The Forever Court

by Dave Rudden

  “What kind of honor?”

  This from a tall man leaning against the far wall. Iron had crept up his face like dark ivy, cracking and creasing his skin. He wore more of the Cost than any Knight Denizen had seen—even Vivian or Jack.

  Denizen suddenly wondered what happened when the Cost was no longer something you could hide. His palms itched beneath his gloves.

  “The Palatine acknowledges Singer Xi Che of the Choir.” Greaves inclined his head. “And ... we haven’t been told.”

  “Why not?”

  Vivian’s voice cut through the tension like a garrotte. Every head turned. Sitting beside her, Denizen suddenly tried to make himself much smaller than he was.

  Greaves’s smile was sharp. It was clear this was an interruption he had been anticipating.

  “Vivian?”

  “Why don’t we know what this honor is? Isn’t it entirely possible that honor is their word for bloodbath?”

  The conference room was silent. The Knights, Denizen realized, were hanging on Vivian’s every word. She didn’t seem to notice. Her words were for Greaves alone.

  “In short, Palatine, how do we know this isn’t a trap?”

  “We don’t,” Greaves said shortly. “But what would you have me do?”

  The question hung in the air, along with the busy silence of twenty very scary people considering the unknown. That was the heart of the matter. Had one of the Forever Court called this Concilium, it might have been dismissed as a trick. There was little known about the Court, but it all followed a certain blood-soaked theme.

  Mercy was something else entirely.

  Until her kidnapping had nearly plunged the worlds into war, no one had even known the Endless King had a daughter, and now, with the unpredictability that was so central to their race, she wanted to thank a human for saving her life.

  “There’s a lot we don’t know about Mercy. What she wants, what she’s capable of,” Greaves said, meeting Vivian’s eyes impassively. “But what we do know is what we’re capable of. There’s firepower amassed here the likes of which has not been seen in centuries. Should the Court for a second show their teeth…we’ll set ’em alight.”

  He smiled brightly.

  “Now, if you’ll turn to page four of your briefing document ...”

  Denizen looked down at his empty hands. He had not been given a briefing document. He didn’t even know there were briefing documents. The room crackled with the sound of rustling paper, and Denizen sank deeper into his chair, trying to look attentive while not actually having anything to look at.

  The attentive look lasted all the way through Warrior Placement (pages 8–11). It began to falter around Watch Rosters (11–16). By the time Greaves started going through the Door-by-Door Fail-Safe Analysis, Denizen’s mind had unhooked and was drifting through memory.

  Her smile had been lit by starlight. There had been burning fingerprints on the books that she had read.

  —

  “I DON’T LIKE THIS.”

  Vivian tossed the briefing document at Denizen as they left the conference room. Maybe she already had it memorized. Maybe she just didn’t bother with such things. But Greaves had finished his run-through by summoning Denizen, and now the two Hardwicks were striding up the corridor toward his office.

  “What are you worried about?” Denizen said. There was an itch in the back of his head where a pair of Cants felt too close together. He’d spent the closing minutes of the meeting fighting the urge to just say them and be done with it.

  Bad idea.

  Though the Goshawk probably did have fire insurance ...

  Stop it.

  “He probably just wants to ask me about Mercy, that’s all.” There was a tiny, ugly part of Denizen that quite enjoyed how Vivian’s eyes narrowed when he said that. The thought that he’d be so open with someone she clearly disliked obviously bothered her. “I should probably tell him. He is the Palatine—”

  Suddenly Denizen’s back was against the wall, a pair of gray eyes staring down at him from a face of scars and fury. As always, Denizen was shocked and not shocked by just how fast Vivian was. How often had that narrowing of eyes been the last thing a Tenebrous saw?

  She hadn’t touched him. There were a good few centimeters between them. She’d just ... Vivianed. And now Denizen’s shoulder blades were trying to dig through the wallpaper.

  “Tell him,” she whispered. “Tell him? You have no idea how serious this is, do you?”

  It was a scared little frown Denizen summoned (Number Not Yet Categorized), but a frown none-theless.

