Free Palatine First (The Aurelian Archives) by Courtney Grace Powers Page B

going to do without a Palatine First? If Liem is dead…” As her eyes grew round, she lowered her handkerchief and looked at Reece thoughtfully. “…if Liem is dead, you are the Palatine First.”
    Reece flinchingly drew back his hand. “If Liem was dead, they’d have left the body. That boom? That meant they were running, and fast.”
    “Then hail Thaddy,” Abigail said. “Send him a log and tell him to come home.”
    “Where is he?”
    “Cronus Twelve. He’s speaking at the inauguration of their new prime minister. Nine days out, by Stream.”
    “I—maybe you’d better do it.” Reece wasn’t scared, not of the duke. It just seemed a shame to break their spell of silence with this kind of news.
    Abigail scowled at Reece as she snatched the bottle of bourbon from one of the cowering servants. She pointed a finger at him with the hand clutching the neck of the bottle, for all her superiority, looking more like a drunk than a duchess. “I don’t care about your petty feud and your…your big, stupid head! You will hail him, and you will do it now, or so help me, the box-dwelling, bottom-feeding Westerners in Caldonia’s filthiest brig will be your envy! Now stop staring and MOVE!”
    The gulp was just to wet his throat. Not because he was nervous.
    There was a log interface just down the hallway, in the guest room that had been Liem’s study for as long as Reece could remember. The room had suffered as many casualties as the last by way of gutted shelves and trampled books. Reece tiptoed around the chaos. It felt wrong to disturb it, disrespectful.
    The log interface was a wooden box on the wall with a bulbous lens protruding from its top and a speaker mouth from its bottom. Easing himself into Liem’s desk chair, Reece flipped the switch on the side of the box that turned the dull blue light behind the lens on with a soft buzz. At the same time, part of the wall behind the desk folded aside like a stiff curtain to reveal a blinking screen.
    He didn’t bother recording the moving pictures of himself that usually supplemented the audio half of the log. The first time he saw the duke again, he wanted to be in uniform so as to have something to present of himself, not in his nightclothes with his hair as messy as a jumble of underengine coil wires. And if that was a selfish thing to think at a time like this…it could be chalked up to the fact that Reece was still having difficulty believing any of this was real.
    “Sir, this is Reece. There’s been an accident.”
    His message was brief. Every word of it burned in his throat like a shot of Pantedan burnthroat.
    After a few minutes, the log interface gave a startlingly loud beet , and the sound of the duke’s voice rolled out from the speaker, low and smooth and as cold as deep space. Reece involuntarily jumped when the screen winked on, facing him with a head-and-shoulders view of his father. At a glance, he was an older man who had come into his prime past his middle years, getting handsomer with age. He was taller than Reece, fit and square-shouldered, and his head was neatly shaved.
    At a glance.
    “I’m leaving Cronus now,” the duke rumbled. He couldn’t see Reece, not with Reece’s lens turned off, but he seemed to stare him straight in the eyes. “How is your mother?”
    “She’s shaken. But she’ll be fine.”
    “Take care of her until I get there.”
    “I will.”
    The duke paused, not blinking, his curveless lips pulling tighter at their corners. Beet . The interface turned off with a lingering crackle, and the screen went dark.
    Slowly, Reece leaned forward and flipped the switch to hide the screen, but he didn’t leave. Instead, he slouched in his chair, idly pulled the book sitting on the desk into his lap, and tapped his fingers on its leather cover. He sat like that for some time, tapping and thinking until suddenly, it hit him. Nivy ! Bleeding bogrosh, he’d completely forgotten!
    He stood so quickly that his knees struck the