Master of One

by Jaida Jones

“If you want, you can tie me up again,” Cab offered. “Not that One would approve, but she likes you well enough. Probably wouldn’t bite you for harming me.”

  “Probably.”

  “I don’t make promises I can’t keep.”

  “Thought you were her master.” Einan took a measured step away from One, whose grin widened.

  “It doesn’t exactly work that way,” Cab said.

  It does, actually.

  No, it was more than that. They belonged to each other.

  Cab didn’t get the chance to answer One. The floor shook beneath him, and dust filtered down from above. A reminder of what he was here for.

  Not to make friends.

  A cave-in near the catacombs? Or had someone accidentally triggered one of the oft-mentioned underground traps?

  “Fucking diggers,” Einan whispered. With quick fingers, she tied her hair back into a fiery braid. Then she reached for Cab’s hand. Gripped it with surprising strength. “I can take you to the catacombs now if you swear you can guide me safely through. Actually, it doesn’t matter,” she added when Cab hesitated. “If we both die, then you weren’t the man for the job. Clearly. And Sil lives to carry on the cause.”

  “I don’t intend to get us killed.”

  Cab was making a lot of promises lately. After he’d sworn never to take another oath.

  Maybe that was the first resolution he needed to break.

  Einan led him swiftly down a dark length of sewer tunnel. Made a left, then a right, then a sharp V-shaped turn that took them through a hole where the stone wall had crumbled, leaving an opening large enough for an ill-fed person to squeeze through.

  Cab winced at the squeal of metal on rock as One followed them.

  The audacity, One said. I’ve lived hundreds of your lifetimes, and you worry I’ll scratch easily?

  After that, Cab shut up. Einan’s freckles stood out dark against her white knuckles, white throat, and white cheeks, illuminated by One’s faint glow.

  Finally, Einan paused at a section of wall that was slick with green algae—or worse. “Through here.”

  She’d barely said it before she pulled Cab relentlessly forward and straight toward the wall. He didn’t have time to shout. They passed through the stone like it was the curtain of a waterfall, came out into a steep, upward tunnel. Cab felt himself gasp. Heard One chuckling in delight as she passed through the wall behind them.

  “What was that?” he asked.

  Another tremor shook the earth around them. Einan swore. “That was all Sil. And we can talk about how wonderful she is later, all right?”

  Without waiting for his agreement, Einan trudged up the slope. Threw her shoulder against something heavy. Stone scraped. A weak, greenish light filtered into the tunnel. Einan’s long legs disappeared through the crack in the ceiling. Above, she pushed the heavy flagstone farther aside, then reached her hands down for Cab.

  He knew where they were before she pulled him up. Arched hallways of cold white stone, carved without seams. And the vault drawers made of opal and milkglass.

  They shimmered, reflecting One’s light, just as they had before in the light of the captain’s torch.

  “You said something about diggers,” Cab murmured.

  Einan’s lips twitched, more grimace than smile. “We thought the fae were gone. That’s what the Queen told her people—it’s what’s written down in all the histories. Only that wasn’t true, was it?”

  Cab shook his head. No. He tried to orient himself. Looked left, then right. Down seemingly identical forked paths.

  “The fae did disappear,” Einan said, “and many of them were killed, but not all. Because while Her Majesty was busy turning the finest architecture left by the fae kingdom into a channel for piss and shit, she found something in the deep she wasn’t expecting: a sleeping fae girl.”

  From the way she said it, reverence and reverie, Cab knew who she meant. Sil.

  “There she was. Tucked in for a thousand-year nap. So the queen figured, where there’s one, maybe there’re others. Kept close guard on the treasure she’d found and set about searching for more. She destroyed whole neighborhoods. Homes, shops, whatever was in the way of the tunnels. Sent a get-out-now squad of Queensguard with a royal writ, and anyone who didn’t budge conveniently disappeared before excavation began.”

  “Happened to you?” Cab asked.

  “What’s it matter? Happened to plenty.”

