Ash and smoke plume around a city of brick and flames.
Fae Urilong watches it in the twilight, tucked up in a high tower, buffered from the hot breath of flame by a fortress of rock and steel.
This is not the Solveigard City she remembers.
Down below her people are dying. And they're also killing, streaking red across their faces as they shriek and rage, all fury, no sense. They're killing each other.
She watches as the next unit of troops marches as a single block, shimmering tints of steel twinkling in moonlight, toward the gates. The hinges creak and groan as the huge doors open, and then they are off, out somewhere in this quagmire of chaos to try to enforce order.
There is only one person in this fortress not unsettled by the bedlam rioting on below and he is lounging in the chair behind her, legs stretched out and crossed. Languid, posing.
"Watching it won't change anything," he purrs, a slice of callous sense on this dreamy nightmare. "You're just putting yourself through unnecessary torture."
"I'd prefer to not live up to all the lies they're telling about me," she answers, not bothering to look back. "I won't give him the satisfaction."
"Darling, he's going to say that about you whether you stand there or not."
Fae turns back from the window to look at the thief. He cocks a dark eyebrow, head tilting to the side, giving that sly look, that subtle simmer of cleverness and smugness.
You know I am right, it says. You know it is pointless.
She ignores this, moving away from the window but away from him as well, toward the pitcher and cups tucked on a small end table. She remembers when they first met; now a couple of months ago, but several weeks after her return to Solveigard City.
She had asked the Paragon to arrange it before she left, asked in the egg-crack yellow-streaked sunlight of dawn, and the dark-eyed woman had watched, speculatively, a frown twitching across her mouth before she had answered: "I'll tell him. He'll come or he won't. We'll see."
At the time Fae thought this ridiculous—an insubordinate deciding whether or not to follow a direct order—but in the first few days back, amidst the turmoil of shrieking nobles, collapsing buildings, mutinying guards, and rioting commoners she began to understand. Rats don't climb onto a sinking ship.
And then, in the dark of the night, he showed up, slipping through all the defenses, all their precautions, creeping all the way up to her study. He had lounged in her chair, as handsome as the night she had spied on him in her father's study, but now with a drink in hand, waiting for her.
"This whiskey is excellent," had been the first words she'd heard from him, all white teeth glinting in his wide, artful mouth. "It's no porter but..."
And then he paused, a twitch in his brow, the subtle narrowing of his dark eyes.
"You know who I am," he concluded.
"Our library had a hidden room," Fae told him, watching as he twisted a bracelet around his wrist. "You know who I am too."
"Of course I know who you are," he had replied, an edge to his tone then. "Knowing who you are has long been a matter of keeping my skin or not."
And keep your skin you did, Fae thinks, turning to spare a glance at the long-limbed man, all repose now except for the sharp eyes. She figured out rather quickly that was all a façade. Keno watched. Keno listened. Keno did not relax.
"You need to relax," he says, and the suggestion is so close to the trail of her thoughts she almost smiles. He has an eerie knack for that, tracking on the same line as her, even when the conclusions are different.
"I need to read reports," she says instead.
"Reading isn't going to save all of them, but a clear head might."
"It's not going to be clear if I don't know—" she begins, but stops. Worn trails, old arguments.
Thalassa lost to the Jarles; Dangok in ruins, the old anxieties begin again, piling on top of each other like bones. Solveigard falling, falling...
"Sit down," the thief says, his voice cutting through it, his gaze fixed and watchful. "You look like you could faint. Sit down and I'll tell you about my progress."
She does, collapsing in the chair across from him gracelessly, not with the dignity of a ruler. The elegance of a queen. But that is a show she does not need to put on for him.
"Have you found more?" she asks.
The thief pulls the little gray book out, turning to a dog-eared page.
"Acquired by S.J.F. in the southern section of Thalassa City," he reads aloud from this Jarles ledger, this notation of trafficked bodies and bones. His finger taps on the page. "Did you know there's a fine sea captain by the name of Saul Fernuch who often ports at Thalassa? Well, used to, obviously. His middle name is Jris, by the way."
"And where is Saul now?" she demands, leaning forward onto her knees. This, this is where she and the thief first came to terms, where they are always in perfect alignment.
This is what I went to Bear's Spear for, this is what I sailed out to East Watch for, what I starved and bled for, the one thing I wanted—
"Our dear friend has managed to evade the hordes of Jarles," Keno answers, his black eyes glittering. "He has taken refuge across Broken Port Bay in Tazdahur City."
"Can you get to him?"
The thief shrugs.
"I know some people who could do it. For a price. You should know that he has the High King's special favor. He carries special spices and cloths that are difficult to acquire."
"There's more," Fae says after a moment, because she knows him now; she knows when a secret is hiding between the lines of his smile.
