Master of One

by Jaida Jones

  “Listen,” Rags said, “I’m gonna take this thing off and leave it over there. Then I’m gonna lie down and close my eyes, pretend to sleep. After that, you’re gonna take the blindfold back out and put it on my chest again, so quietly that I don’t hear you do it. And then I’m gonna do some snooping.”

  Shining Talon’s face regained its faintly quizzical blankness. “What is ‘snooping’?”

  “Investigating. I’ll try to find this ‘something terrible’ you’ve mentioned, ’cause what the fuck, why not, this is my year of bad decisions.” Rags forced a grin, then wheeled away to follow his own idiot plan.

  “For one who doubts his own character at each turn, you act with bravery at every chance presented.”

  Rags pretended not to hear him. He couldn’t let that kind of distraction in, not now. The blindfold would slow his heart, but he was ready for that. If he didn’t overextend himself, it would be fine.

  Shining Talon had never asked Rags for anything before. Rags was giving this to him.

  It went smoothly. He only knew Shining Talon had draped the cloth over his heart a second time because he felt it, not because he heard it or saw it. Morien wouldn’t know anything was amiss, would think Rags was lazy or beat down or both.

  As long as nobody saw him knocking around.

  But nobody would see him. He was made for this.

  It was what had landed him in all this trouble in the first place.

  70

  Rags

  Out in the hall, Rags was back to his old life: lingering around a corner or behind a column to avoid servants in a house too fine and too big to be his, sticking to the shadows, casing the joint for a wicked heist.

  Only this time, the house in question was a castle. The castle.

  Well, he’d bested fae ruins, so the home of Her Majesty should be a breeze by comparison.

  Never mind that he had someone with him, because Shining Talon could be quiet as a cat after the cream and ten times as graceful.

  No poisoned arrows. No doors whispering Rags’s darkest secrets back to him. They left their room behind, no note for Inis in case she read it with Morien over her shoulder.

  Shining Talon could sense when they were about to pass by a mirror, and that was a handy talent. Couldn’t be too sure which mirrors were Morien’s and which weren’t. Maybe they all were.

  The two of them worked well together. Better than if Rags had been on this job alone.

  Twice the fae heard someone coming when Rags didn’t, gripped him by the shirt and pulled him backward to avoid being caught. Rags chalked it up to his instincts being off, to having too much on his mind. Too much in his heart. He couldn’t blame himself for not having the same eagle-sharp reflexes as a fae prince, so he nodded shaky thanks, told himself he didn’t have the words because he was conserving energy for sneaking around.

  With both of them huddled together in an alcove or behind a corner, Shining Talon holding him by his shirt until it was safe to proceed, Rags kept his mind on the mission.

  He couldn’t afford to let his breath run ragged or his pulse quicken in the shelter of Shining Talon’s tattooed arms.

  After they’d taken three sets of servants’ staircases, all of them down, it was Rags’s turn to return the favor, gripping Shining Talon by the shirt and dragging him into a dark alcove so he wouldn’t barge into a fancy footman wearing silver gloves.

  The guy passed them. Rags bent into a crouch, willing the dizzy spell—it had cropped up after winding down, down, down all those stairs—to pass. His heart had to labor twice as hard against the silencing effect of the blindfold.

  “Just gotta catch my breath,” he wheezed.

  Shining Talon didn’t answer him, mouth drawn, eyes dull.

  Rags gripped the fae’s elbow, pulling himself straight. “Whoa, hey. Snap out of it.”

  “We are closer,” Shining Talon explained. “I hear sorrowful voices.”

  While Rags could’ve turned back, or asked for more time, the suddenly ashen color of Shining Talon’s silver eyes told him what he already knew.

  No chance of that.

  His chest felt tight, like he’d been running in a dead sprint with the Queensguard on his heels. If he left the blindfold on too long, would it kill him? Probably not, since the magic was Morien’s, and Morien needed him alive.

  Then again, Morien didn’t know he was using the blindfolds for this. There went that theory.

