Master of One

by Jaida Jones

  She reached for Two, palm settling atop the smooth curve of a hind haunch. He rumbled.

  “I won’t do anything to put my family at risk,” Inis said. A statement meant for everyone who might have been listening.

  Shining Talon settled back next to the sleeping heap that was Rags. Inis hadn’t recognized he’d been tense until he relaxed. The difference between frozen and running water. “I would expect nothing less.”

  Inis had no experience navigating fae conversation, but she suspected she’d answered a question Shining Talon hadn’t asked outright, and that her answer had been the right one.

  She didn’t close her eyes. Even if Shining Talon could keep watch better than anyone, Inis planned to keep her own.

  Sometime in the night, with Two at her back, she curled into him and slipped into his thoughts, his senses, behind two of his four eyes. The wholeness he brought her, after leaving the rest of her family behind. She cried.

  Tell me a story, Inis, Two said, licking the tears off her cheeks. The first one you think of.

  Inis wasn’t sure if she was still awake or dreaming. Night bugs glowed over her head, winking on and off. Sometimes they weren’t night bugs but stars. She heard every sleepy cricket, the twisting of an owl’s head from back to front, and the splash of a far-distant frog as it dove underwater, the bog fly it had swallowed still writhing.

  Inis’s thoughts drifted back to her childhood. To an old, long-gone friend, the youngest prince—one of the Queen’s many sons who had no chance at the crown, his chances even less than the others’.

  His name was Somhairle Ever-Bright, a prince with a beautiful face and withered side. He’d told her most of the stories she still shared with Ivy on nights when memory haunted them like vengeful ghosts, chasing them from sleep.

  Once upon a time, Inis started. But instead of focusing on the story—about a girl who runs across a midnight procession of the fae and must outwit them to earn back her freedom—she found herself thinking of the boy who’d told it to her.

  As if the storyteller was the story.

  Sitting beneath a pear tree with Prince Somhairle, neither of them important enough to be wanted anywhere else.

  She felt Two radiate warm approval.

  Inis knew where they had to go next.

  48

  Somhairle

  Somhairle woke to banging, to his bedroom door being nearly pounded off its hinges. He fell on his way to open it, good knee and both palms stinging. Not yet awake.

  He’d been dreaming of silver. Again. Still tangled in the dream’s webbing, fingertips catching beams of oddly bright moonlight like they too were wrought of metal.

  Somhairle unlatched and opened the door.

  On the other side, Lord Faolan. His black hair tousled, loose, falling over his face in chaos. His eyes like glass—mirrorglass.

  “You need to go somewhere, anywhere else,” Lord Faolan suggested, brittlely calm. Outside, lightning split the sky, buried its forked tongue in the earth directly in front of Somhairle’s window. Its heat charged his lips, his skin a single, continuous prickle. “On second thought, stay here and don’t come out until I’ve given you the signal. Or don’t do what I say and regret it the rest of your life.” Faolan’s voice cracked. “Your choice!”

  “What about you—?” Somhairle began.

  Faolan didn’t let him finish. “Ah, Morien the Last is here.” He shuddered, straightened, and dragged the door shut, Somhairle still gripping the knob on the other side.

  Something screeched along the floor, probably one of the heavy hall tables being dragged into place, heaved as barricade between Somhairle and the rest of the house. The wall trembled on impact, stilled. Silence descended.

  Outside, the rain had ceased to fall, the moons hidden, the night pure black.

  Somhairle rubbed silver out of his eyes. Whatever job Morien had been sent to complete for Queen Catriona, whatever royal approval he bore—surely this didn’t give him the right to terrorize the countryside.

  The door rattled when Somhairle pushed it, pounded on it. It refused to budge.

  He fought with the doorknob even though it was a futile effort, because it was a futile effort. One he had to make, in order to live with himself. It had happened so quickly, he hadn’t realized he’d let himself be made prisoner. In his own room, in his own life.

  He placed his shoulder to the door and pushed and pushed, and cried out and slipped. He tried to lever the door open with his leg brace, all the while grateful he couldn’t dislodge the table.

