Richard was staring at an image of an urbane, groomed blond man with sharp features and an overly elaborate haircut. There was a focused, predatory edge to his glare. “What about him?”
“Baron Oleg Rene.” Kaldar crossed his arms. His face had gained an unexpected vicious edge. “You wouldn’t believe who he’s related to. You see the family resemblance?”
“Spider.” Richard spat the word like it was poison.
“A distant cousin. How about that?”
The two men glared at that picture, the hate on their faces so similar, they looked like twins.
“The same Spider who killed Sophie’s mother?” Charlotte asked.
Kaldar nodded. “Rene is Spider’s younger half sister’s son, the Adrianglian branch of the family. Because of this inconvenient connection, he’s been blacklisted from military service, the Department of the Interior, and the Diplomatic Corps.”
“What does he do?” George asked.
“Arts, sports, and entertainment,” Kaldar said. “He travels around the country working as a glorified event planner. Organizes festivals, tourneys, and so on. The Department of the Interior has no issue with it as long as somebody else provides his security. He’s very good at it, apparently.”
“So he can move around the country pretty much at random,” Richard said.
Kaldar nodded. “I’m thinking they use him as a buyer / scout / trouble fixer.”
He turned to the last photograph. On it a man in his middle forties looked at the world with hazel eyes. He was handsome, with a masculine beauty that was just a shade too rugged to be perfect, and that slight roughness only added to his appeal. His expression was dignified but free of pretense. An engaging smile played on his lips and in his eyes, proclaiming loudly that this man was worthy of loyalty because he was good and would do the right thing. Its power was so pronounced, Charlotte felt compelled to smile back.
“Viscount Robert Brennan,” Kaldar said. “The main head of this twisted hydra.”
He sat down. “How do you want to go about it?”
“We need a confession,” Richard said. “Or at the very least, an admission of guilt.”
“Brennan is a tough nut to crack.” Kaldar’s face turned grim. “It’s not just that he’s a cousin of the king. He’s also popular. Blueblood ladies think he’s darling, and men think he’s a man’s man. He’s athletic, charming, funny, and they all love him. You’ll be fighting against the tide of public opinion.”
“Then we’ll need to turn it against him,” Richard said.
“How the hell are you going to do that?”
“Why can’t we simply remove him from the equation?” George asked.
“Because if we kill him, the organization wouldn’t die,” Richard told him. “Think of a monarchy. One king dies, another takes his place, but the institution survives.”
“Richard is right.” Charlotte rose.
The two men and a boy immediately stood up.
“Why did you get up?” she asked George.
“You’re a woman,” George answered.
“Yes, but what is the reason?”
“I don’t know.”
“You rose because hundreds of years ago, when a woman entered a room full of men, she wasn’t exactly safe. Especially if she was beautiful or had holdings. Our magic is just as deadly, but physically, an average male is stronger than an average woman, so when a woman entered the room, men who knew her stood up to indicate that they would shield her from danger. The three of you just declared yourself my protectors.”
They looked at her.
“A modern woman is hardly in danger of a direct assault,” Charlotte said. “So why do men still get up?”
George frowned.
Charlotte smiled at Kaldar. “You know, don’t you?”
“We get up because women like it.” Kaldar clapped George on the shoulder. “You don’t want to look like an unmannered bumpkin in front of a girl. And if you get up and she notices you, she might sit by you.”
“Exactly. There is no law that says men should rise, but you still do because women enjoy this show of attention. It’s so ingrained in your nature that when we first met, Richard refused to sit down until I did, even though he was half-dead at the time.”
Richard cleared his throat. “That’s a wild exaggeration. I was a quarter-dead, at most.”
Kaldar swiveled toward him and peered at his brother’s face. “That’s two jokes in less than an hour. You feeling all right?” he asked quietly. “Feverish, eh?”
“I’m fine. Get out of my face.”
Kaldar looked at her, then back at Richard, then at her again.
Charlotte sat down. The three men sat.
“The monarchy survives because the bluebloods like it,” she said. “Most Adrianglians like it. It’s an idea that appeals to them on some level. The king has less power than the collective Assembly or the Council, for example, so he can be overthrown. But we like to pretend we’re still a warrior nation under a single strong leader, and we idealize the throne and those who sit on it.”
“Or stand close,” Richard added.
“The bluebloods don’t fear laws,” she continued. “Some of us still think they don’t apply to us. We fear only public judgment. The public has judged the royal family to be paragons of virtue. We can’t fight that, or we’d have to rub the blueblood noses in the fact that their long bloodlines don’t bestow them with nobility of spirit the moment they pop out of their mothers.”
Richard nodded. “The bookkeeper on the island is a prime example—she was so committed to Brennan, her eyes practically glistened at the thought of him. In her mind, he could never do anything base.”
Their minds ran on parallel tracks. “We can’t fight the system,” Charlotte agreed. “But we can tarnish one individual. To crush the slaver ring, we have to get Brennan to admit to an act so base, so at odds with the standard of blueblood behavior, that society will have no choice but to judge him as defective. He will be viewed as a freak, unworthy of his pedigree. Anything he engaged in would become unclean. The bluebloods will destroy him just to escape the taint.”
“I like the way you think,” Kaldar said.
Richard nodded. “I agree. The public disdain and disgust must be so severe that it would cause a cry of outrage. The slave owners must recognize that being discovered would make them instant social pariahs. That’s the only way the institution of slavery can be rooted out.”