  Onward, looking after Shining Talon to make sure there were no more missteps, no more too-close calls. Another flight of stairs down, three more footmen, a butler, two cooks, five maids. None of them gossiped, Rags noted, or laughed or smiled or wasted time. Most of them were a step short of running. Wherever they were headed, they were taking their duties seriously. Too damn seriously.

  Whenever there was a mirror nearby, Shining Talon would flinch, hiss. So he was still useful for that, although each time, Rags found himself gripping Shining Talon’s hand, squeezing it to bring him back to the present.

  Rags had to take another break eventually, leaning back against the wall with his eyes shut while Shining Talon kept watch.

  He counted a few slow cycles of his heartbeat. Then pushed on.

  They were one floor below ground level, having descended what felt like the entire Hill on the inside. But that was where the servants’ staircases ended. Rags and Shining Talon circled the perimeter once, and it took ages. The castle was massive, round to fit atop the Hill, and unnaturally quiet. There were no idle comings and goings, no men and women of state milling on the white tile inlaid with black bone. Rags didn’t like it. Gave him the crawlies.

  “Below,” Shining Talon murmured.

  Rags looked down, saw that they were standing on a black hand. More fae bones. He made a face, but it was time for him to be useful, to find a way down for Shining Talon. If he was leading them straight into some bad shit, at least he was leading at all. Right?

  Easier thought than done.

  Still, Rags had experience with tricky architecture and getting into places he wasn’t meant to find. He also saw another hand inlaid into the floor, about ten paces from where they stood, and noted that its fingers were pointing the same way as the first.

  Another ten paces, another hand. Rags crept from one set of black bones to the next, which kept him close to the wall. That was good. He was starting to feel faint. He counted off eleven hands in total before the trail stopped. A hand was missing beneath a high, narrow window with a plush velvet seat built into the sill.

  No, scratch that. There was a hand, but it was white bone, human bone, and almost impossible to see against the surrounding white tile. Rags crouched to inspect it, then found himself grinning as he set his palm against the outline. Sure enough, the top of the window seat hinged open soundlessly, revealing a space wide enough for Shining Talon to crawl through, which meant Rags could fit, no trouble.

  Beneath the window seat: a ladder. Rags sent a prayer to Lady Winter and gripped the rungs for dear life. Miraculously, he managed not to plummet straight down.

  Shining Talon had no difficulty following him.

  The window seat snapped shut after them, plunged them into darkness. Or it would have, if not for that faint glow of Shining Talon’s skin.

  Rags counted the rungs as they went, although he started to harbor a worm of panic when he came to fifty. How far down were they going? And how much of an idiot was he for wanting to reach the bottom without knowing what he’d find there?

  He forced himself to slow his breathing. If he panicked between the castle and what lay beneath, he’d black out and fall to his death for sure.

  He just had to remind himself that after weeks of being out of control, he could control this. Going down was his choice.

  Whether or not it was a terrible one.

  Finally, after seventy rungs, Rags’s heel hit solid ground. Shining Talon dismounted the ladder after him, and Rags groped his way one-handed along a dark tunnel that curved inwar
d toward the Hill’s center.

  They had to be below the Hill at this point, surrounded by fae bones. Shining Talon’s breath shivered audibly. Rags didn’t know what to do for him, settled for doing nothing. He wouldn’t tell him it was gonna be all right, because Rags wouldn’t make a promise that could be so easily broken. And unlike in the carriage, they were on the move, not the place to touch Shining Talon’s arm or take his hand. Rags recalled the warmth of smooth fae skin against his own before he banished the thought. No distractions.

  In front of them, a sliver of silvery light shone from around a final curve in the tunnel. Rags slowed, let his eyes adjust, and kept himself tucked against the wall so he wouldn’t bust in on—

  What he saw around the corner nearly blinded him. He drew back, squinting and wincing, biting down curses. Light everywhere, it seemed, like the chamber they’d found held a sun. Only there was no heat, so it couldn’t be fire. The place was cold, sucked warmth from Rags’s fingertips, his chin, his nose.