  “And they found more fae. Explains how sorcerers like Morien the Last got so powerful.” Cab drew his gaze to the stony ceiling. A light was out over the right-hand path—the catacombs weren’t lit by torches but by glowing spore-light, an accidental offshoot of a sorcerer’s experiments with fungi. They wouldn’t burn out over time, and they wouldn’t blow out in a gust like fire.

  It was a deliberate marker.

  Left, then.

  “This way.” Cab directed them, all too aware of Einan breathing down his neck. He couldn’t help but feel like she wanted something more from him, although Cab had already sworn his allegiance and couldn’t think of what else he had to offer.

  Another rumble beneath them. Cab dodged a fall of pebbles. He jerked back from touching the wall for balance. Behind him, Einan scrambled to do the same.

  Among Queensguard recruits, whispers suggested that the catacombs remembered everyone who touched their stone. The walls remembered. The old queens remembered. And so every recruit kept their hands firmly to themselves on their tours, glad of the thick bootsoles between them and the stone floors.

  After he’d fled the Queensguard, Cab came to suspect those rumors were probably gossip encouraged by the recruits’ officers, who didn’t want the rowdy youths touching everything in the royal burial chambers. He hadn’t realized how deeply the old superstition still affected him.

  He wasn’t willing to test his theory. Not with others depending on him.

  “Hands in,” Cab said gruffly. “Don’t touch the walls.”

  Einan didn’t have to follow his orders, but she did follow this one, and Cab was grateful. He could only help as much as she’d let him.

  He gestured reflexively with two fingers, an old Queensguard signal that meant they were to move along around the corner. Einan replied with a ruder variant.

  “I’m no soldier,” she said, had the good sense to get in close and keep her voice low, “and I don’t respond to commands like a dog.”

  “Right. I’m going around the corner.” Cab barely moved his mouth. When he glanced back at Einan, he had only an impression of her face. She was so alive. High color in her cheeks, the sheen in her eyes like light through a whiskey bottle. So unlike the mirror-glaze of the Queensguard’s gaze. Not a soldier, and obviously terrified, but there was anger there, too. Determination.

  She wanted to be here.

  That was Cab’s impression as he moved, nearly stepping into open air. Einan slammed solidly into his back.

  For one sickening moment, Cab thought he’d swing forward and down through the hole where the floor had given way.

  Someone had triggered one of the traps before them.

  Then someone else had come along behind and turned the triggered trap into a passageway. Real torches stuck into the walls, casting haphazard orange light through the empty space. Steep slopes on all sides faded into almost total darkness below. The bottom wasn’t visible, but Cab thought he could see something—someone—moving down there. Deep, deep down.

  “We’re going down,” he said.

  Einan was unfazed. “You afraid of heights, handsome?”

  “Not that I know of,” said Cab.

  “Figures.” Einan replied. “Why should this next bit be a nightmare for you?”

  In the torchlight, Cab could see strange markings carved into the stone. He didn’t understand them, but they were too deliberate to be claw marks from vermin. They formed a pattern.

  It was nothing like the beautiful, barren halls of the queens’ catacombs. And yet something abou
t the structure of the hall below mirrored the hall above. Dark and light. Night and day.

  Better hurry if you don’t want to lose them, One said.

  I’m going, Cab said, but didn’t move yet.

  Do you think I’d ask you to do anything unsafe?

  Properly scolded, Cab jumped—and slid on his ass through gravel, past torches and carvings, into the dark. Panic rose, louder than the inner voice demanding to know why he was shredding his backside for a Resistance he’d fought to put down not so long ago.

  The answer to that was obvious. The fullness of his heart with One in it made his transgressions impossible to ignore. There was no honor in hiding if he could use his skills to combat the Queen’s brute might.

  The real problem lay in trying to figure how he could stop sliding without smashing into a wall or cutting himself to pieces on debris.

  Cab jerked his forearms in against his chest, squinting at the flicker of torches as they whizzed past. Behind him, Einan’s soft voice muttered something that sounded part prayer and part vulgar action with a plate of mashed potatoes. Then he heard a crash of gravel that meant she was sliding down after him.

