by Jane Yolen
Their throats had been cut with something large and inelegant.
Something like the ogre’s butcher knives, the ones he’d worn in the belt around his waist.
But when she and the prince had passed by the dead ogre, he was still lying on his stomach, which concealed the knives. And he was as still as the two creatures at the door. So she knew he couldn’t have been faking. Ogres were not subtle creatures.
There’s someone else in this game, she thought. Someone who doesn’t care about killing, which argues for a toff. Someone who is fast, thorough, and inelegant, which argues for a Border Lord. Someone who kills without using magic. She bit her lower lip. Which leaves only another creature, or an apprentice. She sighed. Apprentices don’t kill.
She thought a minute, then amended that: Unless they are apprentice assassins. Not that she’d ever met any apprentice assassins. Or met anyone who’d met any.
It was a puzzle.
Puzzles made her head spin.
A midwife’s apprentice was taught how to anticipate problems in the birth chamber, not solve problems left by killers. Anticipate, alleviate, and then await—the midwife’s creed. What an assassin’s creed was, she didn’t want to know. Cut, kill, hack, and hew, slice your prey through and through? And then slip silently away?
She forced herself to watch the prince’s back and keep up with him step for step across the interrogation cell. By concentrating on that, she got her head to stop spinning at last, but it didn’t solve the puzzle.
She hated puzzles.
While she climbed the secret stairs behind the prince, she stuffed her right hand into her apron pocket and wrapped her fingers around the handle of the knife she’d taken from the ogre’s back. Elegant, with a carved handle, and an exceedingly sharp point that she hadn’t dared touch, the knife was the only thing that made her feel even a little bit safe.
So why hadn’t the prince taken it? Or asked for it back? She shook her head, reminding herself that if there were a third player in this game, then the knife was probably his. And he, rather than the prince, had done the ogre in. I definitely don’t want him to come to get his knife back.
Snail was lost in thought as they reached the top of the stairs, and she failed to notice the prince coming to an abrupt stop. She slammed into him for the second time that day, and he dropped the candle. It fell spinning to the floor, making their shadows dance crazily along the stone walls as if there were suddenly dozens of strange creatures in the corridor.
“I’m so sorry, Your Serenity!” she whispered as she bent to pick up the candle. It must have been magically lit, because it was—thanks be to Mab—still burning. But when she stood up again, she saw that the shadows hadn’t lied completely, and there was someone else in the hall: a tall, dark shadow looming up behind the prince, spreading shadowy arms to grab him.
And that someone, Snail thought, was most probably the one who killed the two assassins and possibly the ogre as well.
Before she could move or even think, the shadowy arms grabbed the prince. He tried to jerk away, but the arms held him fast by the shoulders. Even by candlelight, Snail could see that the prince’s face had gone bone white. It was as if she could see the skull beneath. Whether it was terror or something else, she couldn’t tell.
“Let him go!” she shouted.
She heard a low chuckle, and it was not from the prince, who was still struggling against his assailant.
That laugh . . . she’d heard it before. Only she couldn’t think where. She took the knife out of her pocket and held it up in her left hand, the candle being in her right.
“Let . . . him . . . go,” she said plainly, each word enunciated in case the shadow assailant was from the Seelie Court and didn’t speak their language. “Let him go now. I have a knife . . .”
She held it up and was pleased that her hand didn’t tremble at all.
“Unless you are left-handed,” the voice behind the prince said—it was low, controlled, and rather amused—“I think I have the better of you.”
“I am left-handed,” she said, bluffing, “and my knife is very sharp.”
The low laugh came again. “Your knife, is it? Not unless you are a drow.”
Unexpectedly, the prince broke free, turned to face his assailant, and said, “Jack, what are you playing at?”
“You know him?” Snail was astonished.
The prince said over his shoulder, “He is my best friend.” He hesitated as if he’d said too much, then turned back to the drow.
And now Snail could clearly see the drow’s hand, which—if she’d noticed it earlier—would have identified him sooner, the four-fingered hand with sharp black fingernails that gave away his clan.
“Answer me, in Obs’s name,” the prince insisted. “What are you playing at?”
The drow moved into the light.
Still holding the knife out in front of her, Snail raised the candle so she could see both their faces at once.
The prince looked furious, color now flooding back into his face. He had his hand on the handle of his sword as if any minute he’d take the drow’s head off.
As for the drow—this Jack—he was old. She knew that few drows reached old age. They were a quarrelsome crew—the young males fighting in the nest and eating their dead, and the adolescent males battling to the death over mates. That Jack was this old and a friend of the prince meant he was smart, lucky, and ruthless. She didn’t like the sound of that combination.
“Ask him,” she said to the prince. “Ask him again.”
“Ask him . . . what?” the prince said, turning toward her, narrowing his eyes, almost hissing.
She realized at once that she might have just made a fatal mistake. The problem was she’d never had real occasion to learn proper manners. Birthing mothers don’t care if the midwife addresses them correctly; they just want the babe out NOW! And the prince had seemed forgiving of her lapses in manners when they were alone and creatures were dying mysteriously all around them. But she knew that toffs could get really prickly about all that manners stuff when they were gathered in one place. Not that the drow was an actual toff. But still . . .
