by Lisa Henry
The thought of it made the hair on the back of Min’s neck rise and his skin prickle.
From farther down the street, he saw a trail of people hurrying toward the city. It took him a moment to understand what was occurring: the people whose homes were outside the ancient walls of Amberwich were seeking refuge inside. Some were lugging possessions. Some were carrying children. And all of them, pulled from their beds by the frantic ringing of bells, looked afraid.
Chirpy fluttered to the top of the portcullis and perched there, peering down at Min.
A burly bearded man stepped in front of Min, one beefy palm held up. “The gate is being closed by order of the king. If you’ve people out there to fetch, you might not make it back in time.”
“Understood,” Min said.
Min had made a lot of stupid decisions before in his life. He was known for them. (Ask his mother. Min suspected she kept a detailed list.) And the one he was about to make now, well, that was probably the stupidest of all of them. And yet… yet Kaz had sent Chirpy to him, and that meant something. Min didn’t know what the fuck it meant, but he was sure it meant something. Even knowing what was waiting on the outside of the city walls—and he knew in his bones exactly what was out there—Min couldn’t ignore that.
He trusted Kaz.
Strange how that had happened, but here he was.
Kaz had never run from him. Kaz had stopped him from drinking from the pool in the woods. Kaz had found their way back to Amberwich, when it had meant a life of captivity. He could have fought Min, but he never had. He could have run and let Harry die, but he hadn’t. Kaz had never led Min wrong, when he so easily could have, and perhaps he should have. And Kaz had given himself to Min that night in his old room. And maybe that was because Min was the pick of a bad bunch, but Min thought maybe it was more than that too. It was for Min, at least. Not the bright, burning inferno of love Harry thought it was, like smashed pots exploding into flames against a door, but it was an ember, maybe, with a small and steady glow. Min could feel its warmth.
It didn’t matter what it was anyway. It only mattered that Kaz deserved better than his fate, and that if there was any hope at all, Min couldn’t desert him now. And perhaps it wasn’t hope that waited outside the city walls, but it was something. And something had to be better than nothing.
Min squared his shoulders and glanced back at Harry and Aiode. “Wait here for me.”
He walked under the portcullis, through the darkness, and back out into the moonlight. When he turned to check, Harry and Aiode were still with him, and Chirpy swooped down to alight on his shoulder.
They walked on.
The houses stood farther apart now. The cobblestones turned to dirt. The city slowly dropped away.
They walked in silence, Chirpy swooping ahead in long arcs and then circling back again, and the bells of Amberwich growing quieter as the three of them paced out their distance from the city walls. Out here, without the dark buildings crowding in, the night seemed even brighter. The world was awash in silver light, and Min felt as though he had fallen into a dreamscape where nothing was quite real, or perhaps passed beyond the veil into a different world entirely. His breath was as loud as an ocean and muffled all other sounds. Only the sharp crunch of his boots on the dirt kept him anchored as each step forward revealed another shape taking form out of the strange light: low stone walls and hedgerows, crofts and cottages, posts and pathways, and trees that shifted and shivered like anemones in the breeze.
The bells in Amberwich tolled in faint warning in the distance, and up ahead Min heard a clear high ringing in answer. The moonlight shifted like mist, and through it a pale horse appeared at the top of a rise in the road. The horse breathed steam from its nostrils into the cold night air.
The rider turned its head and looked directly at Min.
Min had heard it said that great men like kings and heroes could read their fortunes in the heavens, in the fiery comets and intricate constellations that lit up the night sky. Min wasn’t proud enough to think he had ever done anything in his life to earn himself a fixed mark in the heavens that sailors could plot safe passage by, but he’d sometimes pondered the hazy spread of stars, indistinguishable from one another, and wondered if one of those more modest beacons belonged to him. Even under a humbling field of infinite stars in a never-ending sky, Min had never felt so small as he did now, because what was the rider except the moon himself? Bright and blazing, the light of him swallowing up all the stars.
Min watched, his heart in his throat, as Chirpy fluttered toward the rider.
