Lucas did not like this plan. Not from the very beginning, but since it was all decided while he was incapacitated for what turned out to be the last two weeks, all he could do was deal with it. Rather than pump her for information and use that information to destroy the people she worked with, they’d thought like nobles think and decided that an alliance was in order.

Of course, Lucas was equally certain that the two of them were already trying to figure out how to backstab each other to get everything for themselves. He could practically see it. It was their nature. Adin got something out of the deal, of course. He got his debts paid, and his name cleared. Apparently, The Torvin house was powerful enough to pull strings on its own that even the Whisperers would struggle with.

“Her father will insist on it, don’t you see?” Adin explained to him. “He’ll have to clear my name and give the Parin’s a renewed sense of legitimacy before the wedding is announced, otherwise it will make him look bad, and once we’re related by blood, well, our interests are aligned. It's the perfect match.”

Lucas admitted that the man’s point had a certain kind of sense, but he didn’t see how simply murdering Adin in his sleep wasn’t also an option. “The moment you ally with those people, you’re putting a target on all our heads,” Lucas argued. “She’s only trying to save her skin and get the Blue. After that, you will be one more casualty in whatever secret war it is they’re waging to seize power in the city.”

There were no answers that night nor in any of the nights that had followed. One night, after Lucas was strong enough to walk around, they sat together near the edge of the clearing, and he finally learned that the price for the marriage alliance was one-quarter of all the Blue they made going forward.

Lucas argued that was bullshit, but Adin countered that he was already entitled to the four-way split, and he’d only given up his share. “She wanted the recipe; fortunately, I don’t know it, do I?” he said sardonically. “You said so yourself. I’m terrible with different herbs and forever mixing them up.”

“You’re betting your sister’s life that you’re right, you know?” Lucas told him a few days later when it looked like they’d all be able to go back to the manner and get back to work soon.

“I think you already did that when you started making drugs and my house and selling them under my name, dear cousin,” Adin taunted him.

If Lucas had been stronger, he would have knocked him out right there. The man was getting testy because they were almost out of Blue, and Kar’gandin hadn’t seen fit to bring any more because everything was still buried and hidden in case the guard came back.

“You might think this is going to protect your sister,” Lucas spat, “But I don’t see how this ends well for you.”

“What do you mean?” Adin asked. “I get a beautiful high-born wife, a freshly cleared name, and connections I’d never have been able to manage before. I don’t see how this doesn’t end well for me.”

“What about the blue?” Lucas asked, allowing himself a smirk.

“What about it?” the noble asked, kicking some rocks.

“Well, you gave away your share to the Whisperers. Where are you going to get more?” Lucas countered.

“Everyone around me is swimming in the stuff. I’ll simply buy a vial when I need one now and then. It’s not that big of a deal.” Adin answered, but Lucas could see the doubt he was trying to plant worming into the noble's thick skull. “Surely my wife will—”

“Give it to you?” Lucas asked, leaning forward from where he was sitting on a low stone wall. “She better because all your income came from your share of the drugs I sold, and you gave that away. Buy more? From who? With what money? You might think this is a fabulous deal, especially for you, but I see exactly one upside to the whole thing.”

“Oh yeah, what’s that?” Adin asked peevishly.

“It's going to finally force you to get clean,” Lucas chuckled, despite the pain, “And boy, I don’t envy you that.”

Adin walked away that day frustrated, which was good. It meant he’d gotten the subtext. The Viscount could either get clean, buy blue with money he didn’t have, or he could ask his new wife and her friends nicely. Both of them knew that there would be a lot of strings attached to that third choice.

Perhaps that would put the fear in the lordling where none of Lucas’s other words had, he thought smugly as he slowly walked back to the tent like an old man with a bad back.

A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

Lucas had gotten a lot stronger in the last week, but he was only halfway back to normal. He knew that when they got back to the Manor, he could speed that up with potions, but even so he hated for people to see him like this. It could’t be helped, though. If he didn’t move and exercise he’d never recover, despite the healing.

At night, when he took his shirt off, he saw the puckered scars of three stab wounds in his ribs, making it trivial to imagine how big that monster’s claws had been. He was told that the wound in his back was the biggest of the four as well as the ugliest, but he couldn’t see that one, and honestly, he wasn’t sure he wanted to.

. . .

After almost a month in the wilderness, they were finally given the all-clear to go home. Lucas rode a mule back, but only at Cassara’s insistence. Even so, he walked the last leg from the orchard to the house so he could look stronger than he felt.

