The Forever Court

by Dave Rudden

  “Because Vivian hasn’t told him about what happened at Crosscaper?” Simon said incredulously. “Surely he wouldn’t—”

  “I don’t know,” Denizen said. “Everything he said was ... calculated. Like a test, or something. Or he was feeling me out to see if I was like Vivian.” He paused. “I think he likes pushing people’s buttons. Getting them to do what he wants. As if he views everything we’ve been through as currency.”

  Darcie shook her head. Denizen had only ever heard her angry a couple of times, but it was in her voice now, deep and dark and cold. “That’s what all this is about.”

  Denizen frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “Everyone’s here because you saved Mercy. And Greaves likes being popular, or else they’d all be staying on cots in Seraphim Row. So you’re his new best friend. Or he’d like you to be. It looks good. Political currency.

  “And, since this is all based on your connection to Mercy, he wants to know what that connection is. Plus ... he has a history with Vivian.”

  Frown No. 11—Do I Actually Want to Know This?

  “What do you mean, a history?”

  “Nothing like that,” Darcie said, her eyes going wide. “Or I don’t think so anyway. But D’Aubigny told me once that while Greaves is good at being the Palatine, he wasn’t everyone’s first choice. When the last Palatine died, all the Mallei convened in Daybreak, the Order’s ancestral headquarters. Edifice Greaves was chosen. Eventually.”

  Abigail leaned forward. “My dad said something similar. Vivian could have been Palatine. She was called to attend. But she ...”

  “She what?” Denizen asked.

  “She didn’t show up,” Darcie finished. “She didn’t even acknowledge the summons. Then suddenly, years later, her secret son appears and, three weeks into his training, defeats the Clockwork Three, saves the world, and ends up being owed a favor by the Endless King?”

  “That’s not what—”

  “Yes, it is,” Darcie said, in a voice both stern and kind. “Whether it was luck or coincidence or you being modest doesn’t matter anymore. What happens next does.”

  “You’re right,” Denizen said. “I guess. And I’m not trying to be modest.”

  “OK,” Darcie said.

  He glanced over at Abigail. “What do you think?”

  “I think I’m going to get the duck in pomegranate jus with the serrano ham and the hibiscus salsa,” she said without looking up, “and the Goshawk didn’t put prices beside its dishes, so I can’t be expected to know better.”

  She sighed and closed the menu.

  “I also think that Edifice Greaves wears a nice suit, and probably—probably—hasn’t swung his hammer in anger in a while. But he is a Knight. No—he was a Knight, and then he was a Malleus, and then he became Palatine of the Order of the Borrowed Dark. Our leader.”

  Her voice sharpened. “First rule of combat is that you don’t go in blind against a potential threat. That’s why”—and she gave Darcie a respectful nod—“the Luxes are so important. Last winter, Knights all over the world were fighting for their lives against a threat they didn’t understand, and then suddenly, in a quiet little corner of Ireland, that threat was ended. By you.

  “They must have felt very helpless.

  “And now we have a new situation, and you’re in the middle of it again. There’s a threat here, and maybe an opportunity, but nobody knows what’s going to happen. Of course he needs to get the measure of you.

  “Unknown quantities, Denizen. That’s what kills you.”

  They all stared at her.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I’m hungry.”

  —

  THAT EVENING THEY ATE like it was their last night on earth. Denizen had never stayed anywhere that put taste before functionality. Crosscaper had believed in three square meals a day—and then halving those meals to save money. Vivian cooked a stew that was the equivalent of high-octane engine fuel, and had the same taste and consistency.

  The Goshawk didn’t have cooks. It had architects, or possibly sorcerers.

  “I can’t,” Abigail said, staring morosely at a vol-au-vent. “I won’t. I refuse.”

  “Yield not,” Denizen tried to say round a mouthful of mashed potato. It came out as eehmf hmot.

  Simon and Darcie were flat on their backs. Neither had made a noise in some time.

  When the knock came, it took Denizen a minute to process it through the gravy-fugue. With some effort, he glanced over at Abigail.