  He had to look in there again, try to resolve the overpowering light into a set of images. He couldn’t ask Shining Talon to do it, because Shining Talon had gone still as stone after edging away from the light. Rags could barely see the glint of his gaze in the shadow.

  He wasn’t glowing anymore.

  Steeling himself, narrowing his eyes, Rags peered out into the burning white space a second time. It was dizzying. His vision swam. He was seeing too much at once, too many of the same shapes, like he’d stumbled into Whisper William’s Horrific House’s Room of Mirrors.

  Mirrors.

  That was what Rags saw: countless mirrors set at different angles. A mirrored wall. A mirrored floor and ceiling. The bright light in the room’s center was reflected a thousand times, had blinded Rags when he first looked in.

  There was more than light at the center of the room. There were bodies, unmoving—dead?—lying side by side, black hair like crows’ wings and silk, pale silver eyes open but unseeing.

  A better person would’ve retched. Had tears prickling at the corners of their eyes. Their knees would’ve buckled.

  But Rags only felt a roaring in his ears, the rush of Old Drowner separating him from the shock someone was meant to feel when they saw something like this.

  Of course, whispered the boy in his head, the one who’d kept Rags alive all those years on the street. The hard cockroach shell of protection he’d donned to survive. Of course this shit exists in the world.

  Acceptance trickled down his spine like runoff from a stalactite overhead. But it was a different kind of dirty, rippling underneath his skin and staying there, becoming a part of him.

  Rags wasn’t surprised by the sight. No disbelief, but belief. Undistilled.

  Mirrorcraft.

  And at least twenty small fae trapped by it. They’d found more of Shining Talon’s people alive, all right.

  Only Rags wasn’t sure this counted as living.

  71

  Inis

  After exile to the Far Glades, Inis had imagined there would be nothing more difficult than a return to the Hill.

  But that had been before Somhairle told her who they were meeting in the fall garden by the Palisades.

  Laisrean Ever-Bright. Tomman Ever-Loyal’s best friend, when Tomman had still been alive to have one; before his best friend’s mother had ordered him killed. Laisrean had been Inis’s friend, too, up until he wasn’t.

  The depth of Inis’s fury held no room for distinctions, like if Laisrean had known about the attack on House Ever-Loyal before it had happened, or if he could have warned his friend and didn’t. Even if he could have done nothing to prevent it, where had he been all this time? What had he done to honor Tomman’s memory? If he’d missed Inis or mourned with her, what had he done to show it?

  Nothing.

  Is that why you never wrote your little summer prince? Even knowing he couldn’t have been aware of his mother’s plans? Two’s voice was wry in her mind. Easier to blame them all by association, I know. But there’s strength to be found in focusing your anger where it truly belongs. Where it can strike its deadliest blow.

  I’m trying, Inis promised.

  So she accompanied Somhairle to the fall garden, leaving the thief and the fae behind, if not her worries.

  Because she didn’t want to make Somhairle uncomfortable, she couldn’t stare at him.

  Because she didn’t want to fall into a pit of grief, she couldn’t stare at anything other than her feet on the grass.

  Summer parties she had attended here once upon a lost time. Garlands of light and silk ribbons threaded through trees. Ivy’s first time to one, clutching Inis’s hand. The swish and laughter of skirts, a favorite pair of silver shoes, being complimented by princes who’d suddenly grown taller and broader of shoulder and looked like strangers, not the children she’d chased between rows of flame-colored lilies.

  Impossible not to remember all of it when she smelled the roses.

  They stopped to rest beneath the Oak, the Hill’s oldest tree. Its roots had grown around the bodies of the conquered fae where they fell, twisted in the shapes of their bones. A few of those bones, black and bare, peeked out from the soil.

  Strange to be back. Two curled up at Inis’s side. At least no one’s eating hot porridge out of me.

  “I’m sorry,” Somhairle said.

  “For what?”

  “I don’t know what we’ll find here. And it can’t be easy for you, being back, but not yourself.”

  Inis shrugged, fixing her focus on her hands. Not a proper lady’s hands anymore, although Morien’s glamour had made them look like they were.

