of room, but bare to scrutiny, never a true part of village life.
Under Inis’s supervision, and with Bute’s guidance, the front garden blossomed, the door no longer hung off one hinge. The windows were clean and the roof had been repaired.
But right now, there were horses approaching the cottage, two handsome mounts with a rider each. Someone led them on foot, and an enormous shaggy dog walked beside them.
It wasn’t stipend day. Their last had arrived less than two weeks ago.
Didn’t matter. This entourage was no courier. Couriers came alone like clockwork once every double moon. They never bothered with ceremony.
Inis dropped the basket of eggs even before she heard Ivy scream.
One of the riders dismounted.
Inis started to run.
36
Cab
FOUR DAYS EARLIER
The raid on House Ever-Loyal had taken a month to plan, based on good intelligence that key members of the family were plotting to harm the Queen.
The irony of the Ever-Loyals acting against their namesake quality wasn’t lost on those included in the innermost circle of the Queensguard’s most trusted young recruits. Bright-eyed, fiercely devoted, brutally trained, too eager to serve their country.
Their Queen was threatened. They marched to save her.
Midnight, the night of the raid. Cab led a squad of recruits he’d trained beside, had been taught to trust with every breath. They felt the same about him. The massive mansion loomed over them while their captain knocked on the main door.
Cab couldn’t pinpoint when rounding up traitors had ended and the slaughter had begun.
It hadn’t been by his order but by their captain’s. An innocent child’s throat was slit. One old groundskeeper, wielding a pitchfork, had entered at that wrong moment, sparked a frenzy that for Cab had ended when he found himself throwing a little girl to the floor, his blade to her throat.
He blinked.
He’d seen her eyes.
She wasn’t crying. Not because she wasn’t terrified. Her fear had carried her somewhere else. Cab stepped back and slipped on a torn curtain trailing through a pool of hot blood. He went down, fingers suddenly unable to keep their hold on the hilt of his sword. It had clattered away from them.
“Run,” he’d told the girl.
Then he’d taken his own advice.
In the chaos and carnage, he shouted to one of his bloodstained, glass-eyed cadre, beating a corpse to pulp, that he’d seen someone flee out the window and he intended to follow. His voice had sounded as cool and certain as steel.
Out into the dawn.
Shedding his bloodstained armor, tossing it aside in the trampled garden.
Didn’t look back to see the first line of smoke rise, the first flame tonguing out a smashed window, as House Ever-Loyal began to burn.
How many of the Queensguard had followed their orders because they had had no other choice? How many had been like Cab, not yet under the thrall of mirrorcraft, but blinded by love for their Queen? How many had decided, like him, that this was the last Queensguard order they would follow?
Like any true coward, he was terrified of the answers.
They were a haunting. They prowled the perimeter of his guest room in Faolan’s summer mansion, drawing ever closer as he recovered from Morien’s mirrorcraft.
No matter how far he tried to run, there was no escaping this: Cabhan of Kerry’s-End, Master of One, was the only person who could lead Morien the Last to the next master, the next fragment of the Great Paragon.
After he’d recovered from the initial side effects of the mirror sorcery planted in his heart—this involved hours of vomiting—his first instinct had been to kill himself rather than be a sorcerer’s puppet. But One was there to stop him.
I’d prefer it if you don’t. I’ve waited a thousand years to meet you. Only getting to be with you for mere days would be a slap in the face.
Cab was imprisoned. All his running had led to nothing.
Except it wasn’t nothing. He’d found One, and One had found him.
Can’t die yet, Cabhan admitted. Not before the sorcerer gets his.
That’s the spirit, my soft little fighter.
Cabhan laughed darkly, pressing himself against One’s cool scales and trying to sleep. This close, he could hear the ticking of her inner workings. Like a heartbeat, only more reliable. He shut his eyes, pushed his face into hers, and drew new depths of strength from being with her. Felt whole again, more peaceful than he had in years.
Felt less peaceful when her mind clasped his like a handshake, met his like ocean kissed river.
What are you doing? Trying not to panic. Knowing he