  “What do you—”

  Vivian’s words bulldozed his. “You meet this thing, this creature, and suddenly you, a thirteen-year-old Neophyte, have seventy-eight Cants in your head. Perfect and fully formed. You speak them better than I do, you realize that? But I earned the twenty-four I use, and I feel the ache each of them cost me, and you don’t, because a shiny little monster handed them to you and said set me free. I don’t know why it did that. And you don’t know why it did that. And Greaves doesn’t know it did that at all.”

  Denizen’s eyes went wide. “What—”

  “He would smile,” Vivian hissed. “He would grin, and he would make jokes, and he would take you away—”

  “Vivian?”

  She froze. So did Denizen. Their heads turned in unison to see Greaves leaning against the wall, buffing his knuckles against his suit.

  He smiled.

  “You don’t still hit kids in this country, do you?”

  “No,” Vivian said, and straightened immediately. “Mother–son discussion. You know how it is.”

  “Not even remotely,” Greaves said. “Me and my mother get on fine.” He indicated a door down the hall. “Now if you don’t mind?”

  The words weren’t an order. Denizen suspected Greaves rarely gave orders at all. Nevertheless, Vivian nodded curtly and stalked away up the hall.

  The office was decorated in the same shades as the foyer below, the walls hung with paintings of undulating shapes. Greaves slid behind a desk of slick black wood.

  They stared at each other in silence. Finally, the Palatine spoke.

  “You’re wondering why I called you here.”

  That wasn’t what Denizen was wondering. Denizen, currently sitting uncomfortably on what had to be the most comfortable chair he’d ever sat on, was still reeling from Vivian’s words.

  Take you away ...

  Up close, the Palatine’s air of command was even more potent. The office was just a rented one. Hundreds of people had sat behind that desk. Hundreds more would when Greaves was gone. But that no longer mattered: it was his office now, as surely as if he’d purchased every drop of paint.

  Denizen kept his tone polite. “I assume it’s to do with Mercy.”

  He was trying to separate his own impressions of Greaves from Vivian’s obvious disdain. It was difficult—her personality tended to drive others along in front of it, like a tsunami. Greaves seemed to have a little of that too, but with a far more charming delivery system.

  Denizen didn’t like charming people. As someone who possessed little or no charm himself, he immediately distrusted it. The skeptical part of him saw the edges and aims of that easy familiarity. It had only taken Greaves half a second to exploit the cardinal route to each of his friends’ hearts, as elegantly as D’Aubigny in a swordfight.

  Darcie’s love of books, Abigail’s pride in her family, and Simon’s lack of one. One. Two. Three.

  It was the latter that was really bothering him. People’s pasts weren’t tools to be used against them. And now Denizen sat, wary of what Greaves’s opening move would be.

  “It is about Mercy, obviously,” Greaves said. His accent was interesting. Consonants kept disappearing and then returning to ambush Denizen in odd places. “But we’ll get to that later. First, I ...”

  His fingers drummed rhythmically on the desktop.

  “I’m sorry about Grey.”

  D
enizen went cold. There was a place in the back of his head so remote and silent that even the fire of the Tenebrae flickered out before it could reach it. He imagined it sometimes as an oubliette lined with steel boxes—feelings left to starve and be forgotten. It was where he had pushed his thoughts about Vivian when there had been a world to save. There were boxes marked CROSSCAPER and CORINNE.

  There was one marked GREY.

  Wars killed people. That was the point. When the Clockwork Three had prosecuted their tiny and vicious war against the cadre of Seraphim Row, there had been casualties, people that Denizen had only just begun to care about properly before they were taken away.

  It seemed horribly selfish to mourn Grey more when D’Aubigny had died, but Grey had been Denizen’s mentor, his first friend in this new and scary life. The Three had gotten inside Grey’s head and made him do terrible things, and when they had no more use for him, they had thrown him away—a hollow, damaged wreck.

  “We were friends,” Greaves continued, his voice solemn. “Still are, in fact. He’s recovering. We don’t leave people behind. I wouldn’t ... I wouldn’t leave him behind. I don’t know if you’d want to ...”

  He adjusted the silver sword pin on his black silk tie. Grey had worn one just like it.

