Master of One

by Jaida Jones

  For Somhairle, it was exile.

  He should have hated it, should have felt natural disgust at his predicament. Out of sight, out of the story.

  But he loved the sprawling country manor. Its uncomplicated, old-fashioned wood-plank roof, upon which the patter of spring showers echoed like laughter; its white stone walls bathed in drowsy sunshine. Waking late and reveling in the slow creep of country life, the solitude of pale sunbeams peering through his leadlight window. Somhairle’s court was composed of birds, whose gossip was sweet song, who came and went freely in and out of open windows. No cages. They made their perches on the sturdy branches of Ever-Land’s undying trees, built nests, chattered to one another between breezes.

  Then, one morning, Morien the Last had appeared with Lord Faolan Ever-Learning in tow.

  When last Somhairle was at court, House Ever-Learning had been ambitious but unsuccessful in the ruthless hierarchy of Ever-Families jockeying to gain favor with the Queen. They’d moved up in the world, he noted, if they now had access to one of her most powerful sorcerers.

  “Here on the Queen’s orders,” Lord Faolan had explained, flashing the Queen’s seal. Somhairle had limped down the steps to greet them, tousle-headed, wearing only a dressing gown with his steel-and-silver brace and crutch, which steadied and straightened him from ankle to hip and chest to shoulder.

  The birds had already stopped singing.

  Morien the Last hadn’t bothered to explain his presence. Sorcerers rarely felt the need to explain themselves to anyone. They answered to Queen Catriona alone, trusting the lesser princes to stay out of their way and usually affording them the same courtesy in return.

  Before the hour was out, Morien had commandeered the dining room, locked the doors, draped a bolt of red linen over each one and curtained the room’s many windows.

  Somhairle gave him a wide berth. It had been nearly a decade since one of his mother’s sorcerers had tried to impress her by curing him of his unacceptable flaws, yet the memories held a keen edge no matter how many years they’d lain idle.

  If Morien had come to adjust the enchantments that kept Ever-Land alive and hidden, which sorcerers occasionally did, he’d complete that business and be gone within a week. Somhairle could manage the metallic taste the sorcerer’s visit left in his mouth for seven days. He’d have to.

  As a lesser prince, without political value as an heir—he was nowhere close to ascending the throne, and even if he had been, he wasn’t the image of perfection Catriona would choose to crown—he demanded respect, but wielded no significant power.

  He was a prince royal who couldn’t so much as ask his houseguests to leave.

  So he avoided Morien the best he could and minded his own business, trusting it would all be finished soon.

  Three days later, the doves nesting on Somhairle’s windowsill began to lose their feathers. The following day, his canaries refused to leave their roost. Treetops once filled with birdsong hushed silent as fresh graves, as if the hardening grounds were holding their breath. The balmy air chilled and thickened.

  Somhairle woke in the first night, having dreamed he was choking on liquid silver.

  And the next night. And the next. More silver, gushing forth from under the ground, flooding Somhairle’s bedchamber. The birds flapped their wings, but one by one, they drowned. Somhairle drenched in cold sweat, like he had during the fevers of his childhood.

  Every night he was reminded, by the light of a single candle in his study, that there were invaders in his sacred court.

  According to that candle, Lord Faolan never slept.

  Usually, neither did Somhairle. But the study was intended to be where he spent his own sleepless nights.

  Somhairle resented the change at first, then found himself unable to resist the pull and promise of company. Of conversation.

  Whether Morien was awake on these long nights was a puzzle Somhairle didn’t risk solving.

  Lord Faolan was different. Somhairle soon mustered the courage to join him.

  Maps had piled up like dirty laundry in the study over the passing nights, gradually devouring a once neatly ordered desk. Tea stains everywhere. Faolan drank a dark, smoky brew that made Somhairle’s nose burn, though sometimes Somhairle poured a cup simply to have something warm to hold on to.

  On top of the maps rested several open books—some from Somhairle’s collection of classical plays—though it was impossible to tell whether they were in the midst of being read or being employed as paperweights.

  Morien never made any attempt to join them. Fortunately.

