“He told the king?”
She had walked into the feast hoping—that blasted hope—that King Ingomar knew what she had done. That she, a command-less commander, was the strategist who had snatched the land he had so cavalierly claimed before even a whisper of an attack had been planned. He would have had to know, and if he knew he would have had to honor such an asset with a command. He hadn’t. Instead, he had congratulated Elwyn and sat back down and tucked into his ham and potatoes, not even acknowledging the great gift of Scratch, just a table away, slowly asphyxiating under lungfuls of disappointment and an overzealous waistband.
“But if he knew that I had planned the octagon . . .”
Frances faced her. The princess had a feral sort of beauty, more woodland imp than fairy, with short, stubby eyelashes and brows that arched mischievously, even through an otherwise blank expression.
“Come, now. You had to know this would happen.”
“I had to know what?”
There was pity on Frances’s face, strange and discomfiting, and Scratch remembered with startling clarity that she was talking to a princess. Moreover, she was freshly aware of her own body, that of a shrimpy, blue-veined Tangled Lakes girl. She was entirely out of her depth.
“You had to know,” said Frances, voice soft with gentle patience, “that he would never give you a command.”
She blinked. The leaves in the hedge began to form swirling pictures, the darkness revealing wavering images of menacing faces, garish, tonsil-bearing laughter, her mother’s raised hand. She blinked and blinked and they changed, kaleidoscopic mockery and dirt-dizzy fallen soldiers, mouths biting the wet, maggoty earth.
Oh. She was high.
“You’re from the Tangled Lakes,” Frances murmured, with the tone of an apology. “You have no breeding. No lineage. You don’t look like anyone in charge. You’re, pardon me for saying so, very small. And,” she chuckled darkly, “you’re a woman.”
“There are women in charge,” Scratch countered, though that was hardly the point. What was the point? Perhaps she had lost the point entirely. No, no, this was the point the princess was making—that there was no point. No point in trying, no point in striving. Because Scratch had made the mistake of being born to a penniless Tangled Lakes woman in the Royal City slums and, thusly, had no point at all.
“The women in charge are well-bred. They’re the exceptions. The commanders without breeding are men. And they’re all exceptional. Have you seen Julaine throwing a spear without his shirt? So what if he’s from the Southern Reaches? The man is a side of beef.”
“Of course I’ve seen Julaine throwing a spear,” Scratch spat, and instantly regretted it. “I’m sorry, Your Highness.”
“Don’t think on it.” She smiled tightly, her wicked eyebrows dimmed by discomfort. “Maybe if it was just ‘commander.’ But it’s ‘lord commander.’ Or, I suppose, ‘lady commander.’”
“Yeah. Lady.” She was ambivalent about being a “lady”—different than “woman,” which, come to think of it, had its own baggage—but the knighting? That was uncomplicated.
Lady Scratch Keyes, Lady Commander in the King’s Guard. She had imagined it so many times: the weight of the sword on her shoulders. The feel of the rug pile beneath her knee. Rising before her king as a knight of the realm.
“You ought to know, Keyes,” Frances murmured. “My father will take everything from you. He’ll keep you just comfortable enough to keep thinking you can reach for more.” She met Scratch head-on, those dark eyes unblinking. “He’ll never give it to you.”
She felt impossibly heavy, as if she and the bench were both sinking into the mulch below. She tasted soil.
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Because it’s not too late to do something else.”
She fingered the white raised scar on her face, a line drawn by sword point from forehead to cheek.
“Something else . . .”
Frances shrugged. “Something other than being in the King’s Guard. He won’t knight you. You’ve reached your ceiling there. Maybe you could be appreciated elsewhere, doing something else.”
“Like what?” She didn’t care that she sounded desperate. She was desperate, because there was nothing else. There had been nothing else since the day the Academy recruiter plucked her from the streets—a stringy ten-year-old, her pockets heavy with stolen fruit—and told her she would be a soldier. There was nothing else she was good at. There was nothing else she liked. Without the King’s Guard, Scratch Keyes was nothing at all.