  “Did you—”

  “I did not,” she said. “I’m never eating again.”

  It took two tries for Denizen to haul himself upright before padding over to the door and opening it to reveal his mother. Everyone immediately sat up—Darcie nudging Simon awake—and the Malleus eyed the graveyard of cleaned plates on the floor with what might have been amusement.

  “I see you’ve been availing yourselves of the Palatine’s generosity.”

  The Goshawk gave its receipts in tiny black boxes. So far no one had possessed the courage to open them.

  “We’ve finished running through the preparations.” She sniffed. “After a lot of chatting. We’re ready to go to Retreat. This ... whatever it is ... is at sunset. Darcie, can you take Simon and Abigail back home?”

  She nodded, though Abigail didn’t look happy about it.

  Vivian gestured at the door. “May I have the room for a moment?”

  Despite their carbohydrate-induced comas, the other three Neophytes were gone before Vivian’s words had vanished from the air. Denizen sat straighter, ignoring the protestations of his stomach.

  “So.” Vivian looked uncomfortable. “A bit different than what we’re used to.”

  “Hah,” Denizen said. “Yep.”

  “Mmm,” she said.

  Denizen was staring very carefully at a wall sconce half a meter to Vivian’s left. He couldn’t be sure, without sacrificing his very important perusal of the sconce, but he thought she might be giving serious eyeballs to the headboard in the corner.

  “Did you talk to Greaves?”

  “Not really,” Denizen said. “I mean, I didn’t ... What did you mean when you said he’d take me away?”

  Now that the immediate threat of Greaves’s interrogation had passed, Vivian’s walls seemed to be up again. Her gaze skipped across everything in the room that wasn’t Denizen before she managed to speak.

  “It doesn’t matter. I’m taking care of it. Just do ... do what you’ve been doing. Don’t say anything to anyone about Mercy. I’ll handle the rest.”

  “The rest of what?” Denizen said. Frustration was building again, that urge to just lash out and ... and ...

  There was sweat on his brow once more.

  “Denizen.”

  Reading Vivian’s face was like trying to discern individual notes on a piano from several rooms away. Everything was hidden behind two layers of scowl. But this time he thought she looked…disappointed.

  “You just have to trust me,” she said softly. “And I…” She lifted her bag from her shoulder. “I have something for you.”

  It was a slim package wrapped in paper. Denizen took it, surprised at how heavy it was, and unwrapped it to find a knife nearly as long as his forearm in a plain black sheath.

  “Draw it,” she said. There was a strange tone in her voice.

  The dry scrape of stone against leather filled the room. It was all one piece—blade, hilt, and rounded pommel—and curved slightly, like the talon of a great cat. Its knapped edge didn’t gleam, though Denizen could feel the sharpness radiating from it like a whispered threat. There would never be more than the faintest shine from this weapon, and the leather that wrapped its grip was a dull gray.

  Mica swarmed blackly in the stone knife’s depths.

  “Do you remember the shard I used to kill the Three?”

  An ancient Malleus’s hammer had once been buried in the chest of the Endless King’s Emissary, before Denizen had shattered it against Mercy�
��s prison. Vivian had used the largest shard to kill the Three, and it was that piece he now held, its imperfections planed away to leave a sliver of polished, murderous stone.

  “You did this?” he asked. There was nothing fancy about the blade, no carvings, no flourishes. Jack was—or had been—Seraphim Row’s weaponsmith, and he had always found some way to incorporate a touch of beauty to the killing edge. With this knife, the killing edge was its beauty. It was a perfectly simple piece of technology—just a hard line in the air, a border no monster would cross.

  “I like working with my hands,” Vivian said. She looked awkward. “It ... helps me relax.”

  “Wow,” Denizen said. “That’s ... I don’t know what to say.”

  “It may not retain the hammer’s potency,” Vivian said, as if she hadn’t heard him. “And you’ll want something a bit bigger when you get older, but I thought for now it’d be a useful last-ditch weapon, a holdout when ...”

  She launched into a lecture, weighing the merits of knife-work versus swordplay, but Denizen wasn’t listening.

  He was watching her instead.