All of them had a celebratory dinner in the main dining room after that, and though Lucas ate sparingly and waited for the other shoe to drop, there was no late night guard raid that put them back in the dungeon. Honestly, the hardest part of the night was dealing with Arisse. She was even more difficult than Danaria.

Danaria wished only to smother him under worry and affection. She had heard about the owlbear attack, but everyone had assured her that he was fine. Now that she could see he was most definitely not fine, despite his best efforts to fake it, she became an even more suffocating nursemaid than Cassara had been.

That at least was done with the best of intentions. Arisse, though, she’d been arrogant even when she was bound hand and foot. Now she was insufferable.

“You’re not going anywhere until any number of guarantees are in place,” he reminded her on more than one occasion. He still didn’t fully understand the dynamic of the warehouse bombing and so many other facets. Would the Whisperers just forgive those deaths because they finally had a trickle of their blackmail drug? That seemed unlikely, but given how cold-blooded they were, it certainly wasn’t impossible.

Still, she seemed to prefer the prison cell of a well-appointed room to a month in the woods, so at least she didn’t try to escape. It was a small enough blessing, but he’d take it.

The next morning, Lucas decided that he was going to start cooking again. Before he started, though, he made it very clear that Arisse was not to be let out of her room even if the Manor was on fire.

“We must do everything in our power to make her believe that we continue to import this stuff from abroad,” he lectured his partners when they all sat around the table in the cider house that morning. It was the first time the four of them had been together, and other than him, none of them seemed worse for the wear. “We only just finished building this lab, and the second she knows where it is, we might as well burn it down and start building one somewhere new.”

Everyone agreed to that, even Adin, so he might be completely out to lunch in all this. “Second,” Lucas continued, “We now know they run around with invisibility and shit, so we need to be more careful. All this stuff needs to look like a legitimate enterprise up here to hide the illegitimate one down there, right?”

No one disagreed with that either. Indeed, they’d made great strides toward that since he’d been gone. The room was now filled with new bunk beds, wooden kegs, and apple bins. Even the pressing equipment had been refurbished. To all appearances, it looked like they were getting ready for the harvest season that was coming in another month or two.

Once all that was done, he finally climbed down the hidden staircase in the back that led to the new lab. Once he was there, though, he took a few moments to look around before he got to work. The place had turned out a lot nicer than he thought it would be.

He’d expected a dirty little hole in the ground. That had been the original plan, of course, but apparently such things weren’t up to Kar’gandin’s dwarven sensibilities, and he’d had the walls bricked in and laid flag stones on the floor. Lucas still had a stove and a still, but now they were both bigger and better than before.

Those were really the watchwords for the whole place. The ingredients were labeled and sorted in various bins that were clearly labeled; his glassware stood clean and ready to use on a counter that was now plained wood instead of a split, rough-hewn log. If he had a few more apparatuses, he’d have been tempted to call this modern.

Once Lucas was done gawking, he got to work. That didn’t mean Blue, though. That would have to wait. The first thing he wanted to do was create the weak potions of healing with some endurance ingredients.

So far as he was aware, there was no way to make the effects of a boost potion permanent, but with the right ingredients most recipes could be turned from normal potions into slow acting potions. For a person like him that was still recovering from his wounds, that could make all the difference in the world.

So, after deciding on a few recipes he wanted to try, he gave a few of the boys that they’d hired for this sort of thing his wishlist, and they went off in search for what he needed. In addition to the normal healing potion ingredients, they were also looking for hedgehog thistle root and the flowers of a poison creeper. Either of them might work, but he wasn’t sure. He’d never tried to make a slow-acting endurance potion before.

Once they went out hunting, he got started purifying all the other ingredients. Not only had Lucas’s absence given Kar’gandin the time to stockpile pretty much anything that Lucas had asked for in the past, but with the new still, he’d have pretty much all the alcohol he’d ever want.

Some of the things that had been collected had already rotted, and others were starting to go bad, but the various barks, mushrooms, and flowers had all been dried by someone just the way Lucas had explained before. So, that was nice to see at least.

He spent the rest of the day in the hole, finally doing his job for once. Honestly, it felt good. This was all he really wanted to do. He just wanted to while away the day, fine-tuning formulas and trying new recipes, and the rest of the world seemed hellbent on dragging him off to adventure after adventure, but for a while at least, he wouldn’t let it.