has sapped her nearly to emptiness, One went on. Replacing the sorrow was a crackling vein of anger. She is young, too young for her hair to be all white, for the color to be taken from her. Whoever has done this . . .
Cab didn’t envy the bastard responsible for the revenge One would take.
Sil and One embraced. When Sil drew back, her eyes were silver-wet with tears.
“I’ve never seen one of you before,” she murmured. “I was born after you were sent away.” She kissed One’s brow over her third eye. “Welcome, One of Many. I regret that I cannot greet you with the ceremony you deserve.”
One shook off the apology, a gesture she turned into a bow. Respect passed between her and Sil. Love and understanding. Its depths were something Cab, despite his connection to One, would never know. He stepped back. Gave them their space.
In the meantime, Einan kept a wary, curious distance on the tips of her toes. Cab pretended not to notice her swaying with the force of wanting to get closer but not too close, until she grabbed him by the sleeve. “Listen,” she whispered, “I’ve seen some wild shit in my time, but what the fuck is that?”
Cab held up his hands. He hadn’t been trained since childhood to explain or describe. Only to take orders. It was obvious to him, through what little chance to observe he’d been given, that this Resistance could grasp the stakes. He couldn’t do One justice with his stumbling tongue—and even if he could, he wasn’t sure he had the right to.
“This is what the Queen has been seeking.” Sil straightened. Taller somehow, with One at her side. “A piece of a terrible puzzle we cannot allow her to complete. Our remaining agent within the Silver Court alerted us that the first piece had been found, and so we moved quickly. To find you, One of Many. The Great Paragon was the deadliest weapon ever crafted by my Folk, and somehow, the Queen of Mirrors has learned of its existence. Her sorcerers have been bleeding us dry for decades in their attempts to find it. It seems they are closer than I thought. And they were close enough before my rescue.”
Once, Cab had been a child not much larger than Sil, head crowded with cockeyed thoughts of guarding the realm. What a fool he’d been.
The name Queensguard made it clear exactly who its members defended.
Cab searched, found his voice. Met One’s eyes to see if he had leave to speak and accepted her slow blink as permission. “Rescue from what, exactly?”
He already knew from his own experience with one of the Queen’s sorcerers that whatever the answer was, it wouldn’t bring him comfort.
54
Cab
There was a chamber of iron below the palace. In that chamber were twenty-seven fae children like Sil, all of them kept alive but helpless, the veins in their wrists cut open. Bowls made of birch collected the dripping blood.
From their blood, the sorcerers forged new, more powerful mirrors.
With those mirrors, they maintained Queen Catriona’s long reign and longer life.
Cab had known sorrow, for himself and the things he’d done. Regret was an endless howling from the nameless beast in his heart. He’d passed too far into the seamy shadow-side of the queendom and glimpsed something horrible living in its darkness.
But he’d thought, foolishly, he’d seen the depths of it.
How cocksure, to presume the Ever-Loyal massacre had been the most extreme of Queen Catriona’s orders.
The fae weren’t all gone, as the first Ever-Bright queen had proclaimed. Perhaps she’d been lying. Perhaps she hadn’t known. What mattered was this: while expanding her mines, Queen Catriona had found something more valuable and rare than silver, and she guarded this treasure more jealously than any other.
Shining Talon wasn’t the last of his kind. Once Sil concluded her story, Cab would tell her about the fae prince. There are more of you still breathing than you know.
He couldn’t begin to imagine how he’d get through the rest of it. Find Shining Talon, explain to him that he wasn’t alone, tell him where the other fae were. What had happened to them.
A human himself, Cab had no answers for why humans did the things they did. Just that war made its players into madmen. The Queen had obviously been leading her own silent war for decades.
But Sil’s story had only begun.
Her escape had been part of a greater plan to free all the young fae trapped with her. An