Master of One

by Jaida Jones

  Laisrean rose, blithe and unbothered. His attention to Inis faded and she breathed a sigh of relief. “That’s what you get for bringing pretty girls to the castle. Wait till she meets Berach.”

  Three flapped her wings, as if preparing to take flight. Inis tensed, but nothing came of the movement. It was only a Queensguard strolling past, armor gleaming in the afternoon sun. Inis’s stomach turned at the sight, at the sound of clanking armor.

  Laisrean glanced over his shoulder as the Queensguard continued on his patrol. “Often I think Sorley might have the right idea, keeping away from the capital. Something about too much armor and weaponry spoils the ambience.”

  Had he noticed her discomfort? Or was this a test? Every conversation at court was a little battle.

  No matter how much Somhairle wanted to believe his brother was one of the masters, Inis couldn’t allow herself to forget Laisrean’s position.

  “Some might call that talk treason,” Inis murmured.

  “Would you?” Laisrean stared at her—through her, she felt—and she had to look away or risk him seeing her, not the glamour she wore. He was squinting again, as though he could pick out places where it had faded or faltered.

  “I’d not say a word.” Inis tutted at Two, who rose and stretched lazily. “I ought to give you some privacy with your good brother, Prince Somhairle. I’ve been most uncouth.”

  She ignored the princes’ protests, walking too quickly away from the roses and the memories, the leather cords of friendship Laisrean still wore, the real possibility she was about to give herself away.

  Friendship with Tomman or no, Laisrean hadn’t stood between his mother’s Queensguard and the Ever-Loyals.

  No one could stop the Queen from getting what she wanted. Inis’s blame was misplaced, and she knew it. But her cheeks were still flushed, her throat tight, her eyes burning, when she made it back to Somhairle’s rooms to find that Shining Talon and Rags were gone.

  72

  Cab

  Cab spent the day proving useful around the theater. “Have to make some excuse for you to hang about,” Einan had muttered, giving him a less-fancy shirt to wear from her collection before introducing him to the owner of the Gilded Lily. According to a faded poster by the front door, it was the oldest entertainment establishment in Northside.

  It looked and smelled like it.

  “He might not be that smart,” Einan had explained, referencing Cab, “and it’s best if you don’t talk to him at all, it only mixes him up, but he follows orders and can lift heavy objects. Didn’t you mention we were short a stagehand?”

  Carrying props, splashing paint on backdrops, and carting costume chests from one side of the old building to another kept Cab occupied, kept him from worrying about nightfall.

  Because when night fell and Einan took to the stage, Cab had to meet with one of Sil’s contacts. Her most important contact. Einan didn’t trust him with this responsibility, made that clear by storming out of the room in an actress’s melodramatic huff after Sil proposed the plan.

  Cab didn’t blame her.

  But he wanted to do this for them. For Sil, who’d saved his life and granted his freedom. For Einan, who’d taken him in. (However grudgingly.)

  For all the innocents he’d once hoped to defend.

  When he’d fled the Queensguard, he’d lost the part of himself that had made him join Queensguard in the first place: the strength and the will to protect. The massacre on the Hill had taken that from him. He hadn’t fully realized it was missing until he’d felt it slip back into place.

  That evening, as he dressed for the part, One told him, This is very dangerous.

  Cab shrugged into a bulky coat, another Gilded Lily costume special, and turned up the collar. No wonder I like it.

  The plan was simple, but it had plenty of room for failure and loss. It had been almost a month, Sil said, since they’d been able to meet with their contact from the Hill. They needed to learn what the Queen was planning. What new tricks Morien had up his red sleeves. They needed to know how many other fae had been excavated and what fae secrets had been discovered.

  Cab hadn’t asked who their contact was. Sil hadn’t offered the information. The less he knew, the better.

  Meet him—or her—at the designated spot. Get the information the Resistance needed to keep limping forward. Leave without being caught.

  He could follow those orders.

  There was someone waiting for Cab beneath a streetlamp when he rounded the corner, approaching the address he’d been given. It was close to the theater, which had drawn a respectable crowd.

