deserve trust.”
Sil’s eyebrows were white. Cab caught notice of them as they rose, twin flashes of lightning against a golden sky.
“For returning you to your natural state? This is not something a man should give thanks for. Have humans truly become so diminished?”
“What you did for me . . .” Cab didn’t know how to let it alone. He had to ask the real question, the one sleeping like a cat in the shadows at the back of his mind. “Can you all do it?”
He still thought like a soldier, wondering: Was Shining Talon not the ally he seemed? Had he merely feigned helplessness in the face of humans and their suffering?
Sil smiled crookedly. The expression was impossibly wise on her young face. Over her shoulder, the redhead scowled at him like he was worse than a beetle that ate dung.
“I was a promising young Enchantrisk, rare among my people. Our magic allowed us specialized knowledges, so while I cannot wield a sword to protect my allies, I have this.” She lifted her small hands, showing her elegant, too-long fingers that tapered at the tips.
Cab imagined those fingers burrowing through skin, muscle, bone. His heart twinged in pain, but without fear or shame. Wholly different from how he’d felt after Morien’s magic had burrowed into him, an invading force without respect for anything living.
He finally touched the spot on his chest through his shirt, and was surprised to find it numb. Like it had been removed—put someplace safer. He remembered what Sil had said to him about Morien and the sorcerers, before the pain had become too much.
“They’re growing strong off you?” Cab rubbed his fingertips into the numb spot a moment longer, then stilled his hand. “Sorcerers like Morien. That’s what you said.”
Sil didn’t flinch. Maybe fae couldn’t—or wouldn’t—show vulnerability. She ducked her head, wavy falls of hair slithering free over her shoulders like water. The older woman stepped protectively to her side. Gave Cab a look like he’d said something wrong.
“We’re the ones asking the questions,” the redhead snapped.
Sil shook her head. “I’d hoped he might be perceptive—and strong enough to think for himself, despite his training. He is. Doesn’t that make you feel better about his past as a member of the Queensguard, Einan Remington?”
The redhead snorted in a way that meant definitely not, then spat onto the ground.
“I had hoped we might talk about our future rather than linger in the past.” Sil’s voice, calm and clear, parted Cab’s thoughts. “The Lying Ones profit from the state of my people.”
Cab couldn’t see how anyone could profit from the dead.
There was his lack of imagination again.
“We seek to explore a place with which I fear you will find yourself all too familiar.” Sil’s lashes skimmed her cheeks like the sweep of Cab’s scythe across Tithe Barley’s fields. How had he ever imagined he could escape his past? “The Queen’s catacombs.”
Cab flinched. In spite of himself, all his training.
Queensguard had blank faces. They cultivated silence for the guilty to fill. They didn’t react first, instead allowing others to reveal their own emotions and feelings.
If it unnerved the townspeople—well, that encouraged compliance.
Cab hadn’t marched with the Queensguard in some time. Yet his memory of the anthill tunnels beneath the Queen’s castle were fresh.
The inspiration behind the initiate tours was that new recruits should swear allegiance not only to the sitting Queen, but to every queen before her, now lying in their sacred vaults beneath the Hill.
No skeletons, no hanging cobwebs, no shrieking bats.
Flickering torchlight. Stone tunnels and rows of pearlescent drawers housing the remains of their glorious queens.
Captain Baeth’s first joke on their tour—“If your responsibilities ever get to be too much, recruits, the quickest way to end it all’s coming down here without supervision.”
Not only royal remains set beneath the Hill, where fortifications were strongest, but traps peppering the tunnels to snare grave robbers and glory sellers. Fashioned after the style of the fae underground, which everyone on the Hill could appreciate only once the fae were defeated.
“You’ll never hear whispers of selling Queen Thula Ever-Bright’s pinky bone, or Queen Reve Ever-Bright’s jewels.” Captain Baeth’s chest puffed like a proud gray dove. “These traps are deadly to anyone without proper clearance—only Queensguard knows how to get around ’em, see?”
Sacred knowledge. To be granted only once they’d proven themselves and been sworn in.
Cab didn’t trust he could remember every twist and turn they’d taken that night. He’d been wide-eyed, in awe of the captain and the royal catacombs. He