Here he stood, in front of the Queen again, those distant blue eyes sizing him up with evident disdain. No screw-ups this time, he told himself firmly. No misjudging these dragons, no overplaying his hand. He couldn’t afford to slip up right now, and there were so many different ways to do that. He was in the eye of a hurricane, here—if the shifters who’d taken him prisoner didn’t kill him, his fellow mages or his boss just might.
“Your Majesty,” he said simply. “I’m here to seek asylum.”
That surprised her, he could tell. Surprised Acantha, too, judging by the way her face went even stiller than usual. She was standing at the side of the room with her hands behind her back, and he was trying not to think about how different she looked now that he was seeing her out of her armor for the first time. A simple shirt, a pair of pants—why, anyone would think she was a regular woman, with a normal capacity for kindness. Focus, Cato. You’re pleading for your life here.
“Elaborate,” Queen Lana instructed after a short pause, her curiosity clearly winning out. Cato was pleased his hunch there had been correct. Curiosity really did make people easier to manipulate—that was why Acantha kept hers so closely guarded. He had to stop thinking about the Captain. It was the Queen he was here to manipulate. He’d pitched the idea of trying to seduce Queen Lana at one of their planning meetings, but the coven had ridiculed him. Shifters mated for life, he was informed. If the Queen had found her soulmate already, he’d have better luck trying to seduce a brick wall. Which was exactly how it felt with—dammit.
“I deeply regret how my last visit to this Palace ended,” he said now, staring meaningfully around the room even as he quietly avoided Acantha’s gaze. “I wish I could have told you more before I left, but…” Here it came, the first of many lies. “Unfortunately, I was being surveilled.” Now Lana wasn’t the only dragon present who looked curious. He pressed on. “I tried to hint at the nature of the situation when I told the Captain about the magical artifacts she had observed woven into my hair… under orders, I told her they were protection spells, but they were more than that.”
“Under whose orders?” Lana demanded.
“His name is Haspar,” Cato said solemnly, feeling a chill run down his spine as he spoke his leader’s name aloud. The best lies were served with a healthy portion of the truth, and he’d planned all this with Haspar’s approval, but he still felt like he was genuinely betraying his coven as he went on. “An incredibly powerful mage… and a cruel one who exerts absolute control over his servants. I badly wanted to answer your questions more clearly, Captain, but I knew my life would be forfeited if he heard me sharing his secrets. My orders were to escape as soon as I could… and if I hadn’t taken the opportunity I took to leave, I’d have been killed. Even as it was, I was punished severely for my failure to return earlier.” His mind drifted back to the day he’d returned to the coven, when Haspar had nearly suffocated him, and he let his face shift in response.
“And then what happened? What brought you back here?”
“You did, Your Majesty. This place did.” He shut his eyes for a moment, for the drama of it. “I was here for a week, Your Majesty, and even though I was a thief and a liar, you all treated me with more dignity and honor than Haspar had ever shown his loyal servants. I knew I had to escape. I stole what artifacts I could, and I made my escape into the Fog. I have nowhere else to go, no other doors to knock on, no other safe haven to seek. You would be well within your rights to send me right back into the Fog from which I came… but you should know that that would be my certain death.”
“A consequence of your own actions, not ours,” the Prince pointed out, his face cool as he leaned back in his chair. Cato nodded hastily.
“Of course, of course, and I’d bear you no grudge even as I died in agony. But my honest hope is that I can make sparing my life worthwhile to you all. While speaking with the Captain, I got a sense—forgive me for speaking plainly—that your collective understanding of the world beyond your home is somewhat limited. Is that fair to say?”
The Queen’s expression didn’t change, but she did glance at her mate, who looked back at her with an equally neutral expression. But Cato didn’t miss his little nod. Interesting.
“I can offer information, in exchange for safety,” he said, spreading his hands. “Free of my captor’s influence, I can speak freely with your scholars, tell them everything I know—it’s not much, but I’d imagine it would be a valuable starting point. And additionally, I believe I could be of assistance in your Archives.”
“Giving yourself quite a few jobs here, aren’t you?” Queen Lana said wryly, tilting her head. He hoped the gentle barb was a good sign.
“Simply eager to make myself useful, Your Majesty. Your Palace Archives are full of rare and powerful magical artifacts, are you aware of that?” A cool nod. He nodded, affecting disappointment. “Ah. I’d hoped I might be able to be of use explaining their origins and power, given how many I saw had incomplete or erroneous labels—”
There—a choked sound from the back of the room. He glanced over his shoulder, surprised to see one of the men who’d been with Acantha out in the Fog. The dragon hastened forward, red-faced but clearly bursting to speak, and bustled behind the Queen’s throne to whisper urgently in her ear for quite some time. She waved him away, then returned her attention to Cato.