  “I have to say, I admire your pluck,” Faolan confessed one night, legs flung over the arm of a cream-colored settee, long black hair unbound around his shoulders, resembling a fae prince of legend. “I’ve never seen anyone dare to sneeze in Morien’s direction, let alone scowl at him. Are you the formidable secret weapon of the Ever-Brights, kept safely hidden here until such a time as needed?”

  Somhairle, who had a short lifetime of experience in keeping his expression blank, forced a rueful smile at the appropriate moment.

  “You must offer my forgiveness to Morien for my poor manners. Having been away from court for so long, I must have forgotten myself. I am merely in awe of his magnificence.” He sipped his tea. Too strong and unrelentingly bitter. It wouldn’t help him sleep, but he hadn’t gathered the courage to face his dreams again. He let it warm his cheeks so he could blush sweetly. The innocent cripple: a useful archetype. “I would speak with him directly, but I’m afraid I have an aversion to sorcerers. You might have heard . . .”

  “Rumors aren’t what interest me.” Faolan allowed a courteous moment of hesitation to pass, staring at the curved toes of his pointed slippers, before he continued. “One hears all sorts of things at court, regardless of whether or not one wishes to.”

  A story. That was all Somhairle was to other people.

  If he imagined himself onstage at the old Gilded Lily theater, an actor telling someone else’s tale, he could get through what came next without feeling like a specimen on display.

  He began to explain his past experiences.

  There had been Dyfed the Quick, who’d “painlessly”—his description—inserted a series of mirrorglass needles into Somhairle’s side. As Somhairle soon discovered, this procedure caused brief but blinding agony intended to reinvigorate his stunted growth.

  After the fourteenth unsuccessful attempt, Dyfed had been removed from service.

  Aibhilin the Asking had better luck in pretending she’d come to Somhairle seeking friendship before she lowered him into a mirror-bright pool in one of the palace bathrooms.

  She’d held him under until he nearly drowned.

  Saraid the Ready had produced a reflection of what Somhairle could have looked like whole to mock him from the safety of a looking glass. That Prince Somhairle had existed solely on the other side of the mirror, an image of himself that should have been, forever out of reach.

  In the end, the Queen forbade anyone else from using any magic on any of her sons.

  When Somhairle finished speaking, his cup was empty, though his throat was dry.

  Faolan shivered theatrically, the way all good audiences should. One of his hands hung at his side, fingers twitching rhythmically as if to scratch a dog that wasn’t there. When he caught Somhairle noting the detail, he pretended he’d been playing an invisible instrument.

  Somhairle waited. The purpose of oversharing personal, perhaps tragic details from his life—to him, they were merely what had happened; to others, they were tales of horror and fascination—was to prompt pity. If Faolan pitied him, he wouldn’t respect him. Wouldn’t consider him a threat.

  Might let slip some useful information someday, with a tongue he would have guarded more closely otherwise. Nearly all Somhairle’s contacts at the palace had ceased to reply to him—so if he was forced to undertake a little subterfuge to get news of his own country, that hardly seemed without justification.


  “You needn’t worry, Your Royal Highness,” Faolan said. There were miniature dogs embroidered on his slippers—no doubt the ancestral Ever-Learning hounds. “I expect we’ll be out of your hair soon enough.”

  After two weeks, Morien was still entrenched, Faolan was eating all the cheese, another mourning dove had been found dead in the rosebushes, and Somhairle was no closer to divining the reason for their presence in Ever-Land.

  Something had to be done. Somhairle needed to try a different tactic.

  He buried the dove with the others, whispered his useless apologies to the roots, and, though it felt like too little too late, wrote about the mysterious deaths to his mother and brothers, the few he thought might bother to write back.

  Although the four youngest princes had been schooled together, they weren’t close. Each had his friends, his favorite advisers, all of whom were convinced the other princes wanted their prince dead.

  Somhairle expected to hear from Laisrean if he heard from anyone, but it was Guaire who wrote back first, surprising him.

  Don’t be a child. Though at nineteen he’d lived only one year longer than Somhairle, Guaire never lacked for confidence. Our mother has more important lives to consider. She doesn’t care about a few sick animals, nor should she.

