Anhaga

by Lisa Henry

  The king darted his gaze uneasily to Kaz.

  “What we have here, sire,” Min said, pressing his advantage, “is an impasse. You have your sorcerers, and I have this necromancer. And I think you would be a braver man than me to bet your Gifted against mine.”

  “Are you threatening me?” the king demanded.

  “No, sire,” Min said. “I am only making sure we are both in possession of the same facts.”

  Min had dealt with powerful men before. He’d talked his way out of dark alleys with a knife pressed to his throat. He’d built his entire career on his ability to navigate the shifting sands of alliances amongst the most dangerous men in the eastern quarter. He’d even won arguments with his mother, not that she’d ever admit it. And he’d done all of that without a necromancer by his side. A king was only a man. A man who commanded an army, but the point still stood, right? Min hoped so.

  “Sire,” he said, “you cannot keep Kazimir in chains. You may have the right, but you do not have the ability. If today has proved anything at all, then it is that. Your sorcerers couldn’t contain him when he wore iron. Your tower couldn’t contain him.”

  “A necromancer could destroy this entire city. He almost did!”

  “But he stopped,” Min said, aware of Kaz, wound as tightly as the strings of a psaltery, shifting anxiously from foot to foot beside him. “Sire, this conversation is pointless. What must we do with Kazimir? How can we chain him to our will? And the answer is, we cannot. What can be done? Nothing, unless Kazimir allows it to happen.”

  Min was under no misapprehension that he could control Kaz. He’d stopped him, but only by giving him a moment to come back to himself. And that, honestly, was the only power Min wished to have over Kaz, necromancer or not. He’d put him in a collar once, and he would hate himself forever for having done it.

  The king stared at Min a moment longer, and Min couldn’t read the look in his eyes. He looked back, keeping his shoulders straight and his face impassive. He was balanced on a knife’s edge here and didn’t dare blink.

  “Sire,” he said. “I’m the one who put the iron collar on Kazimir. Despite that, there were many times he could have run from me. There were times when he could have betrayed me to the fae, and he did not. I know my word is worthless to you. Kazimir’s may be as well. But if you let him go, I swear he will not strike at you.”

  He couldn’t bring himself to look at Kaz. The boy who’d only ever wanted to make potions and poultices and be left alone.

  The king pressed his mouth into a thin line.

  And then Aiode appeared at his elbow, wreathed in dust and impatience. “Oh, sons of Rus, Brenin! I have dirt in all my crevices. Just let him go!”

  “And have him fall to the Hidden Lord?” the king asked, but there was nothing combative in his tone, and Min felt cautious hope stir in his chest.

  “Kazimir,” Aiode said. “Would you swear your fealty to the king if he asked?”

  Min glanced at Kaz in time to see him nod, a halo of dust bursting from his hair.

  “There,” Aiode said, as though that settled matters. “He will swear it.”

  A king’s pride was a strange thing, Min thought. The man knew he had no power here at all and that any oath of Kaz’s might easily be a lie, and yet a gesture like this was necessary. Kaz could destroy Amberwich with a single word—something that would undoubtedly give the king nightmares for the rest of his days—but if Kaz knelt and swore his loyalty, then the charade was maintained.

  The king regarded Kaz and then nodded sharply. “Then kneel, Kazimir Sabadine.”

  Kaz knelt.

  “Do you swear your fealty to your king?” the king asked.

  “Yes, sire,” Kaz said, his voice rasping. “I swear it.”

  The king stared down at him unhappily for a moment and then waved his hand. “Stand. You are banished from Amberwich, Kazimir Sabadine, but your oath to me is not forgotten. You remain my subject and not the Hidden Lord’s. I will allow you a day to leave the city walls, after which you will never darken them again.”

  Kaz nodded cautiously. “Yes, sire.”

  “And you, Robert,” the king said. “You’re banished too.”

  “Sire!” Robert exclaimed.

  The king’s stately poise vanished in a heartbeat as he rounded on him, gesturing wildly at the massive pile of rubble. “That was my fucking house, Robert! I lived in that! Fuck off and go and raise goats in Pran!” The king jabbed a finger in Min’s direction. “And you. I’m not entirely sure who you are—”

  “A fool,” Aiode said helpfully. “But a harmless one.”