“You’ll think of something,” said the princess, and she strolled off into the darkness, leaving Scratch entirely, achingly alone.
Chapter Two
Scratch had lost track of time. Maybe it was the Roselap. Maybe it was the grief. Maybe it was the pants. Whatever the cause, the night was silent and still when she made her way back to the barracks.
The guard at the door nodded in greeting. “Bowstring was looking for you.”
She grunted acknowledgment as she slipped indoors and found her quarters. Of course James had been looking. He had probably been worried. She knew a spike of guilt, quickly blotted out by a petty slash of rage. James Ursus, that green-eyed aristocrat, would never have had this problem. If he had been born with a tenth of her drive, he would have been a knighted commander by now.
But James didn’t have any desire to take command. He had chosen to support her instead. Oh fantastic, now she felt guilty again.
She released herself from her pants, not bothering with any of the pre-bed grooming rituals James had foisted upon her, and stubbornly closed her eyes.
Scratch didn’t have sleepless nights. After her first few weeks at the Academy, when she had realized that her name and appearance were, as her peers so helpfully informed her, lacking, she had trained herself to sleep on command and wake early. Her secret tools were two cups of hot water, which she procured from a motherly kitchen maid who had loved to fuss over her runty, underfed form. She would down the water at lights out, allowing the heat to soothe her to sleep. In the morning, when the urgency of her bladder woke her in the predawn hours, she rose quickly and quietly, with enough time to ensure her cot was neat, her fair hair tightly restrained, and her demeanor cheerful before any of her peers had even opened their eyes. Soon, she didn’t need the water to fall asleep instantly or to wake before the sun. Her body, like Scratch herself, had learned to adjust.
So she slept, against all odds. And it was a peaceful sleep. All two hours of it.
“Up, Keyes!”
She jolted awake, blinking away the afterimages of closely held torchlight.
“Branch?” She peered at the three men surrounding her: one with fire, two bearing swords. “Hester? Gultin?”
“I said up! And put on some clothes.”
She scrambled out of bed and fell directly onto a pair of pants, which she promptly wriggled into.
“Can I do my boots, or—”
“Do your boots!”
Her fingers skipped over the laces, tangling them into knots. She could barely piece together a coherent thought. Was she going to be killed? These three men—they were her peers in the Kings Guard. They hadn’t particularly liked her (the feeling was rather mutual) but there certainly wasn’t enough hatred to garner a midnight murder. And they were all sergeants; she outranked them.
“Where are you taking me?”
“You don’t get to ask questions.”
She needed to stall. Her sword and dagger were sheathed across the room. Maybe, if she scrambled over, she could—
“Time’s up.” Hester, the largest of the bunch, revealed a length of rope and bound her arms. Her bootlaces trailed like tripwires under her toes as he yanked her upward, her shoulders jamming into the back of her neck.
“Ow,” she said.
“Sorry,” he murmured. “King’s orders.”
“King’s . . .”
Her mind went panicky-white. The moisture left her mouth
so quickly her teeth ached.
“Why does the king—”
“I said no questions!”
She diligently clamped her mouth as her captors dragged her out of the barracks and into the night, holding her just-too-high to walk for herself. Her toes scrambled for purchase on the packed earth of the palace grounds. They reached the hall, where the remnants of dinner lay like untouched murder evidence, then through to dank palace corridors. And farther, to where bare stone shifted to rugs, blank walls to tapestry. Then, an oak door, oiled so recently it reeked of linseed and pine tar. It opened.
Her knees slammed against the floor before her mind had a chance to catch up. Oh, I’ve been shoved.
“You look well,” a familiar voice slurred beside her.
She bit back a gasp. James’s lips puffed like a seedpod ready to burst, a pinkish sap of drool and blood seeping from the corner of his mouth. One of his vibrant green eyes was swollen shut.
“And you,” she whispered, attempting to breathe. He looked at her like he knew what she meant: You’re my best friend. I love you.
