Page 179 of The Crown’s Temptation

He looked back at me.

Neither of us said anything after that. The room held the silence the way rooms did when something had just shifted inside them.

Yorali

TAMAL

The dining room in Yorali was never comfortable.

That was intentional. His father did not believe in comfortable rooms. He believed in rooms that reminded people of where they were and who was sitting across from them.

Tamal ate his food and said nothing and waited.

"Your sister," his father said.

Tamal wanted to sarcastically reply which one?

But decided against it.

"Yes."

"Where is she?"

"I do not know." He kept his voice even. "I believe she is at Rathmor Palace. She has been there some time. She was in the dungeons, had recently fallen out of favor with the king."

His father looked at him across the table. The face he wore tonight was the handsome one, the youthful one, the face that had tempted more than one princess into a room she should not have entered. It did not fool Tamal. It had not fooled him since he was a child.

"Was it she who killed the girl?" his father asked. "The Veynar princess?"

"I do not know," Tamal said.

The sound arrived without warning.

It filled his skull from the inside, high and sustained and wrong, the kind of sound that had no source and no direction and could not be blocked or reasoned with. His vision blurred. He kept his hands flat on the table and did not move and waited for it to stop.

It stopped.

His father reached for his wine. "You do not know a great deal this evening."

"No," Tamal said. "I do not."

His father set down his wine. "I hear this Yvara may be the key," he said. "That she may be my blood. Where is she?"

"Resting in the northern wing," Tamal said.

His father had begun rebuilding the northern tower. It was not tall enough to be a tower yet so for now it was simply a wing. The rationale behind it Tamal had never been certain of. With his father the rationale was rarely what it appeared to be.

"Does she have power?"

"None that I can tell."

His father looked at him. "Without power what use is she to me?"

Tamal took a sip of his wine.

He thought about the day he had gone to the Ivory and walked in on Sevrin's scene. Yvara on the bed covered in another man's release, looking at the ceiling, her face impossible to read.

It had been a strange scene. Intriguing, if nothing else. He had almost requested a turn but something held him back and given the fact that she was his sister he was grateful he had not.