  Denizen couldn’t help himself. “Want to what?”

  “Visit him. He asks about you.”

  For a moment, Denizen couldn’t trust himself to speak.

  “I’d like that,” he said in a small voice.

  Edifice Greaves nodded. “Not now, of course. Bit of a full plate at the minute.” His fingers paused on the desktop. “I know your mother doesn’t like me.”

  Denizen opened his mouth to speak, but Greaves shook his head.

  “No. It’s fine. We’re very different people.”

  Greaves’s hammer stood against the wall near the door, still wrapped in its sheath of silk. Denizen was trying not to look at it. There was a sense of danger about the Palatine—he had his fair share of scars and you didn’t rise high in the Order on charm alone—but Vivian would never have left her hammer out of reach.

  “I know.”

  If Greaves detected anything but the requisite politeness in Denizen’s tone, he didn’t show it. “With all respect to her—and I do respect her, believe me—Vivian Hardwick is a blunt instrument.” He shrugged. “That isn’t an insult. The Order is built on warriors like her: indefatigable, unstoppable, and unshakable in their dedication to the cause.”

  A slow heat was winding its way through Denizen’s stomach, kindled by rising anger and the Palatine’s friendly demeanor.

  It wasn’t that he disagreed—far from it. Vivian thought she was always right. She displayed as much empathy as a morning-star mace. Her earlier warning had been typical Vivian: aggressive, standoffish, only telling him things when he absolutely needed to know them ...

  She didn’t give. She didn’t compromise. She didn’t trust; she gave orders and expected them to be followed, emotion be damned. Greaves had just elegantly summed up exactly why Denizen hadn’t been able to bring himself to open up to his mother.

  So then why was fire stalking the edges of his mind?

  “I, on the other hand, take a longer view.” Greaves thumbed his beard, a gesture that would have seemed thoughtful and unconscious had it not looked so rehearsed. “And the Order needs people like me too. People who look beyond the battle at hand. Soldiers, not warriors.”

  Turn to page four of your briefing document ...

  The corner of Denizen’s mouth twitched. It was a struggle to deny the hot light seething up his spine. Forcing the power down had been difficult enough when all he had known was a single Cant. Now there were seventy-eight swooping like hawks in his head. It was a challenge not to breathe just one, to take that sourceless anger and roar.

  “I didn’t mean to cause offense, Denizen. I just wanted to let you know that ...”

  Denizen jumped a little in his seat. Had he slipped? Had Greaves seen the fire mounting beneath his skin?

  “Know what?” Denizen said too quickly.

  Ice. Waterfalls. Control. Cold, cold thoughts.

  The power receded slowly, leaving behind scorched feelings of doubt and frustration.

  “That Vivian’s way isn’t the only way,” Greaves continued. “There are many opportunities to serve the Order. Grey knew that. And I’m sure you know it too.”

  Denizen recognized that tone. Cheerful but brittle, like thin ice cracked by the passage of something beneath.

  “Now tell me about Mercy.”

  He would take you away… .

  Denizen wasn’t sure what made him do it. It wasn’t that he trusted Vivian (though, that was the horrible thing—he did, in this, a matter of war), but he told Greaves only the bare bones of the truth: Grey had been enthralled, but he’d let Denizen escape at great personal cost; Denizen had doubled back to Crosscaper and found Mercy, who told him Vivian’s hammer would shatter her prison; Vivian had shattered her prison and rescued Grey.

  The end.

  “I see,” Greaves said. “And Vivian did all that. By herself.”

  “Pretty much,” Denizen said.

  Greaves lifted an eyebrow.

  “With a bullet wound?”

  The handy thing about having an inferno lodged beneath your chest was that it made nervous sweats easy to explain. “Umm ... She’s pretty tough.”

  “That she is,” Greaves said, after a searching look at Denizen’s face. “Well. I’m glad we had this chat. The first of many, I’m sure.”

  “Um. Cool.”

  Greaves leaned forward.

  “You’re the future of the Order, Denizen. You, Darcie, Abigail, Simon—you deserve to be at the center of things. Not out here, in a border town, unable to see beyond the head of a hammer.”