  Vivian hadn’t looked at him yet. She hadn’t taken a seat. Now that he thought about it, he rarely saw her sit down at all. She paced, or stood with feet spread, so that even at rest she looked ready to throw a punch.

  Denizen knew that should the floorboards so much as creak outside she’d have the knife out of his hands and into hers in a heartbeat. She always stood with her back to a wall. She smiled perhaps once a month. In a good month. And she was utterly fearless on the field of war.

  And she couldn’t look at him.

  “Listen,” he said. “I—”

  The Malleus abruptly shoved both hands in her pockets and started toward the door as if she’d suddenly remembered she had eight other places to be. “Yes. Well. I’m glad you—yes.”

  Pulling the door open, Vivian glanced back at him, her face once more a calm, unshakable mask.

  “Keep it close.”

  Whatever Denizen was going to say—and he wasn’t really sure himself—went unsaid. She was already gone.

  AN HOUR BEFORE SUNSET, the Knights deployed.

  They drove a hush through the Goshawk’s foyer, like static electricity before a storm. Waiters stopped in their tracks; guests paused with architecturally complex cakes mere centimeters from their lips.

  First came Palatine Edifice Greaves and, though his title was a secret, he wore it like a crown. The menace in his grin was mirrored by the prowling of the men and women behind him—no two alike in appearance, but each possessed of that same dark purpose.

  Tomoe Gozen, who slew Carcharadon after a day and a half of chasing the fiend through the understreets of Tokyo. Pierre Renaud, as deadly with one arm as most Knights were with two, and his duelist daughter, Camille. Eloise Cassidy and Nathaniel Gayle and Rowan, whom they called Head-Taker, and Malleus Vivian Hardwick herself.

  They all wore gloves. They walked like wolves.

  Behind them followed Denizen Hardwick— thirteen, worried, with a toothpaste stain on his shirt. The Knights stalked out to the waiting black jeeps as though nothing existed but their destination, and Denizen did the same, though for very different reasons.

  He was thinking about monsters.

  That’s what the Tenebrous were, whichever way you looked at them. They were nothing but hunger and shadow until the reality of this world forced them to claw together a form. Even the ones who hadn’t personally tried to eviscerate him had done a great job of scaring the hell out of him, cloaked as they were in a shroud of world-bending distortion and dread.

  The jeeps were big and black and as blocky as tanks. Vivian sat across from him, her gray eyes fixed on something far away. They left the redbrick heart of Drumcondra, slipping through streets already darkening in anticipation of night.

  The bad-dream angel. The eel-of-tweed. The Emissary and Pick-Up-the-Pieces and a dozen other Tenebrous Denizen had ... encountered over the last six months.

  The Clockwork Three.

  The Endless King, so great and terrible that even his name made the shadows grow long.

  Mercy.

  I will trust you. And she had.

  Vivian had once said the Endless King had his own sense of honor. He had certainly displayed a sharp understanding of justice. When Mercy had gone missing, he had reacted as any normal parent would—or so Denizen assumed. He wasn’t by any means an expert.

  There was no denying the fact that the Tenebrous didn’t belong in this realm. The world itself flexed around them, as if trying to throw them off. But did that make them evil? All of them?

  He ran a finger along the black iron of his palm. This world doesn’t like us either.

  Denizen had grown up on fantasy books, and plenty of them featured races who were simply evil, because that’s what they were. He hadn’t questioned it. When you were a kid, black robes and jagged armor made you evil. That was how you told good from bad.

  Unfortunately, that idea fell apart as soon as you poked it, even if you weren’t as skeptical as Denizen. Bad people—even the phrase sounded childish—could do good, and good people did bad things all too often.

  Evil wasn’t a cliff you fell from. It was a staircase you climbed.

  But that was in books, and monsters were real, and they were going to meet some right now. It was hard to argue with empirical evidence. With bodies on the ground.

  But that smile…Denizen swallowed. Monsters shouldn’t have smiles like that.