He pulls a thin ribbon of parchment out of his coat with two fingers, dangling it out over her outstretched hand.
Fae take it, unravelling it, reading it.
She looks back up at him after a moment.
"Another one? Here?"
The blackness of Keno's eyes seems to glitter as he answers: "An active war zone is a rather good place for an arms dealer."
"Is the Cabal using him?" Fae asks, leaning forward. "Can you get concrete evidence of that?"
The thief gives a one-armed shrug.
"It's possible," he says, "but who are you going to tell, darling? Are you going to go stand on your balcony and read off coded messages and exchange logs to a restless crowd that can barely read, let alone do math?"
The line of Fae's mouth hardens and she leans back. Her hands clutch into fists—white-knuckled, straining fists that she doesn't need to hide now, doesn't need to conceal.
"I want him alive," she says after a moment, her gaze fixing back up on the thief. "We can make him talk. We can make him confess it all to them."
"Bring them to me," she orders, and she is a queen now, all dominion and intent.
The thief watches her carefully a moment more and then smiles, head tilting in a small incline, as deferential as it is mocking.
"Your Highness," he says.
The room had bled red on her coronation.
She had known, anticipated, that the Cabal would not let it go smoothly, that there would be a piece of resistance, a piece of rejection, public and bold, branding her as not of them.
Those days were endured with a combination of adrenaline, quick-thinking, and the strange effect of Caj's dark, lingering presence. Although slight, the Smith Skiller, clad in ash-singed, dark gray armor acted as a silent phantom on the citizens of Solveigard City; a ghost of brutal efficiency and smoky echo of a greater problem looming on the horizon. He earned a reputation in those first few days. So did she.
She gets the letter with her breakfast, crumpled and yellowed from speed and hard travel. She unscrunches it first—food can come after—and reads Hiran's sloping, but hurried writing:
Peanut,
Sorry for the slow reply—there's not much to write here (mostly waiting and debating) but enough to do to occupy all the daylight hours. A lot of it is training—General Jin is an enthusiastic believer in stretching and structured forms. You can imagine how our particular friend feels about this.
There's not much else I can say in paper. We're all thinking of you, and (I at least am) envious of all the skull-bashing you're getting to do.
Tell the Gloomy One we all say hi,
- H
Fae sets the letter down, a strange tastelessness settling in her mouth.
"There's not much else I can say in paper." And "waiting and debating"—something is brewing. She chews on the inside of her mouth, the paper twitching in her fingers before she snatches it up and crumples it in her fist.
Skull-bashing, she repeats. I haven't put on armor in months. Haven't thrown a knife in weeks. I just have to sit up here, stuffed in all this finery—
"You can be what they need," Caj had said to her amidst that initial chaos. "I can be what they deserve."
It had been her idea, but he had taken it, an expression of frustration and concern, and brought it to life.
Keep me clean, keep me... good, her mouth curdles at the word, curdles against the weight of it settling around her ribs, across her chest, over her face. It is the best way—the best way to fight back but not be frightening. Poised, proper. Never too angry, never out of control, never violent. Always just, always reasonable, always fair.
But I don't want to be.
It's a thought she can't quite escape—it bubbles up uncontrollably, when she's sitting, waiting as a handmaiden laces up her dress; when she's clutching silverware in the hall, plying her stiff fingers apart.
I don't want to be.
"Your Grace," Helen interrupts, setting the tea on the table. Once part of the Urilong house staff, now the keeper of a castle, Helen is the only one who handles her food. Keno had suggested that and Fae had balked, balked that it would come to this, that she should have to trust her people so little. Caj had insisted. It was one of the few things the two men agreed upon.
"Last night was successful, Your Grace," General Hin says, her knife cutting smoothly through the meat and eggs, the silverware clinking against the porcelain plate. "We waylaid five separate incidents and stabilized two neighborhoods. A third is underway this morning and I expect a fourth to be brought into line this afternoon."
"I am glad to hear of it," Fae answers, voice wan in the morning air. "The bystanders—the children, the elderly—they were protected?"
"Yes, Your Grace," the general answers, but her tone is clipped. "We have set up the safe houses. As you asked."
As you insisted, are the words unsaid. As you commanded, even though it is a waste of manpower and time, even though we could gain control of the city faster if we left them behind—
"It's not just peace now," Fae murmurs, her words old, said before, but in need of repeating, "but peace months, years from now."
The children will remember. Their parents will remember. They will not remember me the way the Cabal says I am.
The general merely grunts, the hard lines hewn into her face in the dawn light, face turned down to the plate in front of her. Somewhere, across the long stretch of land, in a soldier's camp, her twin sister is scowling into her own breakfast.