  Perhaps the best solution is to stop feeding them. Then they’ll die elsewhere, and won’t disturb your sensitivities?

  The backhanded accusation revealed by Guaire’s suggestion reminded Somhairle of the many ways he’d proven unsuitable for his mother’s Silver Court. He imagined the other chidings that would arrive. He was a fool to have bothered with letters.

  Then, the next morning, his mother granted him an audience.

  Moments past sunrise in the solarium, when the light was softest, gilded. To keep birds from flying into the glass and snapping their tiny-boned necks, Somhairle’s few servants had hung flowering plants along the windows. Bright orange and yellow honeyflower, vibrant scarlet trumpets—all the sweet nectar the birds once loved.

  Catriona Ever-Bright appeared resplendent in the midst of the blossoms. The sight of her filled him with awe and fear. Her full white gown, so encrusted with diamonds and pearls that it could have stood on its own, shone with the reflected color of a thousand far-off flowers. She looked younger than Somhairle remembered, but also more distant.

  The portrait of a queen, not the queen the portrait was based on.

  For she wasn’t really there, flesh and blood, in the solarium. The Queen loved her sons best when they gave her time to miss them. What Somhairle saw sitting across from him was merely a reflection, the creation of one of her sorcerers.

  Still, it was rare that she could take time to speak privately like this, even with the assistance of mirrorcraft.

  “We would never allow any harm to befall our own.” Catriona’s voice rang like struck steel in the tiny solarium. She pitched for great halls and grand pronouncements—too grand for these more humble surroundings. “It is admirable that your care for Ever-Land extends to even its most insignificant details, but do not allow your dovelike heart to mislead you. The land prospers.”

  The difficulty Somhairle often felt in speaking to his mother was that she was responding to a different son: the one she wanted rather than the one she had.

  The birds weren’t insignificant to him. Perhaps Guaire had been trying to spare him the embarrassment of bringing his small concerns before their mother, whose kingdom consisted primarily of actual people, not doves and starlings.

  Somhairle shifted on his overstuffed velvet chaise. It was a chair best suited for afternoon naps and late-night reading, less so for receving one’s mother, the Queen. He’d dressed for the occasion, white shirt fastened high around his throat, a gauze flower opening under a delicate waistcoat wrought in filigree silver. The pattern of scrolling vines tinkled when he moved, creating visual and aural distractions from his leg brace.

  On his head was a silver circlet. Around his throat, the sun-sigil medallion of House Ever-Bright.

  It was too hot. He’d never felt his station less. He missed his loose gardening trousers, the drowsy bumble of bees, the smell of warm dirt.

  “I’m not afraid for Ever-Land.” He was too aware of the crooked set of his shoulders, the relatively short span of his eighteen years compared to his mother’s many decades. Worst of all, he sounded childish. Proving Guaire right was the dread that forced Somhairle to press on. “. . . though, in your wisdom, I’m sure you understand how it might feel unsafe. Morien arriving, birds dropping out of the air around me . . .”

  For the first time, Queen Catriona looked at Somhairle instead of the plants. Her attention was total, terrifying. It always had been.

  Silver flashed in her stare, then disappeared with a langorous blink.

  “Our young, wounded bird.” Catriona shared Somhairle’s blue eyes and fair complexion, but her features were hewn without sentiment. As a magical reflection, she looked almost ghoulish, as though she had silver bones and silver blood. His mother’s court took its name from the wealth of ore in the Hill’s bedrock, but sometimes, Somhairle thought she took her ornamentations too far. No other queen in their history had been so garish. “How we hoped that you, of all our children, might escape a life haunted by death. . . . Your beloved father was so lively.”

  Somhairle’s father had gone questing to bring back an antidote for his twisted son. Before his child had had a chance to know him, he’d vanished.

  This wasn’t unusual. Few of his half brothers had living fathers.

  Sun winked off his brace, reminded Somhairle that he too had an unusual silver accessory. Instead of ceremonial crowns, the Ever-Bright smiths had wrought a series of strong, lightweight models fitted expertly to Somhairle’s growing height.

