For a moment, Telent Rundel was completely still. But while his body froze, his mind raced, desperate to find an answer to a single burning question: How much did Valeri Leufroy know?
Telent had always been an outsider to the inner circle that Bors Lothian had built during the War of Inches. He'd been forced to find his own avenues to power, and that had begun when he married the daughter of Duke Argidir Keating's youngest aunt.
He'd known all the way back then that the match his own cousin had made for him came with a price. The Ruling Council didn't trouble themselves with the affairs of a frontier baron's marriage without reason, so when he'd received a letter asking him to visit Corven Barony in Keating before entertaining any matchmaking within the march, he'd known that he was caught up in someone else's scheme.
Argidir had attended the matchmaking banquet personally, and his pitch had been impossible to ignore.
