Master of One

by Jaida Jones

  Only her eldest brother, Tomman, had been named as guilty in the writ-of-summons, but Inis knew that was as ludicrous as if she’d been named herself. Tomman had done nothing wrong. One of Lord Ever-Loyal’s enemies at court must have whispered enough poison into the right ears to have Inis’s father removed from the playing board, no longer a threat, a worry, or anything else, other than garden mulch. They wanted his lands, or his influence, or the rare books he owned, and thought his life—the lives of his children—would be a fair price to pay.

  It had happened to other families. Sometimes Inis wondered how many. But she didn’t think about it as often as she used to.

  Memories of her brothers’ laughter, stilled in their slashed throats, her father’s refusal to kneel before they slit his, visited her with the same patternless frequency as rain on the heath. Aches came and went. She refused to be too grateful about the fact that she was still alive, thanks to the generosity of the Crown. The Queen’s royal compassion.

  During the massacre, little Ivy had found Inis hiding in a wardrobe. She’d crawled in beside her, buried her face in the collection of their mother’s dresses. They’d wrapped stiff petticoats and jeweled sleeves around their heads so they wouldn’t have to hear the servants screaming.

  Mother only survived, Inis later learned, because they had kept her alive specifically to make her suffer. They’d forced her to watch every moment of torture, every instant of death.

  When morning crept in through the flame-licked windows, a rider brought the survivors’ pardon—with stipulations.

  Leave the Hill. Go to the Far Glades.

  Never return.

  Inis had no desire to return.

  The pardon was a gesture at apology, blaming the overzealousness of the Queensguard, who hadn’t been instructed on paper to kill everyone they saw. Yet those had been their orders, if not officially.

  Eradicate anyone who might pose a threat to the Queen.

  No one shed a tear when traitors were slaughtered.

  The Ever-Loyals had grown up alongside the Ever-Bright princes and called them friends. Inis had spun fae tales with Somhairle while Tomman and Prince Laisrean dueled with sticks nearby. She and Ivy had provided surrogate sisterhood to the Ever-Bright family as it firmed its foundations.

  Not one of the princes came to the Ever-Loyals’ defense when the Queensguard marched on them in the night.

  Who was living in the Ever-Loyal mansion now, tending its blood-soaked earth? Whose hounds roamed wild on the grounds of Inis’s childhood?

  Inis didn’t know and forced herself not to care. In the cottage that was the new home of House Ever-Loyal, she read to her silent mother and Ivy each night, an attempt to fill her sister’s head with better fodder for her dreams, and spent her days walking up and down the heath, even when rain broke suddenly and drenched her to the skin.

  Good country air, breeding a strong constitution.

  Her boots had holes twice mended by her own hands with scraps of unwanted leather. She sold their purple mourning silks. She cut articulated lacework from sleeves and organza petticoats from underskirts and sold those, too. She gathered piles of heather, dried them in bundles, filled the cottage with them. She opened windows and beat dust from the curtains. She went to town with their faithful manservant Bute on every errand, learning to haggle over the price of eggs and check loaves of bread to be sure they weren’t moldy before she paid for them. She no longer gave the village people a fine laugh at her expense. She cooked, cleaned, hated sewing but sewed anyway, managed their budget, kept track of Ever-Loyal’s banishment stipend when it arrived, and never asked the couriers for news from the Hill. She’d helped Bute repair damage to the roof thatching. They’d all gotten lice, but she was the one to get rid of them, going through Ivy’s hair, then Mother’s, with a fine-tooth comb out in front of the cottage. Because she couldn’t give herself the same treatment and couldn’t trust anyone to do it for her, she’d wrapped her head in lye-soaked rags to kill the vermin.

  It had worked.

  She didn’t smell good, but she didn’t care. The lye had burned her scalp, but she had no one to complain to.

  She walked and walked until the blisters on her feet hardened to calluses. She grew to love the view from the hills that twisted and tumbled themselves higher, crawling toward the mountains. She thought sometimes she could see Lost-Lands treetops from her highest climbs, could catch the shimmering hint of black trees where the fae Folk had made their final stand and burned, and burned, and burned.