More than one head had been lost at court because of a dropped address or a misused title.
“Ask him again, Your Serenity, if it pleases you,” she said, dropping quickly to one knee.
He turned back to the drow and said casually, so no one would think the girl had commanded him, “What are you playing at, Jack Daw?”
Not to be outdone, the drow bowed his head. “Just trying to keep you safe, Your Serenity.” He winked one bright eye at Snail and stuck a dark nail into his mouth as if loosening a bit of something lodged in his teeth. When he withdrew the nail again, he added, “It looked like you were falling there.”
The prince straightened his tunic. “I was fine. The girl bumped into me is all.”
The drow peered at Snail as if his old eyes were having trouble piercing the darkness. She wasn’t convinced.
“A midwife’s apprentice? Interesting.” He turned back to the prince. “Shall I keep her safe as well, Your Serenity?”
“Well . . . yes . . . I suppose . . .” the prince stammered, then caught himself. “Yes, of course,” he said, sounding more regal, more commanding. “She has proven useful in my escape.”
“Your escape seems to have needed many such useful folk already,” said the drow. “And it is barely begun.” He seemed to be controlling the urge to laugh.
“It is no laughing matter, Jack.”
“Am I laughing, Serenity?”
Snail thought, Close enough as to be no never mind, which was something Mistress Softhands often said.
“Then let us get moving.” The drow’s voice was coolly in control. “The guards will find your two other useful friends at the bottom of the stairs before long.” He turned and said to
Snail in a tone that was both commanding and wheedling, “I suggest you put the knife away lest you fall against the prince again and injure him with it. It looks quite . . . lethal.” Then he walked away from them, along the corridor.
Snail dropped the knife back into her pocket but kept hold of the candle with its flickering light, not wanting to miss any of the drow’s movements. He may have wanted to help his friend. But she guessed he didn’t really want to keep her safe at all. Or alive.
However, she knew he would do his dirty work in the dark where the prince couldn’t see it. His kind always did. More reason to hold the candle high.
She was in this fight and flight alone, as she had been from the start.
It’s best not to forget that, she told herself.
ASPEN AT THE TOWER
They exited the dark corridors and found themselves by the Great Midden Heap. It steamed into the morning, curlicues of stench and smoke intertwined. Nearby were long, thin patches of furrowed gardens with giant vegetables overflowing the rows.
The smell, Aspen thought, is indescribable. And unbearable.
He glanced around. Except for the gardens, nothing grew on this land and it sloped away to the great, rushing river about a mile down hill from there. Nowhere to hide on this open border, he thought. A very vulnerable spot. He wondered if any of the Seelie weapons were trained on this place—the catapults and other siege engines that his father had been so proud of—the catapults especially, which could sling huge boulders across great expanses.
Squinting, he tried to look at the other side of the river, but it was too far away. Besides, the midden smoke was much too thick for him to see anything but the dark water with its occasional whitecaps of waves showing where rills and rocks lay.
Jack Daw made a hand signal at Snail, squeezing his thumb and pointer fingers together, and she nodded, showing that she understood he wanted her to extinguish the candle before they crossed the gardens. Aspen nodded, too, at how quickly she had caught Jack’s meaning, immediately pinching the light out, so that its single smoke curl faded into the larger midden cloud.
Then, in single file, they followed after the drow, stepping over huge ungainly turnips and carrots and marrows that all looked more like enormous orange-colored sausages than the elegant vegetables served up at the king’s table cut and molded into fanciful shapes like dragons and chimerae and other creatures of the Unseelie bestiary.
Though the vegetables were huge, they were only huge for vegetables, and provided no actual cover for Aspen or his two companions on their short journey from the midden heap to Wester Tower. He knew the tower by the description Jack Daw had given him, but he was glad to have the old drow lead them to it. Mistakes at this stage could cost him his life.
The tower was not all that tall aboveground, but it went a long way down into the ground. It was never a good idea for the Unseelie folk to march across great stretches of land in the daylight; their eyes were meant for darkness. So when they were forced to cross this expanse, they’d had captive Seelie slaves build the tower and its tunnel system. It had been a boon for their sorties into Seelie land. Jack had once told him that when the Border Lords had become a part of their armies, the Unseelie Court had finally an overground as well as an underground troop.
“Made us stronger,” Jack had said, in that flat way he had of speaking. “Though getting them to follow orders is like herding sheep. It takes dogs and a good whip hand.” Aspen remembered how the drow had laughed at his own witticism, a kind of harsh cawing.
Seeing the gardens—which must have been tended by day by Seelie slaves or changelings stolen from the human folk—as well as getting his first look at the mile-long run down to the water along open ground, Aspen only now really understood why the tower was so important.
All the more reason to marvel at Jack’s thoroughness, he thought. No guards anywhere. He sent a good-health spell toward his old tutor’s back and was pleased to see Jack’s shoulders straighten a bit.