  One kept to the shadows, which was easy in the dark.

  Also, she explained, it’s my specialty.

  Cab approached the waiting figure. He’d been rehearsing internally the line he was meant to recite. How to make it sound casual and organic in case of mistaken identity.

  “Could use a light,” he murmured, stepping under the lamp.

  “Dark times,” the young man agreed. “So could we all.”

  When he turned, Cab saw that he was dressed like a gravedigger in a black coat with a black rag tied over the lower section of his face. The outfit had two advantages. It concealed anything about his identity that might have stood out. And it made most decent folk look the other way.

  Gravedigging was necessary work, but necessity didn’t stop people from wanting to avoid grave curses and grave sickness.

  They shared a moment of staring at each other. Cab felt himself being measured and did the same in turn. The contact was big, heavyset. For a second, Cab allowed himself to think there might be something familiar about his green eyes. Then he shut down the wondering before it took root.

  “You’re not my usual,” the young man said.

  “She got held up at the theater,” Cab replied.

  Einan hadn’t told him how to manage the contact, how to allay the man’s mistrust of an unknown entity. Maybe that was a test, too, of his meager instincts.

  But One hadn’t warned him yet. He had to assume he was doing well.

  “Shit.” His contact looked down the street toward the crowded theater. He seemed to be weighing a decision. “All right. You’d better come with me.”

  Don’t lose him, One cautioned.

  Although the contact was built like a brick storehouse, he moved like one of the Queen’s trained horses: fleet as the wind and with little regard for whoever he left in the dust. He melted into the dark mouth of a narrow alleyway and Cab stepped quickly to follow him, trusting One to keep up.

  So far, she’d never let him down.

  Cab was twitchy without a decent blade for protection, but no one jumped them from the shadows. He followed the contact down the next open street, past a vendor selling grilled chestnuts, through a crowd of glittering young ladies moving from one coffeehouse to the next on their way back to the university. Cab realized they were making for the cemetery as they cut a jagged path through the city’s backways, edging onto the main streets only when they needed to.

  It was a good route to take if you needed a giant silver lizard with three eyes to keep pace unseen, although the gravedigger couldn’t have known about that.

  But there were no screams of awe and terror yet. One hadn’t been noticed.

  Finally, the iron gates of the cemetery rose into view. Cab was shrugging out of his coat to throw it over the spikes—so they could hop the fence—when his contact dug a key out of his pocket and opened the gate. It groaned shut behind them.

  Inside, Cab tried not to look at the neat array of stones, old and new. He didn’t wonder if he was responsible for any of the graves. Despite their Ever-Noble status, the Ever-Loyals had been named traitors to the crown. They would’ve been buried as traitors.

  They walked past countless silent, mossy markers, stopped at a rickety shack on the edge of the grounds. No light shone through the windows and no key was needed to enter. Cab listened, but One was silent, wherever she was.

 
; Anxiety hummed in his bones, but it hadn’t transformed into fear.

  “Shut the door behind you,” the contact said.

  Cab did as ordered. Kept his hand on the knob.

  The gravedigger outfit gave nothing away. Hid everything save for the contact’s eyes, except where a torn sleeve revealed a brown wrist wrapped with leather straps. “You’re new?” The only light in the shack was moonlight, which the contact had angled Cab into, so he saw Cab’s nod in response. “Nothing personal, but it isn’t easy to trust the new ones.”

  Cab licked his lips. Knew he couldn’t speak straightforwardly, but knew he’d sound a fool trying to code his responses. “Our . . . mutual connections saved my life. I owe everything to them.”

  “Loyal, are you? Hah.” A muffled sigh beneath the bandana. “But it makes sense that a new face would be sent. There’s barely anyone left. Excavation groups have tripled in the past few days. They’re digging deeper, harder, like they’re looking for something specific, not whatever they can find, as they have in the past.”

  The Great Paragon. Cab nodded again. He wasn’t supposed to share the information he had until he got everything the contact knew.