  What did he plan to do if he could escape? What power did he imagine he held over Morien the Last?

  What use was a prince who didn’t understand anything happening in his own kingdom?

  Unable to answer these questions, Somhairle turned to the window. He imagined that, if he opened it, tried to escape his prison that way, the unrelenting night would suck him in, preserve him like a specimen in amber.

  He returned to rattling the door but at last surrendered. A foregone conclusion. His arms sore, his hip throbbing, his knee protesting, his twisted foot cramping. In his head, as he sank to the floor, he composed a thunderously passionate five-page letter of outrage to his mother, tore it up, and burned it, all before putting pen to paper.

  He had only his complaints, and those were neither shield nor weapon.

  The silence closed like ice water over Somhairle’s head. Whenever he told himself it was nothing, that he was being a child and a fool, he recalled the glassy panic in Faolan’s gaze.

  This terror was no nightmare, but a waking thing.

  He would have to endure it.

  The sun appeared a few hours later. It hadn’t risen, merely winked on cautiously behind a curtain of smoky clouds. There had been eternal darkness and then it was no longer, a curtain drawn back, summer returned to the living world.

  Morien was gone. This was what it meant, to have the sun back.

  A mist had settled over the grounds, as though to hide its wounds.

  What had Morien accomplished before he departed, while Somhairle hid and Faolan weathered this storm? Somhairle peered out the window to see black streaks slashed through the earth, bushes and flowerbeds reduced to mulch. One of the willows smoldered; another was reduced to a scorched stump.

  Somhairle opened the window. He tossed his brace out first, then hauled himself after, one-armed, landing with a thump in the scarred dirt. Using his brace solely as a crutch, he entered through the open front door, following silver bootprints stamped onto the carpet and etched into the wood.

  The footprints led to the library. The library was missing its door. Shattered glass crunched beneath Somhairle’s slippered feet as he stepped inside.

  Faolan sat in Somhairle’s favorite chair. Or slumped in it. It seemed he was using its shape to hold himself in place. His eyes flashed when they met Somhairle’s.

  He looked his age for the first time, older than Somhairle, but uncustomarily young for the Head of an Ever-House.

  He’s been alone for a long time, Somhairle thought. Alone like me.

  “You look . . .” Somhairle didn’t know how to finish the observation.

  “More alive than you expected? Really, you and I were never in real danger. When Morien is bothered, he seeks to transfer that bother to someone else. I shouldn’t have troubled you.” Faolan’s tongue was very red, as though in the night his mouth had been full of wine, or blood.

  “And Morien . . . ?”

  “Had other business to attend to!” False cheer in Faolan’s voice. Flecks of blood—Somhairle still hoped it was wine—on his open collar. “He’s a very busy man. I’ll pay for the door, the window, that bookshelf, its books, those two Gleaming age revival vases, and . . .” He trailed off with a circular gesture.

  Somhairle hadn’t been thinking of reimbursement.

  “I’ll make some tea,” he offered. How small he sounded, in the wreckage of the room.

  “No need to do it yourself. Call one of
the servants.” Somhairle couldn’t be sure if the hollowness in Faolan’s words was real or due to wishful thinking. Somhairle didn’t want him to be so unbothered with the lives of others. “Morien always takes care of servants,” Faolan continued, “locking them away in some corner of their mind so they don’t bear witness. Extremely useful spell! No permanent damage done! They’ll be more forgetful than usual for a day or two, but better that than cowering in a corner babbling nonsense for the rest of their lives, eh?”

  “My mother’s enemies must be truly formidable, if Morien is tasked with so many duties.” Somhairle leaned against one brocaded arm of a settee, maneuvering around his true questions. Ones he knew Faolan wouldn’t answer. “Fortunately, Ever-Land was built for relaxation and abandoning your cares. You’re in the right place, if you need—”

  Faolan’s smile sliced thinly across his face, then disappeared. The terrible gleam had faded from his eyes. “Rats make better guests.”