  The king grimaced through his mask of dust. “Whoever you are, you’d better get out of my sight before you’re banished as well.”

  Min knew exactly when to beat a strategic retreat. He bowed and then grabbed Kaz by the hand and got the fuck out of there.

  AN HOUR later, Min was luxuriating in a hot bath with a damp cloth laid over his closed eyes.

  “He just exploded!” he heard Harry exclaim from outside the door. “Like, have you ever dropped a rotten peach on the street?” He made the accompanying grotesque noise.

  Talys’s laugh was full of both disgust and delight.

  Even in his own house, nobody was wasting any time mourning Edward Sabadine.

  Robert Sabadine hadn’t invited Min and Harry back to his house, but Min and Harry had come anyway, because Robert’s house had amenities that Min and Harry’s garret room did not, and he was clearly too shocked by the morning’s events to refuse them. His blood loss probably had something to do with that. The wound was not too deep, but it had bled freely. Aiode had cleaned it, slathered a poultice on it, and bandaged it. Min suspected Aiode was still poking around somewhere in the house too. He’d last seen her heading for Edward’s private rooms, where he was sure she intended to rifle through all his correspondence and report the depth of his perfidy back to the king.

  Robert hadn’t bothered accompanying her. He was busy packing.

  Min heard the door creak open. “If that’s you, Harry, you’d better have brought me a drink.”

  “It’s not Harry.”

  Min dragged the wet cloth from his eyes.

  Kaz was clean. He was dressed in neat clothes that didn’t quite fit his frame, and his hair was more or less tamed. The points of his ears peeked out from his curls.

  “Are you finished packing?” Min asked him.

  Kaz’s mouth quirked. “Nothing to pack.”

  Of course not.

  Kaz closed the door behind him and leaned against it. “There are some books I might take, if my uncle allows it.”

  “Another bookworm,” Min said. He rolled his eyes, knowing his smile belied it. “You’re as bad as Harry.”

  “I think you read more books than you pretend,” Kaz said. “You certainly know how a story should end. You said in the Iron Tower that it’s over when the dragon is killed. But are you really not the hero, Min?”

  “No, I don’t think so.” Min shrugged, and water splashed against the sides of the tub. “I didn’t even win the hand of the beautiful princess in marriage, did I? Well, the prince.”

  Kaz raised his eyebrows. “I never would have taken you for the sort of man who cares for the bonds of marriage.”

  Min laughed. “Well, that’s also true. I suspect I won something better than your hand. And before you do me the dishonor of assuming I’m talking about your lovely ass, I’ll have you know I mean your heart.”

  “You think you’ve won my heart?” Kaz’s expression was unreadable.

  Within the space of a day, Min had faced the Hidden Lord, the king, and the specter of the rising dead. He wasn’t going to be intimidated by this.

  “Well,” he said, dabbling his fingers across the surface of the water. “It only seems fair, don’t you think? Since you stole mine.”

  Kaz ducked his head, but not before Min saw the small, satisfied quirk of his lips.

  “Ridiculous thing to steal,” Min
continued. “Ugly, impractical, and totally worthless.”

  “Maybe so.” Kaz let out a huff of breath that was almost as good as a laugh and lifted his gaze again. “But I like it well enough.”

  Min’s chest tightened as Kaz crossed the room and knelt beside the tub. He showed Min a crooked smile and fished the cloth out of the water. He wrung it out, fat droplets of water splashing into the tub, and then reached for Min’s hand.

  “Your knuckles are grazed.”

  Min shivered as Kaz rubbed the cloth over his hand.

  “So they are.” Min couldn’t remember that happening, but his knuckles weren’t his only small injury. He had scrapes and scratches all over, a series of tender spots on his left hip that would be a patina of bruises in a day, and every muscle ached. He’d complain about all of that later, probably, when his wonder at actually having survived had faded a little.