  TRINITY COLLEGE DOMINATED THE center of Dublin like a stone dragon curled on a hill—cobble-scaled and stern, its walls folded around itself like great wings. Passing through the front arch hushed the city outside until you could almost believe you’d traveled in time as well as space.

  The jeeps pulled to a stop, half the Knights disembarking with Vivian and Denizen. The others drove away into the thickness of the traffic without a word.

  As usual for a warm summer evening, the university’s gates were clogged with packs of giggling international students, but they parted unconsciously before the Knights like flesh before a knife.

  Denizen had to wonder what observers might think the Knights were. They didn’t look like a tour group, unless assassin schools did day release. They certainly didn’t look like students or lecturers. And then there was Denizen—a scrawny teenager sidling uncomfortably after them like a duck somehow adopted by a pack of wolves.

  They wove through the campus, newer buildings clinging to the old like ticks, precarious and ready to be shaken off. A massive sculpture swept bladed limbs before it in Fellows’ Square, looking uncomfortably like the war form of a Tenebrous. Students dotted the green, trying to soak up the fading sun, and the last tour groups of the evening lined up alongside the doors.

  “The Long Room,” Vivian murmured at Denizen’s shoulder. “It—”

  “—was built between 1712 and 1732,” Denizen interrupted. “Extended by 1860 because they’re allowed a copy of every book published in Ireland and the UK and they needed the space.”

  Vivian blinked.

  “Sorry,” Denizen said. “Books.”

  The electronic ticket gates had been disengaged and the group wasn’t stopped by security, though the burly guard at the door eyed each Knight as if he were daring them to cause trouble. Denizen wasn’t sure if that was brave or naïve.

  Evidently, their visit had been prearranged. Even as they entered, Denizen noted another security guard ushering the other tour groups toward an exit, clearing the place the way you would for a visiting dignitary.

  Which I guess Greaves ... is?

  Denizen jumped when the Palatine spoke right by his ear:

  “This used to be a monastery, where some of our Order were brought if the trials of war became too much. A place of quiet, secrecy, and reflection. When this university was started, our garrison ... adapted. We’ve lived in the cracks of this college for a long time—the shadows in its walls, the secret between its lines.”


  The rest of the Knights were waiting at the top of the stairs. Jack was there, and he and five others dragged massive black metal cases behind them, each one marked with the sigil of the Order—the hand-and-hammers.

  Greaves nodded at each and then turned to Denizen.

  “There are more discreet entrances ... but I thought you’d appreciate this one.”

  Denizen followed his outswept arm and stared into the Long Room of Trinity College.

  It resembled a library in the same way a mountain resembled a pebble—the same shape, but on a far more massive scale. Busts stared grimly from plinths—Newton, Goldsmith, Swift—their blank marble eyes burning into Denizen’s, the walls carved deep with Latin. It had the reverent silence of a cathedral or a forest—that same sense of something ancient and powerful just a hair’s breadth away. Knowledge prowled here, like a tiger in grass.

  “Oh,” Denizen said, the word immediately stolen away to be filed. The doors closed behind them with a muted click, leaving the security guards on the other side.

  “Do they know?” Denizen asked.

  “Certain people know certain things,” Greaves said. “And other people know other things.” He paused at an alcove marked MYTH, running his fingers lightly along the books like a pianist preparing to play.

  Denizen frowned. “Are ...”

  There had been something in the Palatine’s face.

  “Are you enjoying this?”

  Greaves’s fingers stopped on a book and pulled.

  “Not at all.”

  The bookshelf moved.

  It slid aside on secret gears, folding to allow access to a spiral staircase. The effect was so absurdly conventional—libraries, book switches, and secret stairs—that for a second Denizen felt a shadow of Greaves’s anticipation.

  One by one, they descended the shaft, the staircase weaving downward like a coil of DNA. The whole tunnel couldn’t have been more than a meter across—Denizen was the smallest of them by far and even he was cramped. He had no idea how Jack must have felt.

  To take his mind off it, Denizen tried to calculate how far underground they were, before realizing he had no idea how to do that and concentrated on not slipping instead. When the bookcase closed again, the shaft became completely silent but for the sound of footsteps and slow exhalations of breath.