  “Lord Faolan.” Somhairle gathered his courage, wrought a heart brace of its disparate parts, and held fast. “If Morien the Last has overstepped, harmed you—one of the Queen’s dearest friends—she must be informed of his transgressions, and will intervene on your behalf.”

  “How long it’s been,” Faolan said wearily, “since you’ve been on the Hill, little prince.” Somhairle stiffened in disappointment but didn’t draw back until Faolan waved dismissively at him. The gesture stung like a slap. “Morien the Last is the Queen’s hands and the Queen’s will, swathed in red.”

  The words scattered like a flock of ravens when Somhairle tried to examine them. His mother—the mother he remembered—would never have allowed harm to come to her favorite courtiers.

  Had the fall of House Ever-Loyal changed her so fundamentally?

  How could any House trust the Queen, if there was no safety offered in return for total loyalty?

  “I, too, am the Queen’s most loyal servant. As you must be,” Faolan finished, licking a fleck of red from the corner of his mouth and shuddering to his feet. “Leave us to our business, stay out of Morien’s way, and you’ll be happier by and by.”

  He lurched past Somhairle, through the door, into the hall. A shadow. A stranger. His loyalties, Somhairle thought, made plain.

  Faolan didn’t look back, though—to Somhairle’s credit— neither did Somhairle allow his face to crumple.

  He wasn’t so far from the Hill that he’d forgotten that.

  With his stiff, awkward gait, Somhairle maneuvered around the broken glass and books on the floor to approach his writing desk, which stood as an undamaged eye in the center of a now passed storm. Its four stout legs were carved to resemble an Ancient One’s paws, furred and feathered talons. Its polished walnut surface was littered with more of Faolan’s papers.

  Papers he might have left behind because he thought Somhairle was too naive or too honorable to snoop through them.

  But Somhairle was his mother’s son. The same blazing willpower that had kept her reign’s light shining for nearly two centuries flowed through his veins.

  Also, he suspected Faolan was too clever by far to have left documents behind if he truly wished their contents to remain private.

  A few of the pages were opened letters: correspondence from House Ever-Learning’s steward about the hounds, one from the royal archives thanking Lord Faolan for the return of their city records, and an abandoned missive that read in part . . . some connection can be presumed but not guaranteed . . . and . . . not a true setback . . . amid larger sections of text that had been blacked out hastily with splashes of ink.

  Faolan and Morien’s business for the Queen, whatever it was, wasn’t going as hoped.

  On the desk, a vellum map of Ever-Land had been half copied onto parchment, the unfinished copy nearly obscured by a leather-bound book being employed as a paperweight. Recognizing it as one of his own by the gilt binding, Somhairle hefted the volume. The task required both hands.

  The drawing beneath was one he knew down to the smallest detail: a tracing of a watercolor of the Lone Tower, the original image from a tome on fae history that offered multiple artists’ attempts to portray its underground chambers and halls.

  Someone as important as Faolan wouldn’t bother mapping myths and old wives’ tales.

  Next, a series of recent assessments and surveys of several royal mining tunnels that spanned the city’s foundations. The Queen, always digging for silver.

  As a child, Somhairle had pretended she sought fae relics. Older now, he’d learned that Queen Catriona reserved no space in her heart for sentimentality without purpose. It was the same with her sons. She loved them because they were a living testament to her total defeat of Oberon’s curse—not because she had any special interest in them as individuals.

  Somhairle looked closer at the copied drawing. Contemplated the incomparable riches Oberon Black-Boned hid in the earth before his demise.

  Perhaps the Queen was looking for something more precious than silver.

  Somhairle dropped the book, snatched his hands back as though he’d burned them. Faolan had made it clear that he wouldn’t share his secrets with Somhairle.

  Why make such a declaration, only to leave Somhairle alone in the room with his private documents?

  There was something else at play here. For the first time, as far from the Hill as could be, Somhairle Ever-Bright found himself entangled in courtly intrigue.

  49

  Cab

  They were underground, in a damp maze that had to be a sewer. Cab was thankful it was dark. The smells were enough to emphasize where they were without a torch.