  Kaz kept his gaze fixed on Min’s knuckles as he drew the cloth gently over them again. “I was… I was so scared today, Min. I’ve never been that angry. It was like a door opened in my mind and I stepped through it, except there was nothing on the other side and I was just falling and I couldn’t stop.” His breath hitched. “I couldn’t stop. I would have killed them all if you hadn’t been there. I wanted to kill them all.”

  Min drew his hand back and shifted awkwardly in the tub so that he could twist his body toward Kaz. He cupped Kaz’s face with his wet hands and angled it up so that Kaz was looking at him. “But you didn’t.”

  “But I wanted—”

  “But you didn’t.” Min ignored the twinge in his back. “You stopped yourself.”

  Kaz’s eyes were wide. “You stopped me.”

  “Sweeting, no power in the world could have stopped you unless you wanted to stop.” Min shook his head slightly. “You listened to me, but you’re the one who stopped yourself. This power in you, this mix of your Gift and your fae magic, it’s extraordinary, Kaz. Nobody has ever seen anything like it before. It’s big, and it’s scary. It’s a storm to the little insects in the air like me, but you reined it back in. You stopped it.”

  Kaz wore a worried frown.

  “I was twelve or thirteen when I discovered I was a void,” Min said. “There was a man, a mage in the employ of some important House, who used to come to my mother’s brothel with his master. He wasn’t interested in the girls, but he was quite interested in me, the dirty old goat. I remember one night he promised me a gold coin in exchange for certain acts. I, being every inch my mother’s son, asked to see the money upfront, intending the whole time to take the coin, kick him in the balls, and escape out the back window.”

  Kaz snorted.

  “A flawless plan.” Min smirked. “And so he gave me a coin, and all the girls gasped and cooed and burned with jealousy to see a shiny gold coin in my grubby fingers. But do you know what I saw?”

  Kaz shook his head.

  “Copper.” Min snorted. “He’d put an illusion on a copper coin and tried to cheat me with it.”

  “What did you do?” Kaz asked.

  “I demurred,” Min said. “I pretended I thought it was gold, and I gave it back to him and stammered that I was very honored by his attention, but my mother would tan my hide if she found out her dear sweet boy was selling himself. And then I fled. It took me all of a week to realize that being a void was a sort of a magic of its own, as powerful as any Gift. Do you know how many rich men have flimsy locks on their doors because they think their household mages can protect their treasures?”

  Kaz wrinkled his nose, and Min wondered if he was thinking of the runes and sigils and wards Min had strolled past in Kallick’s house.

  “I grew dizzy with the possibilities,” Min said. “Drunk with them! For months I was reckless. I stole more coins and jewels than I could even carry half the time and threw around my money like a spoilt little lordling. I thought I was untouchable.”

  “But you weren’t?” Kaz asked.

  Min shifted, water sloshing, and lifted his right leg out of the water so Kaz could see the scars on the back of his calf. “Voids, it turns out, are impervious to the Gifted, but not at all to guard dogs.”

  Kaz winced.

  “You got bitten today, sweeting,” Min said. “Most of us do, at some point, and we learn to be more cautious going forward.”

  Kaz chewed his bottom lip, and Min idly enjoyed the distraction for a moment.

  “You got bitten,” he repeated at last, “but you’re still running.”

  Kaz closed his eyes. “I’m tired of running, though.”

  “I know,” Min said, wiping his thumb along Kaz’s cheekbone. “But you’re almost home.”

  They were both still and silent for a long while, until the cooling water of the bath was no longer as pleasant as it had been, and Kaz’s knees must have been aching. When Min rose from the tub, water sluicing over the edges, Kaz averted his gaze. Min stepped out, dripping water on the floor as he reached for a linen towel. He wiped himself down quickly and knotted the linen around his waist. His filthy clothes were still on a pile on the floor where he’d stripped them off earlier. Harry’s lay with them, because Min had been kind enough to give him the first bath. Robert and Kaz had bathed elsewhere, which seemed very luxurious. Min didn’t even own a single tub—or any servants to fill them—let alone two.

  Min dropped the linen towel on the floor, risking a quick glance behind him to see if Kaz was watching. Kaz flushed and looked away, and Min preened inwardly before turning around again.

  “I wonder if I can prevail on the servants to get something to eat,” he said, changing the subject to distract Kaz from his embarrassment.