She glanced around her new prison. Three thrones sat at the edge of the room—the throne room, apparently, though she had never seen it before. Thick pennants hung from bronze flagpoles jutting from stone walls striped with arched stained glass depicting the major gods. The Mother, god of hearth and home. The Sister, god of poetry and piety. The Brother, god of war and music. The Twice-Buried, god of sex and death. And, behind the thrones, the largest window of them all: The Father, the etheric god that built all on the first day and would destroy all on the last.
It seemed unlikely that any of those gods would come to her aid. The last time she had prayed, it was to The Cheesemonger, god of cheese, and it was on a dare.
“Sergeant Major Keyes.” Sir Levon, Hand to the King, leaned back in his throne. The leather of his black jerkin creaked over his stomach like a beetle’s carapace. “So glad you could join us.”
“Pleasure.” Her teeth chattered. She clamped her jaw, twitches jolting down the muscles of her throat.
Levon raised an eyebrow. “Of course. In a moment, King Ingomar and his wizard will arrive. It would behoove you to give me any information you have before they do.”
“Information?”
“On the girl.”
“What girl?”
In a moment he was before her, raising his craggy hand. The slap stung worse than she could have anticipated. No one had slapped her in years, and the indignity burned even more than the act. For a moment, she was back in her mother’s shack, on the wrong end of Purpose Keyes’s long-nailed claw. It was enough to send her heart speeding, her eyes blinking away shameful moisture.
She breathed herself back into her body as Levon glared down at her, his teeth bared.
“I’m sorry, Sir Levon,” she tried once more. “But I don’t know what girl—”
Another slap, this time to the other cheek, and she hit the floor. It would have been better to be punched. She could take a punch. She did, regularly. But there was something about a slap—like Levon didn’t respect her enough to close his fist. Like he was scolding her.
She generally didn’t mind being a woman, but there was something jagged and painful at the juncture of woman and slap and it tore at her, uncomfortably deep.
“Ah,” said Levon. “Your Highness.”
She struggled back to her knees. Behind the wobbly wetness obscuring her vision, she watched King Ingomar and Sir Gorn take their thrones. The king still wore the celebratory crimson he had worn at dinner, thick ropes of golden brocade lining every seam. The red of his cheeks, usually a sign of joviality, glowed with barely-contained rage.
The wizard was watching her with narrowed lavender eyes, made all the more vivid by the purple cloaks he was never seen without.
“Keyes. Ursus.” Gorn sneered down his sharp-edged nose. “You stand accused of aiding in the abduction of Princess Frances. How do you plead?”
“This isn’t a damned trial, Gorn.” King Ingomar vibrated in his throne. “We know they’re guilty. They have taken my daughter and I demand to know where!”
Scratch’s skin turned to icy gooseflesh. Her stomach sank down past aching ribs to throbbing knees. Beside her, James let out a whimper.
What was the word? Panic.
“You heard your king, girl,” Levon hissed. “Tell us where the princess is and we might spare your life.”
A lie. She’d be killed no matter what she said. It didn’t help, of course, that she had nothing at all to say.
Behind her eyes, she saw a vision of Frances blowing a plume of rosy smoke into the dark night, then slipping into the billowy stream and melting into starlight. She shivered.
“There’s no point in denying it.” Gorn drummed his long nails on the carved armrest of his throne. “Ferrin. Report.”
A freckle-faced soldier approached, ginger curls frothing over his scalp like spiced cream.
“Sir Levon.” He bowed his head. “Sir Gorn. Your Highness. My peers reported losing track of the princess’s whereabouts—” King Ingomar let out a tight hiss “—at ten minutes to eight bells, two minutes before Keyes was seen leaving the feast. Ursus followed a minute after. Neither was seen again until ten bells, when Ursus returned to the barracks. Keyes returned at a quarter to midnight. The princess was not seen again.”
James ran his tongue over his swollen lip. “H-how do you know she’s missing?”
“Because we can’t find her, you fool!” Levon bared his teeth like a wild animal, gray whiskers trembling. “Her chambers have been ransacked. The castle has been searched. Two horses are missing, including her own. She has been abducted!”
