He Stole My Life, So the Moon Gave Me Back novel · Chapter 2 of 27

Chapter 2: The Prince Makes Them Kneel

Adrian brings Noah before the vampire court, publicly shames Lord Valerius for starving a high priest, orders the gathered nobles to kneel to Noah, and afterward warns Noah that the traitor who sold him still reads the church's letters.

Adrian set the tray down on the long table in front of Lord Valerius. The bread was still warm. The wine had not been touched.

'Tell me,' Adrian said, 'why you feed a prisoner worse than the kennels feed a hound.'

Valerius did not look at the tray. He looked past it, at Noah, standing between two guards in his white clothes with his hands loose at his sides.

Noah kept his eyes down. He counted the room instead. Fourteen nobles along the wall. Two doors. Six guards, all of them on Adrian's side of the floor.

The hall was cold enough that his breath showed. Black stone, black banners, and a dais where Valerius sat like a man who had never once been asked to explain himself.

'It is a vessel,' Valerius said. 'You do not feed a vessel. You fill it.'

Noah filed the word. Vessel. He filed the exact way Valerius's mouth shaped it, and the date, and the row of nobles who did not blink.

Adrian picked up the bread and broke it in half. He ate one half slowly, watching Valerius the whole time.

'Then I have been wasting good bread on a vessel for two days,' he said. 'Which makes me either a fool or a liar. Which am I, my lord?'

The room went very still.

So this is how he wins them. He makes them laugh, and then he makes them choose.

Valerius's jaw worked. 'You were sent to bring back a weapon, not a guest.'

'And you were sent to hold a kingdom, not a grudge,' Adrian said. 'We are both disappointing our fathers tonight.'

Someone down the wall coughed into a sleeve. A young noble, dark-haired, trying not to smile. Noah marked him. That one watched Adrian, not the priest. That one mattered.

Valerius stood. He was taller than Adrian and older by a generation, and he used both the way a man uses a door he expects to be opened.

'You forget your place, general.'

'No,' Adrian said. 'I have it exactly. You are the lord of this court, and I am the man who keeps it standing. Ask the northern wall who it answers to.'

He turned to the room. His voice did not rise. It did not need to.

'This is Noah of Armis,' he said. 'High priest. Chosen by the elders of the sun church and anointed at their altar. He is not a vessel and he is not a weapon. He is a guest of my house, and he is under my protection, and any hand laid on him is a hand laid on me.'

'You have no right,' Valerius said.

'Then take it from me,' Adrian said. 'In front of them.'

Valerius did not move.

Noah watched the old lord's hands. They had gone white at the knuckles where they gripped the arm of the chair, and they stayed there, and they did not lift.

He will not strike. He has already lost, and he knows it, and he is deciding how to lose slowly.

Adrian let the silence sit until it turned uncomfortable, and then he smiled, and it was a real smile, warm and easy, and that was the worst thing Noah had seen him do.

'Kneel,' he said.

No one moved.

'To the high priest,' Adrian said. 'All of you. He outranks every man in this room and you have been treating him like cargo. Kneel, and we will all pretend this was respect and not a correction.'

The dark-haired noble went down first. Then a woman in grey. Then the rest, one by one, a slow tide of velvet and iron lowering to the black stone floor.

Noah kept his face mild. He let them see a frightened boy in borrowed white, standing very still.

Inside, he was counting. Four refused. The four on the far end, near the left door, who knelt last and lowest and looked at Valerius the whole time.

And the dark-haired one. He knelt fast and watched Adrian. Not the priest. Adrian.

Those are the ones who will still be standing when this ends.

Valerius had not knelt. He stood on the dais with his hands on the chair, and Adrian let him stand, which was its own kind of sentence.

'You may keep your seat, my lord,' Adrian said. 'I would not want the court to think I had taught you manners at your age.'

A ripple of sound went down the wall. Not laughter. The held breath before it.

Valerius sat down again because standing alone was worse. Noah watched him do it and understood something he had not understood in the chamber.

Adrian is not protecting me. He is taking me from him, and he wants them all to see who did it.

That was useful. That was a door, and Noah had just watched it open.

Adrian crossed to him and took his arm, not hard, the way a man takes the arm of someone he intends to be seen guiding.

'Walk,' he said, low, only for Noah. 'Slow. Let them look.'

Noah walked slow. He let them look. He kept his hands loose and his head tilted a little, the way he always did when he was listening, and he listened to all of it: the shift of cloth, the mutter that started at the left door and died before it reached the dais.

They will talk about this for a month. Every one of them. And one of them will write it down.

At the mouth of the side passage Adrian stopped and let him go, and the two guards fell in behind them, and the heavy door closed off the hall and its cold and its kneeling nobles.

The side room beyond was small and warm, and there was a table with courier packets stacked on it, and a fire that someone had fed too well.

Noah looked at the packets. One of them was folded church stationery, sealed with a ring he knew, and he did not look at it long enough for anyone to notice he had looked.

Deacon Orwin's seal. In this house. On this table.

He looked at the fire instead, and warmed his hands, and said nothing at all.

Adrian poured himself wine and did not offer Noah any. He drank standing, watching the closed door to the hall, and his good humor drained out of his face the way water drains out of a cracked bowl.

'That was the easy part,' he said.

'It did not look easy.'

'It was. Valerius is a loud man. Loud men are simple.' Adrian set the cup down. 'The quiet ones are the problem.'

Noah said nothing. He had learned in the chamber that Adrian talked more when he was not answered.

Adrian turned from the door and looked at him, and there was something working behind his face that Noah could not name.

'You want to know who told us where you sleep,' Adrian said.

Noah's hands stayed warm at the fire. His heart did not change its pace. He had wanted to know that since the first morning, and he had not asked once, and now it was being handed to him.

'You are going to tell me,' he said.

'No,' Adrian said. 'I am going to warn you.' He came closer, and the cold came off him the way it always did, before he was near enough to touch. 'The man who sold your location still reads every letter your church sends. Every one. He has the seals, he has the couriers, and he has been doing it for longer than you have been high priest.'

Noah looked at him and let his face do nothing.

So the church is not safe. The church has a hand in it, and the hand is still writing.

'Why tell me,' Noah said.

'Because you are going to try to send word home,' Adrian said. 'I have watched you since the chamber. You are a man building a plan, and I would rather you built it knowing the ground.' He smiled, and it was not the warm one. 'And because it costs me nothing to tell you the truth when it buys me your trust.'

Noah turned back to the fire. On the table behind him, three feet away, the letter with Orwin's ring sat under a stack of courier packets, and he had already read the seal, and he had already decided.

'You have not bought anything,' he said.

Adrian laughed, low and real. 'No,' he said. 'Not yet.'

He picked up the wine again and drank, and his free hand went to the back of his own neck and stayed there, and Noah watched him do it and filed it with the rest.

The traitor has a name. I do not have it yet. But I know where the letters are, and I know who reads them, and I know that the man in front of me wants me to trust him too much to ask.

'Then what do you want,' Noah said.

Adrian set the cup down and did not answer for a moment, and when he did, his voice had gone quiet in a way that had nothing to do with the wine.

'You will find out tomorrow,' he said. 'Sleep well, high priest.'

He opened the door to the passage and stood aside, and the guards moved, and Noah walked past him into the dark.

He did not look back at the table. He did not need to. He had the seal, the room, and the man, and he had three stolen mornings of counting left before anyone in this house understood what he was.

Behind him, the door to the side room closed, and Adrian was still standing at the fire with his hand on the back of his neck.

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