  He hadn’t received a new one in a few years. But now wasn’t the time for that thought toward comfort, a base distraction.

  “Then I may speak to Morien about the situation?” Somhairle asked gently.

  While in name and birth he outranked the Last, both knew who held more power at court. Morien was the Queen’s arm; Somhairle, barely a ring to adorn her littlest finger.

  Catriona’s eyes snapped back to attention. “The Last must not be disturbed.”

  The blood drained from Somhairle’s face. He’d misjudged Catriona’s tenderness, employed to placate, perhaps nothing more. The bitter taste in his mouth stung his tongue.

  He’d forgotten how quickly his mother’s mood could sour.

  Catriona held up one graceful hand. “We would not see you honed like a blade toward purpose. Remain carefree, and we shall intervene on your behalf.”

  It would push Somhairle’s luck to exaggerate the issues of his health, but that was his only weapon. He’d buried thirteen birds. His pride was nothing compared to their lost lives.

  “You are gracious as ever.” Somhairle covered his mouth to cough, forcing a shaky smile.

  It didn’t matter. Catriona was already gone. The mirror in front of Somhairle showed only a blurred stain, the Queen’s lingering profile like a cameo silhouette.

  Outside the solarium, dressed as though he was waiting for his own audience with the queen, Faolan straightened quickly to prevent the door from opening directly into his nose. Morien was nowhere to be seen, an implication more powerful than physical presence.

  “You look well!” Faolan said with the false cheer of Silver Court conversation, and also its lack of self-respect. The swell of a plum pearl drop dangled from one ear on a rose-gold chain, rather than a silver one—an intriguing, if minor, rebellion against the Queen’s favored metal. “Feeling better?”

  “I am,” Somhairle agreed. “We’ve lost some of Ever-Land’s other residents, however.”

  “Oh.” Faolan’s face flickered, was too steeped in court artifice to fall. “Yes. I heard about the birds.”

  Somhairle wasn’t in the mood to be outright mocked—or worse, humored.

  Alas, when Faolan fell into step beside him
, his brace made graceful disengagement impossible.

  “Forgive me, Your Royal Highness. Though it’s incredibly unlike me, it seems I’ve misspoken.” Faolan worried away at a wedge of salty white cheese Somhairle hadn’t noticed he’d been holding, eating the pieces that crumbled freely into his fingers. “I haven’t slept for days. Not that it’s any excuse, but I assure you, I wasn’t listening at keyholes. I waited for you outside the solarium because I bear glad tidings.”

  “Oh?”

  “I came to find you as soon as I heard,” Faolan explained. Acknowledging, without directly expressing, that he needed some excuse for being flattened against the door when Somhairle had exited. “You’ve seen the last of our friend Morien. At last, eh?”

  It was early enough that the house was yet slumbering. They’d traveled through the main corridor, past two unoccupied guestrooms and a sitting area that cradled a dusty piano. Out of habit, Somhairle averted his gaze from the mirror in the entryway as he opened the front doors for Faolan. A warm breeze blew in with the scents of the tea garden, green and floral, with a whiff of—was that cinnamon?

  His breakfast awaited him.

  Somhairle hesitated, feigned pain as the explanation when it was confusion. He needed a moment to consider.

  If Morien was gone, why did Faolan remain?

  “Your purpose here, Lord Faolan,” Somhairle murmured meekly. “May I be so bold as to inquire . . .”

  “Oh?” Faolan turned, sharp and beautiful as faceted, precious stone. Colder than Somhairle had seen him in the soft glow of candelight, bleak and hawk-eyed under Ever-Land’s morning sun. “The Queen didn’t tell you when you spoke why it is so necessary that we disturb your idyll with our dirty work?”

  “She believes my constitution too besieged already. That I mustn’t be troubled by matters of court and country.” Somhairle cast his eyes down and leaned against the doorframe. His brace’s ankle joint struck the hinge, to remind Faolan that he was limited, harmless. “Though it’s meant in kindness, it makes me feel like a useless child.”