at an unfamiliar dog they badly wanted to pet.
“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