  Stories of the Fair Wars, of the wicked Folk and their defeat by House Ever-Bright’s clever sorcerers, had thrilled Inis as a child. They’d been a favorite escape back when the worst thing to sour her days was a six-hour dress fitting, or a piano lesson from their tutor with the garlic-laden breath.

  When Inis thought of the fae now, she imagined screaming. The scent of her father’s blood as it pooled on the blue-tiled floor of their audience hall. The shrill roaring in her head that insisted none of it could be happening, though all of it was.

  It had happened. To the fae first. Then, hundreds of years later, to House Ever-Loyal.

  Was it better to be cut down alongside your family? Better to die with than to survive without? Inis set her furious questions into a steel box within herself and locked it tight. Her sister and her mother—what remained of her family—needed her. The answers to her questions didn’t.

  She tired herself out so well each day that sleep came easily, without any of the bad dreams that haunted Ivy.

  Thinking it might help to talk about those dreams, to banish them the way the last of the Ever-Loyals had been banished, Inis took Ivy to the sunniest spots she knew, built her little sister bowers of heather, and told her to share her ghosts as though they were part of someone else’s story.

  Close her eyes. Feel the sun on her face.

  Tell her big sister everything.

  One Queensguard chasing her through the halls of—home. (Ivy always stumbled over that word, her expression losing focus with a loneliness that made Inis want to split trees in twain with her bare hands.) In her dreams, instead of letting her go, the Queensguard did to her what had been done to Papa.

  “That’s enough, little egg,” Inis had whispered, pulling Ivy close. “You don’t need to say it.”

  The nightmares continued.

  So did life.

  35

  Inis

  Change arrived when Inis was shouting like a haunt-cat about two broken eggs Farmer Brogan insisted hadn’t been broken before they went into her basket, which was a lie she wouldn’t swallow.

  “Perhaps they were crushed by the rest of your dinner, my lady?”

  “They’re the only things in there.” Inis’s black skirts formed a waterfall over her gray petticoats. She’d tucked them into her belt to create a pouch for carrying the rest of the day’s fresh produce. Green beetradish stems swayed with her anger. She smelled and looked a wildfields fright. “You might think I’m a fool, but have the good courtesy not to treat me as such.”

  Bute stood at her side, embarrassed but refusing to abandon her.

  Inis had learned from her mistakes of the first few months. She wouldn’t raise trouble now without irrefutable reason.

  A crowd should have formed around them to watch the fuss, but hadn’t.

  A squealing passel of barefoot children tore off away from them down another street, followed not far behind by the village carpenter and his wife, Fishmonger Anthea. Only a few spared a glance for wild-haired Inis Fraoch Ever-Loyal, who was probably cursed, and definitely a pain in everyone’s ass. There was a time not so long ago when she’d have died before putting her mended boots and underthings on display.

  Now nothing mattered except keeping the heath from growing over and burying her family. Another unmarked gravesite.

  “Have it your way, my lady.” Curiosity had succeeded with Farmer Brogan where Inis’s stubbornness hadn’t. Whatever the children were running to see�
��likely a cockfight—he didn’t want to miss it. “Take your eggs for replacement, save your shouting for some other luckless bastard, and have a fine day.”

  Inis turned to Bute blazing triumph, seeing the helpless shrug he gave Farmer Brogan and the grin in his eyes reserved for her alone, the only praise necessary. She made the switch, stood straighter, and started back to Ivy.

  Not home. She wouldn’t ever think of it as home.

  It was the place where what was left of home slept at night.

  The cottage granted to the Ever-Loyals in their banishment was larger than any of the village’s other houses and far removed from the main thoroughfare, sitting atop a low hill overlooking the marketplace. Some long-ago magistrate’s family had lived there, separate and above his constituents. Plenty of room, but bare to scrutiny, never a true part of village life.