  “I doubt it,” Kaz offered up. “The house is in an uproar, and the servants are running around like headless chickens. But they probably wouldn’t notice if we took food from the kitchens.”

  Min snorted. “Kaz, you’re a Sabadine. You have every right to take whatever you like from the kitchens. This is your house, until tomorrow at least.”

  “You’re saying I should demand cake?” Kaz asked, the hesitant smile apparent in his tone.

  Min laughed. “Cake. And sweetmeats. And honeyed figs. And a pig stuffed with a goose stuffed with a hen stuffed with a quail.”

  “Stuffed with a dormouse?” Kaz teased.

  “Of course!” There was a change of clothes folded on a stool by the stack of linens, and Min shook out a pair of breeches and stepped into them. They fitted well enough. He hoped they belonged to Robert or one of the servants, and not Edward. Min had no moral objections at all to wearing a dead man’s clothes; he just hated Edward so much that he didn’t want his dick touching anything Edward’s once had. “And the dormouse can be stuffed with a baby shrew. It’ll be a tight fit, but I’m sure your cook is up for the challenge.”

  Kaz’s laughter was quiet and warm.

  Min tugged a shirt on and then a tunic in a pleasant shade of blue that undoubtedly brought out his eyes. The tunic was a little tight across the shoulders, but Min liked the color enough that he was sure he’d forget to return it. The stockings he found were well worn and darned in a few places but still thick enough that he didn’t feel the grit in his boots when he pulled them on. Then, straightening up, he combed his fingers through his hair to tame it a little and decided that this was as presentable as he was likely to get without a razor.

  He turned to face Kaz, expecting him to be wearing a smile after their ridiculous talk of food, but Kaz’s expression was grave once more.

  “What is it?” Min asked.

  “Min, what will happen when I leave Amberwich?” Kaz asked. “The fae… they’re still out there.”

  Min reached for Kaz’s hand and held it. He raised it to his mouth and pressed his lips to Kaz’s knuckles. “And you fear them, just as you fear that part of yourself that comes from them. You were lied to, Kaz, and it might take you a long time to unlearn that lie. Your father loved your mother, and she loved him. I cannot pretend to fathom the way the fae are, bu
t I do not believe your father wants to harm you. I think he wants to know you.”

  Kaz held his gaze. “I’ve been afraid of them my whole life. I want to be brave, like my mother, but I don’t know how.”

  “I don’t know either,” Min said. He closed his eyes and rested his forehead against Kaz’s. Breathed in the scent of him, the closeness, the warmth. “But you’re already the bravest person I know.”

  “Liar,” Kaz whispered, and pressed his mouth to Min’s in a soft kiss.

  “Usually, yes,” Min said, opening his eyes again. “But with you, sweeting? Never. How could you not be brave? You are the son of Avice Sabadine, who reached out and took the hand of the Hidden Lord. She was fearless.”

  Kaz hummed and then pulled back abruptly. His eyes were as big as an owl’s. “Wait? The Hidden Lord? My father is the Hidden Lord?”

  “He is. Did I forget to mention that? Because I might not be the hero of this story, but it turns out you’re actually the prince.” He grinned at Kaz’s shocked expression. “Now close your mouth, sweeting, before you give me all sorts of ideas.”

  Kaz snapped his jaw shut, blinking rapidly.

  “Because first we need food,” Min said, tugging him toward the door. “After that we can see what else we can fit in our mouths, hmm?”

  IT WAS quite a procession when Robert and Kazimir Sabadine were banished from Amberwich. A group of the king’s blue-robed sorcerers followed the cart the next morning, along with a dozen soldiers. The parade picked up gawkers and gossips along the route from the western quarter all the way down Stanes Street. Robert was stony-faced, ignoring the jeers of the people in the street who didn’t know the full story but were quite right in assuming he had something to do with yesterday’s horror. It wasn’t every day that someone from a House as powerful as the Sabadines’ was banished, but it wasn’t every day that the Iron Tower fell and the dead rose either, so the crowd was smaller than it might have been. Min suspected that many residents were still locked inside their houses, trembling. It would take a long time for fear to release its grip on Amberwich.