The fae held out his hand, pale in the moonlight, and Chirpy landed there and stilled.
For a moment nothing happened, and then, in a burst of movement, a flock of ravens burst from around the fae in a cloud, wheeling higher and higher into the sky, spiraling upward in a whirlwind of flurrying feathers and harsh cries. And then they were gone, vanished into the night as though stolen on a breath.
The fae flicked his wrist, and Chirpy fluttered from his arm onto the head of the horse, and perched there on the beast’s silver forelock.
The fae alighted from his horse, his robes rippling like the surface of a lake before they settled again. Chirpy darted back to the fae’s shoulder.
“His magic comes to me,” the fae said, and Min didn’t understand how he heard the words so clearly when there was still some distance between them. The fae’s voice was strangely accented, the cadence more like music than speech, but if it was like music, then it was like none Min had ever heard before. It was music no man could make. It was the music of the wind whispering in hollow places, or the hum of cicadas in the distance on a summer’s afternoon, or shallow water skipping over stones. “It calls to me.”
The fae’s features were sharp, beautiful, cold, and cruel. A fraction too exaggerated, too much like an eerie doll carved to look uncannily like a human. What had Min thought back in Anhaga? Like a dream, the moment before it became a nightmare.
“I am Llefelys,” the fae said. “You know me as the Hidden Lord.”
Min hadn’t known it was possible to be even more afraid, but his blood turned to ice in his veins. A lifetime of bluster and bullshit had trained him never to show fear—but this was fear greater than any he had ever known or could even properly conceptualize. He was an insect to the Hidden Lord. He was a gnat, and the Hidden Lord was a tempest.
Min inclined his head. “I am Aramin Decourcey.”
The fae stepped toward him, his boots soundless on the dirt road. “You are the one who took him from Anhaga.”
“I am,” Min said and waited for the heavens to fall.
“Where is he?” the Hidden Lord asked. His expression shifted, but Min couldn’t read it. He couldn’t tell if it was anger or anguish or an attempted mimicry of something else. He wasn’t aware the fae could feel any emotion at all. They were heartless, weren’t they? They were cold and unfeeling and took amusement in pointless cruelty, like children pulling the wings off flies. But there was something in the Hidden Lord’s face as he spoke again, and the music of his voice hit a straining note: “Where is my son?”
Min reeled back. He heard Harry gasp from somewhere behind him.
Well, fuck.
“They have poisoned him against me,” the Hidden Lord said. “They taught him to fear me, to use the very blood that I gave him to keep me from him. And now they have enslaved him in iron. His magic comes to me, and it weeps.”
Chirpy made a mournful sound.
Min blinked and felt as though his entire understanding of the world had shifted.
Anhaga, he thought wildly. He’d been there and seen it but never even questioned what it was he’d witnessed. The Hidden Lord hadn’t crossed the borders and slaughtered the inhabitants of Anhaga, though he was a creature from a nightmare. The fishermen in Anhaga still put their boats out every day. The women still sold their goods in the marketplace. The children still played in the dusty streets. The Hidden Lord had only come to Anha
ga after Kazimir was sent there. And he had knocked on the peeling green paint of Kallick’s front door each night, only to be repelled by Kaz’s Gift and his fae magic.
Min had seen it with his own eyes, but somehow he hadn’t realized.
The Hidden Lord wasn’t at war with the king. He never had been. He’d only ever tried to reach Kaz.
Min lifted his chin. “Sir, what do you want with Kazimir?”
“Kazimir,” the Hidden Lord echoed, and there was something like wonder in his tone. “She called him Kazimir. She said she liked the sound of that name.”
Another blink.
Another shift.
Because no. Unless this was some trickery, Min could not imagine any woman discussing baby names with the creature who raped her.
Sorrow and pity welled up in him, and not for the terrifying creature that stood in front of him, but for the boy who had been told from the moment he was born that he was an abomination, a mongrel, a violent and bloody stain on the memory of his mother. That lonely brokenhearted boy who had only known hate from the people who should have cared for him.
From his perch on the Hidden Lord’s shoulder, Chirpy squawked and fluttered his feathers.