Scratch could barely breathe. There was no air in the room, the atmosphere ragged-thin, too hot and too cold all at once. She greedily sucked in air, but there was no space inside her for it. Why were her lungs suddenly so small?
Oh. The pants she had hastily grabbed as three unnecessarily large soldiers dragged her from her room were the too-tight pants that she had selected so she might look like a commander when she accepted her first command. Slim-fit and tailored, a gleaming maroon silk that veered toward crimson, her nation’s bloody hue. She had squeezed herself into them, the curves of her body remolding to a new, more desirable shape.
She was going to die in these pants.
The world came to her through a fog of noiseless sound. Someone, maybe Levon, may have said, “Throw them in the dungeons. That’ll motivate them.” And she was up, wrists rubbing, knees throbbing, face still aching from a humiliating pair of slaps that had told her, wordlessly, exactly who she was.
“You have until morning light,” Levon growled. “If we don’t know where Princess Frances is by dawn, you will die.” He scowled, smoothing his mustache with fingers weighed down by rings. “Sleep well.”
Chapter Three
By the time the party reached the dungeons, Scratch was certain she would have finger-shaped bruises all over her arms.
Unfortunately, that was the least of her concerns.
“Your new home.” The same trio of King’s Guards that had yanked her out of bed had the honor of throwing her and James into their dank cell. With her arms bound, she had no choice but to land on her shoulder—more bruises. “Oi, Bowstring. You do look like shit, you know?”
James sucked up some spittle. “You should see the other guy.”
“I was the other guy.”
“And you do look awful.” If he were capable, James might have winked. “Really, Gultin. You’re a gods-crafted disaster.”
The soldier only smiled. “I’d hit you again if I didn’t think it’d kill you.” He spit into the cell for good measure. “Ponce.” And the men closed the gate, leaving Scratch and James alone in the darkness.
Scratch lay, the cool filth of the dungeon soothing her aching skin. Overhead, something drip, drip, dripped onto the clammy floor. Errant scraps of hay littered the cell, the moonlight from the tiny barred window illumin
ating their jagged edges. On the walls, rusted manacles hung like open mouths.
“Scratch?” James’s bravado was gone. All that remained was threadbare, a tiny voice through busted lips. “What . . . what happened?”
“Jamie.” She wriggled over to him. She couldn’t do much with her hands tied, but she managed to press their bodies together—a filthy, pathetic cuddle. “Oh, hells. This is it, isn’t it?”
“It appears to be.” He sniffled. “I never regretted being disowned before, but now . . .”
“I don’t even think your father could get you out of this one, darling.” She smooshed her face into his shoulder. “I wish he could.”
“It would have to be both of us,” he whispered. “Where you go, I go. Remember?”
“Yes. It seems—” She choked on one sandpaper sob. “It seems that’s the case.”
She had long ago decided that James was the love of her life. If he had liked women and she had liked men, perhaps they could have had the happiest marriage in creation. Then again, maybe their utter lack of desire was what made their love so strong; like without sex all that was left was pure, unadulterated affection.
“What do you think happened to her?” he asked.
She didn’t want to think about Frances, especially after last night. Imagining that piebald girl swept away by villains stung Scratch’s throat like bile. Those keen, wily eyes were too bright for fear, those wicked eyebrows too confident.
Princess Frances was a forest fae in reverse: she didn’t trap you with magic; she cleared the magic from your vision. To step into her realm was to see the world as it was.
She would have been a very good queen.
“I don’t know, Jamie.”
“Were we really the only ones out after curfew? D-do you think we were set up?”
“I hadn’t thought about it.” But she had a different thought. It pressed on the inside of her skull like a gnat caught in a lantern. “Jamie, I met Frances today.”
She told him about her unexpected smoke break with the princess. How Frances had, calmly and without cruelty, told Scratch that there was no hope for her. That it wasn’t too late to figure out something else to do with the rest of her life.
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