“It may be that your knowledge could be of use to us,” she allowed, and Cato nodded gracefully, well aware from the expression on the clearly less composed scholar’s face that this was an understatement of significant proportions. “However, I’m not entirely sure those insights are worth the risk. How are we to be sure you aren’t deceiving us now? Captain Acantha has told us the distressing story of your deception and subsequent disappearance… how can we be certain you haven’t just returned to finish the theft you started?”
The whole story, he wondered? Briefly, his eyes flicked in Acantha’s direction, where the Captain was staring relentlessly into the middle distance, for all the world as though she was somewhere else entirely. No, he realized, an odd shiver running down his spine. She hadn’t told them the whole story, had she? Not the part that embarrassed her. Not the part that had been keeping him up at night, wondering just what the hell had come over him when he’d leaned down to kiss her—
“Cato?” The Queen sounded impatient, and Cato jumped as he realized she was waiting for his response. Cursing his distraction, he straightened up, mumbling some half-baked excuse about the difficulty of the journey.
“Your Majesty, you have no way to be certain, that’s the truth. I’ve deceived you before, and I may well do it again. All I can offer is my own trust, in hopeful exchange for yours.” He took a deep breath and reached for the sleeves of his robes. “As a mark of good faith, I’ve left behind the piece of armor I used to vanish last time—I’ll happily consent to a search of my person if that fact needs to be confirmed,” he added, deliberately avoiding looking at Acantha in case he got distracted again. He’d spent so much of their short time together teasing her about undressing him while he was unconscious…focus. “The pieces I have brought are gifts for the kingdom. I only ask that you keep my staff safe, wherever it might be,” he added, knowing without looking that one of the scholars had brought it to the Throne Room—there was no way a dragon would have left such a fascinating object behind in the forest. “And if you do choose to return me to the Fog, I’d ask to take it with me for navigation.”
Another raised eyebrow from Queen Lana, mirrored by her court. He had a feeling they’d be interested to know the secrets of navigating the Fog, especially if they’d been unable to do so up until this point. Another little lure to coax them into doing what he wanted them to do… it was working, he could tell. At least half of the dragons he was looking at wanted what he offered badly enough to believe any half-baked story about why he was here to give it to them. He was winning.
So why did the victory feel so hollow? And why did it hurt so much that Acantha wouldn’t even look at him?
Chapter 11 - Acantha
After Cato’s audience with the Queen, he was hauled away by her deputies, both of whom had been watching the proceedings with keen interest from their posts at the back of the Throne Room. Acantha was a little relieved not to have to deal with him for the time being, if she was honest. She hadn’t been back to the prison cells since the disastrous day he’d escaped, and she didn’t trust herself to keep her cool. She did make a point of instructing her deputies to ensure that every piece of armor was removed from him, and anything that they found in his hair, too—though from what she could tell, the gemstones he’d had braided into his hair were gone, now.
That didn’t mean he wasn’t still full of tricks. The story he’d told up there had been convincing enough, she supposed, and she could tell already that a lot of the dragons present wanted to believe him, but that was exactly the kind of story a conman would tell, wasn’t it? Anyone clever enough to get in and out of the Palace unscathed would be a skilled enough liar to spin a story like that. And sure, she wanted to believe him too. Of course she did. If anything, that was even more proof that he wasn’t to be trusted.
She said as much to the Queen, once the general audience had been dismissed and an emergency meeting of the closest royal counsel had been called. Acantha was a little surprised to be invited to take part, given her role in proceedings, but Morgan had been right when she’d told her that the only person who blamed Acantha for Cato’s escape was Acantha herself.
Predictably, the most vocal supporters of allowing the thief to stay were Arric and Hartwell. Of course the two Head Archivists wanted Cato to stay—his pitch had been all but tailor-made for them, she’d practically seen them salivating over the prospect of adding yet more information to the already-overloaded Archives. Brand new tomes, added to the groaning shelves. Just what they needed, and damn the consequences, right?
Prince Conrad was more circumspect, to her relief. He acknowledged the archivists’ excitement at the prospect of learning more about their collection, but agreed with Acantha that Cato couldn’t be trusted. He was a stranger to them who’d already proved himself capable of deception, but Conrad’s chief concern seemed to be the magical side of things. He was uneasy about the existence of a power that they didn’t understand.
“A sword, I understand,” he said, shrugging his shoulders. “I know its strengths, its weaknesses. I know what will happen to me if I’m caught unawares by a sword. But that staff of his? A completely unknown quantity.”
Acantha nodded in agreement. “He knocked me unconscious from three feet away, Queen Lana. And that was with just one piece of that armor in his hands. Who knows what all the rest can do?”