  They stared at each other for a long moment.

  “OK,” Denizen said. He wasn’t sure what else to say. “Are we ... done?”

  Greaves nodded, his smile folded away for his next appointment.

  “For now.”

  “THAT’S WHAT THEY CALL it,” Simon said, wriggling his bare toes in the carpet. “Being a political animal.”

  At the Goshawk, even the bedrooms given to half-trained Neophytes and troublesome world-savers were impressive. Vivian obviously had no intention of accepting Greaves’s hospitality, but he’d gone ahead and booked them rooms anyway, and, for lack of a better place to wait for her, they’d been dumped there.

  Dumped was the wrong word. The beds were vast meadows of white-and-black silk, like snowfields somehow warm to the touch. The air was filled with the subtle scent of flowers, as if whole forests were hidden behind the walls. You couldn’t be dumped here; you’d bounce.

  “This is ridiculous,” Denizen said, settling on the corner of a bed. “I feel like I’m in a painting.”

  “Oh, we’re far too scruffy to be in this sort of painting,” Simon said, peeling a sock off and flinging it on the floor, where it sat like a sad little inkblot. “We’re like the coffee stain where the artist put their mug down.”

  “Speak for yourself,” Abigail said. She had insisted on trying out the shower and was now lost in one of the Goshawk’s oversized, overfluffed bathrobes. She looked like a princess stuck halfway down the gullet of a polar bear. “I could get used to this.”

  She punctuated her words by flicking heavy black menus at Denizen, Darcie, and Simon. Denizen’s stomach growled a thanks. What with all this talk of blunt instruments, heroism, and certain death, no one so far had had the decency to offer him a sandwich.

  “Political animal,” Abigail murmured, lost somewhere in the appetizers. “What—like a walrus in a tie?”

  “Thank you for that image, Abigail,” Simon said. “No. Greaves is a—hang on. Why a walrus?”

  “Dunno.”

  “Are walruses more political than other animals?”

  “Well, bees are a monarchy.”

  “True. A parliament of walruses. Nope, do
esn’t sound right.”

  For two people who had met on a night of blood and malice, Simon Hayes and Abigail Falx had a shared talent for popping the screws of any serious conversation and cheerfully riding it downhill. It was a gift, Denizen often thought, and he loved them for it.

  On any given day, Denizen Hardwick had about thirty-seven thousand thoughts about whether what he was doing was good, whether it was bad, if it was going to harm somebody, was it supposed to harm somebody, was he standing funny when he did it—and overthinking wasn’t the cool and interesting superpower that fiction made it out to be. It was just a bit awful all the time. With Simon, Darcie, and Abigail, he didn’t have to think. They liked him. He liked them.

  It was ... automatic.

  “You’re thinking of owls,” Denizen said. “A parliament of owls. I don’t know what you call a lot of walruses. A mess, probably.”

  “And if they wore clothes they’d have monocles,” Darcie finished.

  “Exactly,” Denizen said. “But guys, you didn’t see Vivian. She was so angry. She said that if Greaves knew that Mercy had taught me the Cants, he’d take me away.”

  “I had been wondering about that,” Darcie said in a quiet voice.

  Denizen frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “I didn’t want to say earlier. I don’t even really want to say it now. We have enough to be worrying about.” She picked at the hem of her sleeve. “Have any of you not wondered why the Dublin cadre hasn’t been reinforced?”

  No one said anything.

  “Garrisons shouldn’t be left understaffed,” Darcie continued. “It’s dangerous. And since D’Aubigny…and Grey…we’ve received no replacements.”

  In the back of Denizen’s head, a steel box shifted, lid trembling. With a quiet breath, he clamped it shut.

  “Vivian spends half her time on the road,” Darcie said. “Surely you must have noticed.”

  Denizen had, as it happened, but with a dawning sense of shame he realized he had assumed it had been to avoid him.

  “It might just be that the Order is spread thin. It’s the nature of our work. But, if I were to be uncharitable, I’d ask whether Edifice Greaves might have a reason to be putting us under pressure.”