“Avice was my heart.” The Hidden Lord stroked a long finger down Chirpy’s back. “She was my heart.”
Min could barely breathe.
The Hidden Lord lifted Chirpy in front of his face. “You are a storm, my son. You are the lightning on the ocean. You call my magic to yours, and you are stronger than iron. When you break, no man will be able to contain you. You will leave destruction in your wake.”
Min repressed a shudder.
The Hidden Lord raised his hand, and Chirpy wheeled into the air with a piercing cry.
Min looked up as black feathers rained down, a thick heavy blanket of them that blocked out the moonlight. Min raised a hand to cover his mouth as the feathers swirled down, afraid he would choke, but the feathers turned to dust before they hit the ground and vanished into nothing.
When Min looked at the place where the Hidden Lord had stood, he was gone and the jingling of the bells on his horse’s trappings was already fading in the distance. And, at the edges of the world, the dawn was creeping in.
Min shook his head and blinked, and it felt as though he was coming up from sleep. A moment later Chirpy reappeared, fluttering madly, and landed with a thump on Min’s shoulder. Min’s fear caught him at last. His heart beat faster, and he worried his shaky legs wouldn’t hold his weight for much longer. He turned, staring wildly at Harry and Aiode.
“All of that just happened, yes?”
Harry nodded, slack-jawed.
“Your Kazimir is no mere hedgewitch,” Aiode said, her voice hitching.
“No,” Min agreed. His gaze slid over her shoulder and landed on the distant walls of Amberwich. From this distance he could only make out the city walls, faint in the glow of the dawn, and the Iron Tower atop the King’s Hill.
Kaz.
Robert had said Kaz was being sent to the Iron Tower, and so that was where Min had to go. He had no fucking idea what to do once he got there, but that was where he had to go, because the Hidden Lord said that Kaz’s storm was building, and Min didn’t think they had very long at all until it broke.
Chapter 17
ALL OF this, Min thought wildly as he and Aiode and Harry hurried along Stanes Street. All of this because Harry had climbed in Talys Sabadine’s bedroom window and under her skirts. How fast it had all spiraled out of control and left Min on a larger stage than any he had ever wanted to walk on. Min much preferred to slip under the notice of powerful men, and tonight he had spoken to the Hidden Lord himself—and even lived to tell the tale—and now he was on his way to the Iron Tower. Fate was a twisted bitch indeed when somehow Min ended up in the middle of all this bullshit.
The bells of Amberwich had fallen silent sometime in the early morning, and now an uneasy calm had settled like a shifting mist over the city. Min didn’t trust it for a moment.
The portcullis gate was still open, and the stream of pedestrian traffic that last night had been rushing to get inside the city was this morning replaced by restless crowds demanding answers that the King’s Guard could not give. The fae were at the walls of Amberwich, and there was nowhere to run.
An orange-robed wizard had joined the pinch-faced mage at the portcullis at Stanes Street, and Min wondered if the city’s other gates were as poorly defended. A wizard was barely a step up from a hedgewitch. Wizards were alchemists. What was he going to do to defend Amberwich from the Hidden Lord? Transmute some lead in his direction? Where were the sorcerers, the highest ranked of the king’s Gifted, who might actually stand a chance against the fae?
Unless….
Min’s heart clenched as the vicious thought caught him.
Unless all the king’s sorcerers were busy dealing with the fae already inside the city walls. Kaz must have been at the Iron Tower already. If so, what secrets did the king’s sorcerers think Kaz could teach them about his father’s strange people? And how did they intend to learn them?
Chirpy, huddled on Min’s shoulder, burrowed in close to his throat, and snapped his beak anxiously against the shell of Min’s ear.
A ripple of unrest ran through the crowd gathered along Stanes Street, and Min caught Aiode by the elbow and pulled her closer as a man almost barreled into her. She stumbled a little but caught her footing again and thanked Min with a nod. Even Harry, who was usually as slippery as a greased weasel, was struggling to pick a path through the crowds. Min met his worried gaze and knew they were both thinking it: How long until these brief flares of panic descended into violence? Crowds made a dangerous beast, unpredictable and volatile. Min much preferred to watch them from a safe distance.
