The Villain Duke's Butler Served Him Too Well novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Knife
On the eve of his twenty-first birthday the duke holds a silver knife to his kneeling butler's chin and asks who he really is; Corwin tells him the truth, and the clock strikes midnight on the order to take off his gloves.
The silver knife rested under Corwin's chin, and his master had not blinked in a full minute.
"Look at me," said Duke Leander Dauntrey.
Corwin was already looking at him.
He was kneeling on the study rug at twenty minutes to midnight, in his tailcoat and white gloves.
The tip of the duke's dead father's letter knife pressed the hollow under his jaw.
The fire had burned low.
The only other light was a candle on the desk, and it made Leander's hair look like poured gold.
Leander was twenty years old, and in twenty minutes he would be twenty-one.
"Eight years Corwin Radmore served this house," Leander said.
"Yes, my lord."
"In all that time he never learned how I take my tea."
"My lord takes it without sugar, and the cup is warmed first."
"Yes."
Leander's grey eyes didn't leave his face.
"He put two sugars in it every morning and never once looked up when he set it down."
"I will bring the sugar tomorrow if my lord prefers."
"Don't be clever."
The knife pushed a little harder.
"Two years ago I woke up and my butler had a different face," Leander said.
"Not his features. His face."
"You look at me as though I were something you'd read."
Corwin felt his pulse beating against the flat of the blade.
He had a very fast decision to make, and he had been putting it off for two years.
He could say he'd had a fever.
He could say the last two years had changed him, which was true, but it would sound like a servant's lie.
The man holding the knife would hear it as one.
He would be sent away on the one night he could not afford to leave this house.
"Who are you?" Leander said quietly.
"I'm your butler."
"Who are you really?"
Corwin took a breath.
"I was another man, in another world," he said.
"I died at my desk at thirty-one, over a spreadsheet, and woke up in this body on the morning of your nineteenth birthday."
Leander's face didn't change.
"In my world there was a book about you."
"I read it on a train, every night, for a year."
"It was a love story between the Crown Prince and a physician named Tobias Reeve, and you were the villain."
"I hated that book."
"It treated you as someone who deserved to die, and the way it was written, you didn't."
Leander said nothing.
"At your birthday ball tomorrow," Corwin said, "you drink a glass of poison and you die."
"It's the third glass from the left on the butler's tray."
"The butler hands it to you."
"In the book, that butler was me."
The candle guttered.
"What poison?" Leander asked.
"Foxglove, I think.
"The book wasn't clear."
"It was never foxglove."
Leander said it so softly that Corwin almost missed it.
Then Leander's mouth flattened, as if he had stepped on something, and he said, "Go on."
"That's all of it," Corwin said.
"I've spent two years learning your tea, your tray and your uncle's coach, so I could be standing between you and that glass."
"If you wanted me to be your enemy, my lord, I'm sorry.
"I think I'm the opposite."
For a long moment the only sound was the fire settling.
"Why didn't you run?" Leander said.
"You've known for two years that you were the hand that kills me.
"Why stay?"
"Because if I ran, there would be nobody left to refuse."
Leander pushed the knife.
It broke the skin, a bright small pain, and one warm bead of blood rolled down toward Corwin's collar.
Corwin did not flinch.
He would have liked to call that courage.
Mostly it was that he had wanted this for two years, the man from the book looking straight at him.
The wanting was louder than the fear.
Leander lowered the knife.
He set it on the desk with a click.
Then he put out his hand, caught the blood on his thumb, and held it in front of Corwin's mouth.
"Open," Leander said.
Corwin opened.
Leander pressed his thumb across Corwin's tongue, and it tasted of iron and the warm salt of his skin.
Leander's breath caught.
Corwin watched the duke's pupils spread in the candlelight and thought, very clearly, that no one had ever been in more danger than he was.
The clock on the mantel began to strike.
Twelve slow chimes, and on the last one the Duke of Dauntrey was twenty-one.
Leander drew his thumb out of Corwin's mouth, slowly, and wiped it along his lower lip.
"Take off your gloves," he said.
Corwin reached for his wrist.
"No."
Leander's voice dropped.
"With your teeth."
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