  “Another point of interest for our ‘mutual connections’”—the contact’s voice was tinged with a flash of gallows humor—“is that one of the princes has returned to the castle with friends. Reason it’s worth pointing out is that this prince doesn’t have friends. Not since the Ever-Loyals were killed and their eldest daughter exiled a little over a year ago. Oh, and he arrived wearing red.”

  “Friends?” Cab asked.

  Not casually enough. Einan’s acting background made her better for this job.

  “Right, friends. Three of them. Two of them pretending to be servants. I’ll learn more, find out what I can, and report back when I’m able. The usual signal. Which you don’t know, because you’re new, but you don’t have to. Our mutual connections will understand.”

  There was a lot more Cab felt he didn’t know. He didn’t see why it mattered what the prince had been wearing. Why the contact had bothered to mention it. Unless it was the color, red, that mattered.

  Only one person in red came to Cab’s mind, accompanied by a cold, grim weight on his chest. Morien the Last.

  If the youngest prince had come to the castle with Morien, then his three friends might well be the thief, the fae, and Inis Fraoch Ever-Loyal.

  Close enough that Sil could help them with their mirror problem.

  Cab couldn’t ask the Resistance to risk all a second time, not when they’d lost so many of their forces taking him.

  But if they had a chance to free the other masters of the Great Paragon, shouldn’t they try?

  It wasn’t Cab’s decision. Sil would know what to do.

  “Listen,” the contact continued.

  Cab was listening. But it was to One’s voice, clear as sentry bells: Break it up with the big boy. Company’s coming.

  Cab held up his hand, one finger to his lips. To his credit, the contact had excellent reflexes. Dropped into a silent crouch the instant Cab signaled him for quiet.

  In the cemetery outside, the rhythmic crunch of heavy boots, faint but unmistakable.

  Queensguard, Cab mouthed.

  The contact nodded, whispered, “Get out of here. No, don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine. Back door. Stick to the shadows, and don’t get caught.”

  Cab didn’t know how the contact would be fine but didn’t hang around for clarification. He knew a clear order when he heard it. When corroborated by One, he had no reason to disobey.

  73

  Rags

  Inis was spitting mad when Rags and Shining Talon got back to Somhairle’s quarters, though apparently she didn’t like being told she was actually spitting.

  Both Inis and Rags held blindfolds to their chesst. Rags lay on the floor to get ahead of what felt like imminent collapse. Reckless this, foolish that, and a whole slew of new vocabulary words Rags figured meant “stupid” but with extra syllables.

  “If you’d quit hollering about us leaving the room, I’d have the chance to tell you what we found when we did.” In comparison to the rows and rows of fae bodies—twenty-seven by Rags’s count, in lines of three, with bare slabs waiting for more—Inis’s fiery eyes didn’t give him pause. What scared him was a bunch of fae hooked up to mirrors, trapped between them, eyes open and seeing nothing, skin so pale their black bones showed through.

  What scared him was the noise Shining Talon had made, a broken gasp, at the sight. It was like he’d broken. After weathering the extinction of his people and making peace with them putting him to Sleep, this was the final blow.

  Shining Talon hadn’t said a word since Rags had hauled him out of the secret fae torture room, or whatever it was, back to where Somhairle and Angry Inis were waiting.

  It was terrifying, and Rags had to make it stop.

  “You have every right to be upset,” Somhairle told Inis. “It’s awful for you to be back on the Hill, and we’re all grateful that you’ve come.” A pointed look at Rags, like the prince thought he could perform gratitude on command. “However, I think we need to hear what Master Rags has found.”

  Somhairle’s kindness stung worse than Inis and her shrieking. Rags would’ve withstood the headache if it meant fewer soft words and concern for his well-being when, yeah, he deserved shouting. With Shining Talon too distressed to back him up, he was as alone as he’d been before he’d awoken the fae.

  Even though he’d been steeling himself against this moment all along, he didn’t want it to come.