  Kept going for a while, until he rolled into a wall. The impact didn’t quite wind him.

  Einan’s secondary impact was the blow that did him in.

  One followed them, picking her way through the broken shale like the steep angle meant nothing to her.

  Einan helped Cab to his feet. Over her shoulder he could see three mechanical drills the size of horses. Each had two stations—one to turn the bit and one to steer. All three machines were coated in black dirt. One had fallen on its side, revealing a spiral of diamond plating down the bit. Someone had hung a pair of grimy goggles on the handlebars.

  “Look,” Einan counseled in a whisper. “They left their drilling equipment. They only do that when they’ve found something.”

  Do you know what’s—who’s—down there? Cab asked One.

  One shut two of her three eyes. The center eye remained open, shimmered faintly in the darkness. Cab felt the start of a headache, vision swimming, doubling, then returning to normal.

  Yes, One said.

  Without elaborating, she shot forward, toward whatever awaited them.

  Cab was bound to her. He had no choice but to do the same.

  59

  Cab

  Cab didn’t know Einan had followed him until they rounded the first corner, One in the lead, and found themselves face-to-face with two Queensguard. Einan crashed into Cab’s back with a curse that would’ve made Rags the thief blush.

  The Queensguard charged.

  They were following orders. Bad orders. The same fate Cab had run to escape. It wasn’t their fault.

  It brought Cab up short, but it meant nothing to One or Einan. One knew what she was fighting to protect, and when she reared on her hind legs, Cab felt fresh, cool strength flowing through his limbs.

  The Queensguard—had he known them? served with them? eaten with them or trained beside them?—didn’t have time to make a sound before One was upon them.

  Each blow, each snarl, each lash of claws and raking of teeth, echoed in Cab’s bones. He found himself completing One’s every movement, meeting her between slashes, striking out from the other side to finish whatever she had begun. He acted without thinking, without needing to think. He saw what she saw and she watched through his eyes. They were everywhere at once, in complete harmony.

  It was nothing like being commanded in a drill.

  The two Queensguard toppled like ninepins in a heap.

  To her credit, Einan didn’t miss a beat before she was relieving their bodies of weapons. Cab’s guilt hadn’t settled before she shoved a sword into his hand.

  “Thought for a moment you might freeze and leave a poor maiden defenseless.” Einan shoved two daggers into her belt, looking at the second sword with distaste before hurling it down the tunnel. “I like something with more finesse,” she added by way of explanation.

  “Whatever suits you,” Cab agreed.

  He was trying to ward off the sense of numbness that occupied him now that he had a Queensguard sword in hand. These Resistance folk were chatty, and he didn’t want to give Einan any more reason to mistrust him.

  “I don’t like this.” A burr of real anger caught in Einan’s throat as she looked at Cab. “We risked everything for you, thought you could lead us through the catacombs, but you can’t even do that reliably. What if you’re bad luck?”

  That’s gratitude for you, One sniffed.

  “Bad luck is the only luck permitted Her Majesty’s enemies,” Cab replied.

  Einan snorted. This time it was she who went first, Cab a step behind. They followed the glow of One’s body, a lantern in the dark. No one had set torches in this part of the tunnel yet. It was too fresh.

  A scraping sound ahead made Cab tighten his grip on his sword.

  Frightening how easily the instincts came back to him. Maybe they’d never left.

  No time to dwell on that, either.

  They exploded out of the mouth of the tunnel: two humans and a silver lizard too big and shiny to be natural. Cab saw three diggers and two more Queensguard, threw his shoulder into the first man and knocked him down. Einan whirled and stabbed, caught a digger in the shoulder with one of her knives, then leaped on him like a wild animal. Cab didn’t have to keep track of One. He knew where she was, same as in the first fight. He let his body take over. Thinking would prove detrimental at a time like this.

  He could use the skills he’d learned. He didn’t have to fear them.