  Under Inis’s supervision, and with Bute’s guidance, the front garden blossomed, the door no longer hung off one hinge. The windows were clean and the roof had been repaired.

  But right now, there were horses approaching the cottage, two handsome mounts with a rider each. Someone led them on foot, and an enormous shaggy dog walked beside them.

  It wasn’t stipend day. Their last had arrived less than two weeks ago.

  Didn’t matter. This entourage was no courier. Couriers came alone like clockwork once every double moon. They never bothered with ceremony.

  Inis dropped the basket of eggs even before she heard Ivy scream.

  One of the riders dismounted.

  Inis started to run.

  36

  Cab

  FOUR DAYS EARLIER

  The raid on House Ever-Loyal had taken a month to plan, based on good intelligence that key members of the family were plotting to harm the Queen.

  The irony of the Ever-Loyals acting against their namesake quality wasn’t lost on those included in the innermost circle of the Queensguard’s most trusted young recruits. Bright-eyed, fiercely devoted, brutally trained, too eager to serve their country.

  Their Queen was threatened. They marched to save her.

  Midnight, the night of the raid. Cab led a squad of recruits he’d trained beside, had been taught to trust with every breath. They felt the same about him. The massive mansion loomed over them while their captain knocked on the main door.

  Cab couldn’t pinpoint when rounding up traitors had ended and the slaughter had begun.

  It hadn’t been by his order but by their captain’s. An innocent child’s throat was slit. One old groundskeeper, wielding a pitchfork, had entered at that wrong moment, sparked a frenzy that for Cab had ended when he found himself throwing a little girl to the floor, his blade to her throat.

  He blinked.

  He’d seen her eyes.

  She wasn’t crying. Not because she wasn’t terrified. Her fear had carried her somewhere else. Cab stepped back and slipped on a torn curtain trailing through a pool of hot blood. He went down, fingers suddenly unable to keep their hold on the hilt of his sword. It had clattered away from them.

  “Run,” he’d told the girl.

  Then he’d taken his own advice.

  In the chaos and carnage, he shouted to one of his bloodstained, glass-eyed cadre, beating a corpse to pulp, that he’d seen someone flee out the window and he intended to follow. His voice had sounded as cool and certain as steel.

  Out into the dawn.

  Shedding his bloodstained armor, tossing it aside in the trampled garden.

  Didn’t look back to see the first line of smoke rise, the first flame tonguing out a smashed window, as House Ever-Loyal began to burn.

  How many of the Queensguard had followed their orders because they had had no other choice? How many had been like Cab, not yet under the thrall of mirrorcraft, but blinded by love for their Queen? How many had decided, like him, that this was the last Queensguard order they would follow?

  Like any true coward, he was terrified of the answers.

  They were a haunting. They prowled the perimeter of his guest room in Faolan’s summer mansion, drawing ever closer as he recovered from Morien’s mirrorcraft.

  No matter how far he tried to run, there was no escaping this: Cabhan of Kerry’s-End, Master of One, was the only person who could lead Morien the Last to the next master, the next fragment of the Great Paragon.

  After he’d recovered from the initial side effects of the mirror sorcery planted in his heart—this involved hours of vomiting—his first instinct had been to kill himself rather than be a sorcerer’s puppet. But One was there to stop him.

  I’d prefer it if you don’t. I’ve waited a thousand years to meet you. Only getting to be with you for mere days would be a slap in the face.

  Cab was imprisoned. All his running had led to nothing.

  Except it wasn’t nothing. He’d found One, and One had found him.

  Can’t die yet, Cabhan admitted. Not before the sorcerer gets his.

  That’s the spirit, my soft little fighter.

  Cabhan laughed darkly, pressing himself against One’s cool scales and trying to sleep. This close, he could hear the ticking of her inner workings. Like a heartbeat, only more reliable. He shut his eyes, pushed his face into hers, and drew new depths of strength from being with her. Felt whole again, more peaceful than he had in years.

  Felt less peaceful when her mind clasped his like a handshake, met his like ocean kissed river.

