Judging from the raucous tone of the men’s voices, the liquid was not tea but something much, much stronger.

“Ah,” Robert said smoothly. “We seem to have found the rest of the party.”

Tommy eyed the dogs and torches with deep suspicion. “They look like they’re about to hunt down a head of peasant.”

Robert stuck his hands in his pockets and assumed a superior expression. “Don’t be absurd. Peasant is too tough and stringy. Hardly worth the bother.”

He wished he felt quite so sure as he sounded. For all his urbane words, there was something distinctly off-putting about the pampered lordlings prancing along the edge of the forest. The torchlight distended their open jaws and lent a yellow cast to their teeth, making exaggerated caricatures of their features, turning them into something predatory, primal, their faces florid in the flaring light of the torches.

These were the sort of men Arthur Wrothan had collected around him in India, the spoiled, the bored, the wealthy. That was how Wrothan had operated. He had battened on the young aristocrats playing at soldier, winning their loyalty by introducing them to all the vices the Orient had to offer. He had made a very special sort of club out of it, one that operated by invitation only. It was a group Robert had steered well clear of — he had no use for amateur officers dabbling in debauchery and even less for bottom-feeders like Wrothan — but in such a small world, it was impossible not to know of them.

They had tended to travel en masse, Wrothan’s lordlings, clattering into the officers’ mess in a burst of clanking spurs, gleaming silver buttons, and shouted ribaldries, well-groomed hair as burnished as their buttons, cheeks flushed with drink rather than sun.