  Cab had kindly requested One’s presence. Being her “master” didn’t seem the right term for what they shared—a partnership—and Cab wouldn’t command her to do anything she didn’t want to. He was desperate for her company but had practice pushing his needs aside.

  She’d promised to make an appearance, but added that she might be a while.

  Which left Cab alone with Sil in the sewers, on his way to being introduced to the members of Sil’s dedicated Resistance.

  Resistance. It was the word whispered through the Queensguard with the understanding that anyone in this category was to be executed at once. No trial. No chance for self-defense. Cut the head off the snake. Never let it lash out at the Queen.

  But this Resistance didn’t offer the agents of destruction such a word called to mind. When Sil introduced Cab to her fellows, they amounted to a pitifully small group of humans: one older woman, Uaine; one man barely out of boyhood, Malachy; and one slim girl with red hair, teasing green eyes, and a gaudy dress, who cut Sil off before she named her, called Cab handsome, and asked about his scar.

  “What scar?” Cab’s throat still felt raw. He suspected he’d been screaming, without remembering it, while Sil removed the mirror shard from his heart.

  The redhead tapped the air over his chest, grinning when Cab didn’t flinch. “Tough sort, are you? Could use more of those around, after thinning our numbers. Here, lift your shirt and you’ll see what I mean.”

  Sil nodded, so Cab did as he was told—and was met with the sight of three parallel black lines raked across his chest, as though a sharp-taloned hand had reached its claws between his ribs to remove the mirrorglass.

  No wonder it hurt so much.

  “Suits you, though. Sexy story to tell.” The redhead winked, then turned sharply to Sil without wasting a beat. “Sil, we can’t trust this shitter. Not another Queensguard. You remember what happened with Baeth—”

  Cab forced himself not to stand at attention at his old captain’s name.

  “I would not be able to forget what happened with Baeth,” Sil said wearily. She sat in an alcove, tucked into the hollowed spot with room to spare and looking like a ghost child. “This one is not a spy. I crushed the mirror shard he carried into dust—our conversation with him cannot be overheard.”

  The redhead sighed. “I trust you, Sil—don’t get me wrong. Just w
ish I had your otherworldly senses.”

  “You wouldn’t be able to handle them,” Malachy said, and got a swat to the back of his head for his troubles.

  This was the force that had compelled the Ever-Loyals to turn on their Queen and the Queensguard to turn on the Ever-Loyals? So few in number. Raw, undisciplined. United by a common cause and nothing more. It didn’t seem rational.

  Living fae didn’t seem rational as a concept, either. But they were real as day.

  Cab cut his gaze toward Sil through the curtain of his black hair. Her small stature didn’t mean she was only a child, like how One’s shape didn’t mean she was only a lizard.

  Still, it was difficult to imagine this little girl as a threat to the Queen’s realm, one for whom so much blood had already been spilled.

  His eyes lingered on her too-long fingers, gleaming gold where her hands cradled each other in her lap. She’d freed him from a terrible fate. No two ways of looking at that true thing.

  “What happened to my . . .” Cab rubbed his head, a distraction from the hitch in his wording. He didn’t know what to call the fae and the thief who’d brought One to him but couldn’t pretend they were strangers. “. . . the people I was with?”

  Cab was thinking like a soldier. Proving them right, yet unable to stop himself. He was a soldier.

  And they needed soldiers.

  The redhead stepped half behind Sil. Not protecting her. Fortifying their position. Her cheeks flushed with flustered, spotty red, the heat of rage and sorrow. “They’re alive. Unharmed. Our people staged an attack on the house to cover our retreat, and Her Majesty’s royal bitch Morien stepped in and slaughtered them all.”

  It took more of an effort not to react to the word slaughter. An attack on two fronts. Cab had been caught from behind, while it sounded like another group had stormed the house. Struck down by Morien, which Cab could have warned them would happen. If they’d been smarter, more tactical, more might have survived.

  Had they only been after him? From what the girl described, they hadn’t hoped to rescue the others. Maybe they would have tried, if Morien hadn’t gotten involved.