  “We went snooping under the Hill.” Rags glanced toward Shining Talon, checking to see if he’d chime in, share some fae insight. He was seated in a chair, his silver eyes blank. Two had left Inis’s side to twine around his ankles, and Three was perched nearby on the mantel over the empty fireplace. There was something tender about the way the fae creatures clustered close. Like they needed to protect their own.

  Inis pressed her lips together, nostrils flaring with the effort it took her to contain another outburst. But she did it, which meant she had a shred of respect for Rags.

  All eyes on him, the last place a thief ever wanted to be. In the light, center of attention.

  He was making a habit of this.

  “Continue,” Inis said.

  “There’s more than catacombs underneath the palace.” The words spilled from his mouth in a jumble. Rags hadn’t thought about what he wanted to say, because then he’d have to think about what they’d seen. “I noticed this pattern on the floor. Bones. Hands, forefingers all pointing the same way. We followed them to a hidden passage.”

  “You’re not making any sense,” Inis told him.

  “Oh, you’ll want to save that comment for what comes next,” Rags said.

  He told the story as best he could, feeling uncomfortably aware of Shining Talon’s attention on him, his lack of contribution. When Rags got to the part about the fae being held captive by mirrorcraft, Inis sat down hard, and Somhairle’s knuckles grew white where he was holding on to a chair.

  Rags felt another stab of guilt.

  Maybe the voice behind the door back in the fae ruins had been right. He was caught up in something so much grander than his means, and yet no one seemed willing to acknowledge that and turn him loose.

  When he’d finished talking, his throat felt dry.

  “Forgive me.” That was Somhairle, his voice so thin it might snap at any moment. His gaze rested on Shining Talon. “I didn’t know. That my mother could— I truly believed you to be the last of your kind. To realize you aren’t . . .”

  He trailed off, casting about for somewhere to sit, then chose the edge of the bed, looking like an old man. Three left Shining Talon to land on Somhairle’s shoulder and comb his hair with her beak. Preening him for comfort.

  Rags shrugged. “Guess we all thought wrong.” Shining Talon was practically back to his sleep-for-a-thousand-years state, Somhairle’s pale skin
looked ashen, and Inis was fussing with the hem of her sleeve, pulling so hard on the threads that she’d soon tear the fabric.

  Rags couldn’t join them in their shock. His brain was working overtime. Seemed likely that the only reason Shining Talon hadn’t joined his kind in the chamber of miserable mirrors was because he was leading Morien toward this other, greater power. Otherwise he’d be down there with the rest, color being sucked out of him to feed some no-good sorcerer plot.

  Because of course Morien had to know about this, had to be behind it. Maybe it was how he’d learned about the fae ruins, why he’d sent Rags and the other thieves before him after this mysterious treasure he couldn’t explain.

  Another stroke of insight: The collection of fae beneath the castle had to be why Morien was so damn powerful. Why he could pop in and out of rooms without warning, practice sorcery that shouldn’t have been humanly possible.

  He had a whole room full of paralyzed fae at his disposal, to replenish his power by draining theirs.

  “He’s doing it. Morien,” Rags said. Wished he hadn’t, but there it was, plain as day. Let the others look at him like he was paranoid until they realized he was deadly right. “It’s why he can do the shit he does to us, and maybe why he doesn’t feel like he needs to bother putting the same insurance on you, Somhairle. Prince. Your Lordship. Oh, what-the-fuck-ever. He’s got so much he can draw on. He’s collecting these fae wherever he can find them—not like I know where, but he seems to have plenty of intel about fae ruins, so he’s searching them out one by one—to suck them dry. He takes what they’ve got, uses it for himself. And the mirrors are a part of that . . . uh . . . somehow.”

  Another thought dawned on him. More like smacked him in the head with how bad it’d be if he were right.

  “He’s using us, too,” Rags continued. “But not like we think. We’re going to help him find all the pieces of the Great Paragon, right? Or else he’ll tear us to shreds, murder the rest of Inis’s family while she watches, blah blah. But what if, once we get the piece that’s supposed to be Shiny’s, Morien’s figured out how to put a shard in a fae? What if he transfers our connections so he’s the one in charge of them? With enough fae power, what couldn’t he do?”