But a random thought ruined his good mood as they reached the tower and stared down into darkness.
From one dungeon to another.
Still, it didn’t matter what lay below them. He knew the Water Gate was at the very bottom, and so down into the earth he would go.
* * *
WITHOUT COMMENT, they started down the spiral stairs that wound widdershins into the earth.
The stairs were stone—dark, uneven—but Jack strode down them surefooted and swift. Aspen followed behind, trusting to his tutor’s night vision. However, Snail trailed well behind, and for the third time in as many minutes, they heard her stumble and curse.
Aspen turned his head and whispered, “Snail, keep up!”
“Snail, is it?” Jack Daw said. “Aptly named.”
“It seems so,” Aspen agreed. He did not mention how swift she had been to kill the ogre and to take the knife from its back.
They walked down the stairs for what seemed like hours. Or at least, Aspen thought, my knees seem to think it’s been hours.
Snail began to drop farther and farther behind.
Finally, they stopped to let her catch up a little.
“Are you sure we cannot leave her?” Jack Daw asked. It wasn’t the first time.
That is awfully tempting, Aspen had to admit. The girl was annoying and only barely knew her place. But every time he thought about agreeing with Jack Daw and abandoning her on the dark staircase, he remembered how she had faced down the drow with her knife in one hand and the candle in the other, looking half-ridiculous and completely fierce when she said, “Let . . . him . . . go.”
Of course, he thought, that was before she found out that Jack was our friend.
Our only friend, Aspen reminded himself.
He frowned at Jack and tried to copy one of the apprentice’s glares. “No, we cannot. And do not ask again.”
Aspen did not think his glare impressed the old drow, but Jack managed a bow and said, “As you wish, Your Serenity.”
* * *
SNAIL FINALLY CAUGHT UP. She was having a bit of trouble drawing breath, and her hair no longer stood straight up but was lying on her head in tendrils. It makes her look more feminine, Aspen thought. Not beautiful like the twins, of course, or even pretty like the other apprentice in the dungeon. But more . . . He tried to figure out what he meant and could only come up with more presentable.
However, Aspen noted, she was also neither limping nor shuffling, so at least her knees did not hurt.
“Shouldn’t we be quieter?” she whispered.
Aspen was again annoyed that she didn’t address him properly, but she had a fresh bruise on her cheek from her latest stumble, and perhaps she did not need to perform a curtsey when she was using the word we. He’d never been a we with a servant before, so he was unsure of that protocol.
It was Jack who answered, and sharply, putting the girl in her place. “There is no one near.”
“I was thinking of assassins,” she said.
Jack laughed and Snail looked startled, though whether it was because of his laugh or something else, Aspen could not guess.
“I think,” Jack said slowly, curiously aware, like a wolf readying to pounce, “I think those were taken care of.”
“I mean more assassins. Or guards. Or . . .” She ran out of options, or perhaps words.
Jack tapped his long nose with a black fingernail. “I’d smell them if they were about.”
“How can you smell anything but the Great Midden Heap?” Aspen asked, voice rising in exasperation. The midden may have been well behind them now, but the stench still lingered in his nostrils.
Jack chuckled. “For all the hours of the night and day, I deal with kings and queens, and the courtiers who sniff at their heels, young Serenity.”
“I fail to see your point.” Aspen hated it when Jack did this—said
something that seemed to make no sense, before offering an explanation, at which point it suddenly became painfully obvious that Aspen should have known the point all along. Aspen knew he was supposed to learn something whenever the old drow spoke that way, but it just made him feel stupid. And somehow everything seemed much worse now that Jack was showing him up in front of an apprentice midwife.
“I do not see how you can miss the meaning,” Jack said, quickly adding, “Serenity,” as if that alone could take the sting out of what he was saying. “My point is that I am completely immune to the smell of rotting dung.”
Aspen heard Snail stifle a laugh behind him. It made his face burn in the darkness. “Very droll,” he managed.
“My apologies if I offended you, Your Serenity.” Jack sniffed the air. “But do you know what I smell now?”
“What?”
“Water,” Snail said.
“Water,” the drow said as if Snail had never spoken.
As soon as the word was in the air, almost by magic, Aspen could smell the water. And hear it, too, a strong subterranean rumble of water pounding on stone.
“Water,” he whispered. It was a promise, a prayer, and a deep sigh.
* * *
THEY MANAGED TO get down the next ten steps at a run, Aspen in the lead, though he slowed to finish the final ten steps with a bit more care. He was glad to have done so, for the stairs ended abruptly in a huge cavern lit by long torches like spears magically thrust into the stone floor.
Looking up, Aspen could see neither ceiling nor stars, and was amazed by how far into the earth they’d come.
The ground was clear of upthrust rocks, having been carved away to make transfer of troops or treasure from the dock to the stairs easier. He had no idea how long it had taken, how many slaves had spent how many months down here at work. Probably under the whips of dwarves, who were the Unseelie Court’s stone carvers. Huge chainlike rocks hung from the unseen ceiling, hinting at how big the upthrust rocks must once have been.