him picked on in school.”
    “Ree wanted it. She said it means, ‘relief from anxiety,’ and it was very important to her. I call him ‘P.D.’ for short.” I assumed “Ree” was what he called his queen, Rhiannon. Girls could get away with strange nicknames like that, especially girls who looked like the one in that picture.
    “So what happened to him?”
    “The official version,” he said with a glance at Wentrobe, “is that she killed him.”
    “Why?”
    “I don’t know. There are all sorts of rumors, including that she was a moon priestess doing a spell to bring down the government. My favorite is that she hated changing diapers so much that she lost her temperwhen she couldn’t find a nursemaid.” His smile was not amused. “But there’s no denying she was found covered in his blood, and the only remains were bones.” He said this with the practiced calm of royalty, betraying no emotion. “She was violently ill afterwards. The consensus is that she ate part of the corpse.”
    “What does
she
say?”
    “She says she can’t remember. We’d been at a state dinner, and she left early to go put him to bed. Her maids said they left her alone with P.D., and when they came back they found her passed out, covered in blood, surrounded by moon priestess paraphernalia. Candles, knives, incense, the works.”
    “Could it be a setup?”
    “I wish it could be, but how? She was in the nursery, in the middle of the most well-protected building in the whole country. And
why?
If someone breached our security and got into the castle, why kill a baby? Why not her, or me?”
    I nodded. “Yeah. ‘Why’ is a good question, all right.”
    He was silent for a moment as he met my eyes. “I was hoping you could find the answer to it.”
    “Figured as much.”
    “I need someone from outside, who I can trust, and who’s up to the challenge. Believe it or not, you’ve got quite the reputation for cleverness. In some circles, at least.”
    I held my goblet out to Wentrobe for a refill, then tossed it down. “I don’t normally work in circles this high off the ground.”
    “But I can
trust
you, Eddie,” he repeated, so simply that I was both touched and