One twin here, the other there, Fae thinks, watching the general eat. General Jin had taken command of the war at Keesark's borders while Fae had given her twin command of the war within. Jin is still at the battlefront, still out there, facing the Jarles with Allayria and the others...
With my friends.
Here, inside this hall of ruin and collapse, Fae has no friends.
She hears the heavy footfall, the clunk of metal and steel, and then the sound of the armored hand setting on the back of her chair.
"Sit down and eat a bit, won't you?" she murmurs, tipping a finger toward the food, but he will not.
A shadow, a dark knight. It doesn't eat, it doesn't drink, it only lingers, and if it moves you will wish it had not, if it speaks you will wish it had not—
But Fae knows the man behind this mask.
It's part of the game. Part of what he promised when he came back with her.
"They are afraid of me," he had told her in candlelight, the glow catching the flatness in his green eyes. "Let them be. Let me be the thing that terrifies them, so it doesn't have to be you."
You're not frightening, Fae had wanted to say, had wanted to say then and several times after. You don't frighten me.
But he plays this part so well.
Fae can see it on their faces when the first callers enter the hall. See the way their eyes flicker behind her shoulder, to the dark being standing there.
"Lady Weitrou," Fae calls in greeting, bringing the audience's gaze back onto her. She sets down her fork. "Please, come eat with us."
The older woman curtsies and stiff joints do not impede the elegance of it, the fine breeding.
Nothing, not even a crippling, would get in the way of that, Fae thinks, the darkness of the image crinkling across her brow before she hides it. She knows this woman. She was friends with her daughter, Lyla, in the age before this strange time. But now she is here, perched high on a marble throne and Lyla is dead, buried somewhere under rubble. Another pile of bones.
"Your Grace is too kind," the old woman says and beneath the pristine tone she can hear the ire, the needling.
Barely older than a child, barely civilized, barely one of us—
The Keesark houses had been in ruin when Fae arrived, but that had not meant there was no resistance when she produced Allayria's letter. Then Commander Beinsho had shown up, offering supplies and men, bowing low to her in acceptance, in deference, and their proud backs had bent stiffly with his, inclining just enough to cede to the formal power of the Paragon, concede only to the formal correctness of her power to appoint. Then behind those backs they had prepared. They had thought Fae would fail.
There's still time for that.
"I will not stay long," the woman announces, chin tilting up, and Fae knows what she will ask next; it is what she asked the morning before and the morning before that. "Have you killed the pretender?"
"His name is Ben," the Paragon had said, her face a gaunt mask, hiding something else behind it. "He will show you no mercy."
Fae looks at the woman and gives her the same answer as the morning before: "No, I have not."
Lady Weitrou says nothing to this; she only bows once more and exits the hall, her head held high.
Fae hears it, the small tap of metal, of a finger against the back of her throne and she looks down to see her knuckles white against the cutting knife. She plies her fingers loose, letting them sit limply over the utensil, watching the small tremor that shivers through them.
One day you'll walk in here, Fae thinks, and I'll have his head waiting on a platter for you. And then I'll wait, I'll wait for you to ask me that question, one last time.
"Your Grace," another person says—Farlow Toulonne, the youngest son of the Toulonnes.
Both dead, both buried, both ash.
She had given him some task, some position. She had learned quickly that it was through the younger nobles she would succeed; that they would not balk at her age, they would not see her as naïve.
"With the latest recovery efforts our safe houses are at capacity," he says, and she remembers now where she put him, with his kind eyes and gentle hands. Healers.
"There are some more buildings we are preparing," he continues and she can hear it in the falter of his voice, hear what's coming next. "But we are still uncertain of their structural integrity."
"Bring them here," Fae says and she hears the crunch of fingers curling against the back of her chair, metal scraping against stone.
I will show them. Prove to them.
"Your Grace—" General Hin begins but Fae holds up a hand.
"The children," she tells Farlow. "Bring the children here, inside the castle walls. We will protect them in here from the Cabal."
"Your Grace," he says, eyes wide, back bowing. Alarm is reflected across the room, in the sculpted faces of cultured people, but the servants are watching.
They will not remember me the way the Cabal says I am.
The room had bled red at her coronation. They had slaughtered all the pigs and dumped it down, through the windows and seams in the ceiling, so the floor ran red with it.
A fitting tribute, they had said, for a red queen.
A/N: It's HERE! We are back, Fae is back, Caj is back, KENO, queen of sass and porter, is back! I told you all we'd see more of our slippery friend, and boy, do I intend to make up for lost time. We've got a new aesthetic for this book as well as a first-ever in-book Table of Contents; I thought it would be fun to update it with the next Part's chapters as we complete each section.
We catch up with another friend in the next part. Well, friend is a strong word...