  He kicked the man he’d knocked down, then turned away as One leaped in to parry a thrust from the next Queensguard. A third man caught him in the cheek with an armored glove and Cab staggered, face raw from the pain of a strike.

  Tail thrashing, One snarled and lunged. Einan slammed the hilt of her dagger into a digger’s head.

  Cab’s face felt tight and hot and One’s claws were stained ruby when they finally lowered their weapons to silence.

  “Shit.” Einan’s voice was hoarse.

  She was closest to the dig site, so it was she who’d first seen what the Queen’s men had been excavating from a nearby mound of dirt and stone: the corner of a glass coffin, threaded with silver.

  Inside, a pulse. A glow that throbbed like a heartbeat.

  One padded closer. The carvings on the walls brightened, lit from behind.

  Through the glass, they saw it together: the top half of a golden face in repose. Asleep. Peaceful. When their shadow fell across its features, its eyes fluttered open, and they were silver through and through.

  60

  Inis

  Between Three and Shining Talon, Somhairle made his staggering way to bed. One of the servants had a cup of strong tea waiting, smelling of bark and ginger and mint, and Somhairle nearly spilled it in his lap with shaking hands.

  Inis helped him to drink.

  “I fear I’ve overextended myself.” His fingers lingered on hers for an instant, letting her know he was all right.

  Should have been an actor. Two sounded impressed.

  Tea finished, Somhairle collapsed on the pillows, face releasing its tension in sleep.

  They left him with Three standing guard, perched on the bedpost.

  When they returned to the hall, Morien awaited them. His eyes glittered with veins of silver.

  Had they been that way before?

  “No need to worry,” he said in his steady, unimpressed voice. Each word was a pinprick in Inis’s heart. “I don’t intend to do to the prince what I needed to with you. He’s a vulnerable spirit, too kind for court. Would he do a thing that would put your life in danger, Inis Fraoch Ever-Loyal?”

  It was like being back on the Hill, at a ball or tea party, trading barbs with a smile. “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean—” Inis began.

  “Find me the next fragment.” Morien held up his hand and Inis’s throat shut tight. She couldn
’t breathe. When Rags choked on a gasp, Inis understood she wasn’t the only one suffering from Morien’s warning. “That is all I require.”

  The curtains in the hallway billowed inward, though the windows were shut.

  Morien was gone when they settled.

  Inis snarled and slammed her hand into the wall. She let it hold her weight as she gasped for breath, trembling and fiercely glad Somhairle hadn’t seen her like that.

  If she could keep her temper from getting the better of her, she could believe they’d win this battle.

  So why did it taste bitter, like soft, smoldering leaf ash, reminding her of the pipe her father used to smoke?

  You’re a puppet who sees its own strings, Two said. No peace until they’re cut.

  One day, she’d learn how to unravel the knot in her throat.

  Inis rubbed her neck as if to reassure herself that no invisible fingers still gripped it. There was no safety to be found in defying Morien.

  No safety in the Queen’s embrace, either.

  Any mistake could spark unforgivable consequences, but Inis couldn’t protect her family by merely staying out of the Queen’s way.

  She felt Two twine around and between her legs, momentarily getting lost in her skirts before reappearing. His eyes peered out under the fall of fabric.

  The little thief has provided us with something invaluable. Not everything is lost.

  Inis crouched to rub Two’s head, the jagged shape where his missing ear should be. Inis didn’t know why she hadn’t thought of it before, but someone must have stolen a fork or spoon from the set.

  “We’ll have to wait for Somhairle to wake up,” she said aloud, with the same false confidence she used to show for Ivy’s sake. This time she wasn’t trying to fool her frightened little sister but a nasty sorcerer from whom only her inner thoughts were safe. Her false certainty would have to work. She knew what awaited them if they failed. “I can tell Somhairle how to commune with Three, how to figure out where to go next, if he hasn’t worked it out already. Maybe Morien will have found what we lost by then.”

  “Wanna bet me on it?” Rags asked.

  They met each other’s eyes.