They pushed on, heading for the Iron Tower, skirting around the dip of the valley in the center of the city to reach the King’s Hill.
A wall ran around the base of the King’s Hill, broken up here and there by gates large enough to drive wagons and horses through. Nobody entered the king’s land without permission of the Guard. Even Min would never have dared attempt it. He was an excellent thief, but not a total idiot. He balked when he saw the closed gate on Guildhall Street, but Aiode strode forward. Her red hair was a mess, and her shoes and the bottom few inches of her green kirtle were covered in dust. She looked every inch the sort of hedgewitch who’d been digging around in weeds and brambles, but she was still Gifted and still outranked any common soldiers.
Outranked them by a mile, it so happened. She rapped on the door set in the gate and waited, her chin lifted imperiously, as the slot on the door opened and a soldier peered out at her.
“Lady Anarawd!” the man exclaimed. The slot slammed shut again, and Min heard bolts being shifted behind the heavy door.
Min exchanged a look with Harry.
“Anarawd!” Harry whispered, his eyebrows vanishing under his scruffy fringe. “Min, that’s the king’s family name!”
Well then. Apparently Min’s habit of falling for people entirely out of his league was not without precedent. Aiode Nettle, his magnificent ass. Tricky hedgewitches and their tricky false names. If Min had known Aiode was an Anarawd, he might have attempted to acquit himself better between the sheets. Or at least apologized respectfully for his failure.
Aiode threw him a knowing look. “I did have a life before I tumbled into your disappointing bed, Aramin.”
“And here was I thinking you’d been born a grubby little mudlark,” Min said.
“If we survive this,” Aiode said, “I shall have to remember to resent you for that.”
Min gave her a short bow. “Noted.”
The door in the gate creaked open.
Min and Harry followed Aiode along the wide path that curved up the side of the King’s Hill, cutting through the parklands. If Min hadn’t been so sure he was walking into yet another disaster, he might have taken time to appreciate the beauty of his surroundings, dotted here and t
here with fountains and sculptures and flowering bushes that hid the stench of the city with sweet perfumes. But probably not. Min didn’t really give a fuck about gardens, and he had a lot more on his mind this morning. Like how to save a half-fae necromancer who was trapped between two very powerful men and could combust at any moment. Not literally, Min hoped, but what did he know about Kaz’s powers? What did anyone know about them?
Whatever Kaz was, it was new.
“Min, look!” Harry pointed toward the Iron Tower.
A spiral of ravens swirled around the roof. There must have been between ten and a dozen of them—an innocuous enough number, and possibly even an innocuous enough sight, but Min felt a chill run through him all the same. Was this where the Hidden Lord’s ravens had vanished to? If Kaz’s magic, via Chirpy, had been drawn to the Hidden Lord, then was the Hidden Lord’s magic drawn back to his son’s? Stronger than iron, the Hidden Lord had said, and now the Hidden Lord’s ravens circled the Iron Tower. Were they there simply because Kaz had willed it? The implications of that were terrifying.
Min was certain Kaz was inside the Iron Tower now. When it came to Kaz and his fae magic, he didn’t believe in coincidences.
There was a formation of guards gathered at the base of the Iron Tower, armed with pikes and sarissas. There were about twenty or thirty men in total—the rest of the King’s Guard must have been positioned at the gates along the city walls instead. Their barracks, Min knew, were somewhere in these parklands, along with the Sorcerers’ Guildhall, the Treasury, and the various other chancelleries it took to run a kingdom. The mechanics of government were a mystery to Min. The affairs of the king and the noble Houses had always seemed to him to be a nasty business, poisoned by the machinations of ambitious men, which made it one of the few things Min could actually look down on. It was rare that Min could take the moral high ground on anything, and he did enjoy the opportunity when he could.
Min half expected the soldiers to challenge them as they approached the Iron Tower, but Aiode’s green kirtle—or, more likely, her birth name—allowed them to pass unimpeded.