  What are you doing? Trying not to panic. Knowing he could trust her.

  Looking for something, One replied.

  Cabhan lay back, tension tossed away by the tide of One’s sentience. Let her look.

  She flowed through him, beneath his skin. The only acknowledgment of Morien’s presence was how she kept away from his heart.

  It was Morien’s fault that they couldn’t complete each other.

  Though they came damn close.

  The tickle of her claws tracing his veins, the flicker of her tongue behind his teeth, the throb of her pulse in his temples. His breathing eased and he floated, serene. He slumped into the bed, forgetting where his flesh met fabric. His fingertips tingled, went numb.

  One traveled the inside of his skull, his memories, his marrow. She saw everything, knew everything, and embraced all without the stabs of guilt that still woke Cab, sweating and snarling, most nights. She watched what he’d done, the mistakes he’d made, the false steps taken and the right ones, without judgment.

  So. This is who you are, her voice whispered.

  Somewhere along the way, Cab began to weep.

  This was what the fae could do, and they were all but lost now.

  He drifted out of consciousness, entering a state more restful than sleep. When he opened his eyes again, it was morning. One was curled up by his side, sharp teeth and scaled chin resting on his knee. He stared at her for a long while, recognized what her face looked like when she smiled instead of grinned.

  Good. You survived.

  More than that. Cab couldn’t remember when last he’d slept without jerking awake to fight or flee a dreamed-up enemy. He sat up, without dislodging One, and stretched his shoulders. Only the faintest twinge between his ribs, like the mirrorglass was the last remaining shard of regret he possessed. He rubbed his stubbled cheek and pushed his hair from his eyes.

  Better than survived, Cab thought.

  One’s chin dipped, eyes flickering. Yes. We are an excellent match.

  He stood, was halfway to the door—he needed a bath, every inch of his skin too warm and metallic-smelling—when she added, I know what we must do to find Two’s master.

  Cab paused, one hand on the doorframe. Resting at eye level, a scar on his knuckle from his final night as Queensguard.

  Think we can find where the last of the Ever-Loyals are lately? One asked.

  It had been so long since Cab had let anyone or anything under his armor, he’d all but forgotten the pain of a gut-punch, blooming its bruise in him now. Leaving him breathless as a dead man.

>   He hadn’t realized moving forward would mean he’d have to come to terms with what he saw when he looked back.

  37

  Cab

  So there it was. Unavoidable.

  Having to face the surviving Ever-Loyals, having to look them in the eye, would prove too much for the craven to swallow.

  But to disobey the sorcerer would be ending his life as surely as if he’d done the deed with his own hands. And even though he’d noted a letter opener and razor while taking stock of the assets in the guest room, killing himself wasn’t the solution to his reckoning.

  Cab went to Morien instead. What else could he do?

  The sorcerer’s eyes pitched black in the dim light of Faolan’s study. The windows had been obscured with bloodred fabric hung like shrouds, obscuring the glass, blotting out all natural light. A fire crackled angrily in the hearth, though Cab detected no heat in the air.

  “You look hale, Cabhan of Kerry’s-End.” Morien hovered the way a spider hovered, pleased as one with a web full of prey. “An incredible recovery. Queensguard training does make a lad strong.”

  “Right,” Cab agreed, because Thank you didn’t seem appropriate. There was something venomous about Morien’s goodwill, considering he’d been the one doling out the punishment. The agony. “I remember how to follow orders.”

  One’s tinkling laughter chimed in his head. He hadn’t meant it as a joke. He was trying to placate, to show he wasn’t a threat and could be relied on to do as instructed.

  In short, he was lying through his teeth. Thankfully, One approved of who he was lying to, which didn’t leave room for guilt.

  Morien refused to fill the silence, waited for Cab to explain why he’d come, wouldn’t move on until he got what he wanted.

  Cab’s hands felt empty without a tool of some kind. He clasped them behind him after a second’s uncertainty, aware of how the position made him stand too straight, almost at attention. “I have a destination for us.”