  “And the longer it takes me, the longer you have to stay here,” Somhairle added.

  “Don’t,” Inis began.

  Someone’s coming, Two said. Never ate porridge out of me, though, so I don’t know who he is.

  Somhairle’s head flew up at the same time as Inis’s did. Three must have warned him, too.

  Laisrean had Somhairle’s eyes and chin, but that was where any resemblance ended. He was tall, dark-skinned, and heavyset, and wearing a smile that made Inis want to swallow a rosebush, thorns and all. “Sorley! Did I keep you waiting?”

  Prince Laisrean must have been twenty now. Inis rose, keeping her head down despite the disguise she wore like a second skin. He wouldn’t recognize her, but that didn’t mean she wanted to look at him or see the man he was becoming, picture the men her brothers would never be.

  “Laisrean!” Somhairle struggled to his feet while his half brother broke into a run, making it to Somhairle’s side in time to offer him a hand. “I feared you might be too busy to meet us.”

  “Never!” Laisrean pulled Somhairle into one of his massive yet surprisingly tender hugs. Somhairle practically disappeared in his arms. Inis’s vision wavered, threatened by tears. The threat passed. The hug ended. “And who’s this?”

  “Ah . . .” Somhairle paused.

  “Ailis, Your Highness,” Inis said smoothly, dropping into a deep curtsy. “Accompanying His Highness Somhairle Ever-Bright on his travels.”

  Laisrean had once carried Ivy on his shoulders when her short legs had tired ahead of theirs. He’d threatened to give Inis the same treatment when they’d splashed in the Queen’s lake together, scattering panicked copper-and-black-scaled fish, the heat of the summer’s sun reflected by the luster of their skin.

  If he took her hand, would he find it rough? Did the glamour cover other senses than sight?

  Inis reached for her anger to ground her, only to find more than the anger in that bottomless well. Other, older feelings, alongside precious slivers of hope. Stowaway dreams she thought she’d jettisoned along the road to the Far Glades, deadweight cast off so she wouldn’t drown.

  It didn’t matter. Laisrean was a stranger now.

  Inis kept her eyes on the grass beneath her feet. She was the stranger. Unwelcome in lands that had once been hers.

  Was this what Shining Talon felt in the
home of his enemy? As the last of his people?

  “Ailis and I met at the theater many years ago,” Somhairle confided, doing his best to dispel the tension. “We’ve been friends since. She tells me of all the new plays at the Gilded Lily.”

  Laisrean chuckled and ruffled his brother’s hair with one of his enormous hands. Inis shifted instinctively toward Somhairle to brace him if he lost his balance, but he didn’t. Laisrean’s touch was considerate. He’d always been bigger than his brothers, so he’d needed to know his limits, how to carry himself.

  “I’m being rude.” Laisrean knelt in the grass in front of Inis and held out his hand. From the years of etiquette instruction in her youth, she knew she was meant to give him hers, and she complied with the barest hesitation. “Forgive me, Lady Ailis. I was so surprised to find my brother with company that I thought you were a trick of the light. Now I realize you’re more solid than that.”

  Inis smiled despite herself, because it was impossible not to. Endless roses reflected in the green of his eyes. Looking away, she glimpsed twin leather friendship bands knotted around Laisrean’s wrist, tucked beneath the twin suns of his cufflink. Tomman had worn his faithfully, had kept them until they frayed into scraps and fell off his arm.

  Inis gripped Laisrean’s hand tight. He squinted at her.

  “Pardon,” Inis said quickly. She was supposed to play silent and cool, draw no attention to herself. She was already mucking it up. “Compared to such fine company, I’m nothing.”

  “Seldom true,” Laisrean assured her. Inis made herself release him, and he watched her for a second longer than he might have if she hadn’t tried to crush his knuckles. She cursed herself. “But I have to admit, you’d be hard-pressed to find better company than Somhairle.”

  “Lais.” Somhairle’s cheeks were red, although whether from embarrassment or exhaustion, Inis couldn’t tell. “I don’t need your recommendation. I can make my own friends.”