“Captain Acantha,” he said, finding it strangely thrilling to speak her name. “It’s good to see you again.”
“The Queen has made her decision,” the woman said, ignoring him completely. “You’ll be permitted to stay until we can make a proper assessment of the veracity of your claims. Until such time as you can be trusted, you’ll be escorted by an armed guard at all times. All times,” she repeated, eyes narrowing slightly for emphasis. She was clearly waiting for him to make a joke—which was fair, because his mind was already rifling through possibilities. But with a heroic effort, he decided against using his first few minutes alone with her to antagonize her.
“More than fair,” was all he said, inclining his head a little. “Please convey my thanks to the Queen.”
“No,” she said dismissively. “I’m your guard, not your messenger.”
“Well—”
“There’ll be no need for us to talk.”
And Acantha made good on that promise. As the days went by, she was his shadow. It was almost eerie, the way she managed to be exactly three steps away from him at all times, her demeanor relaxed but some glint in her eye telling him that she was always microseconds away from having her sword in her hand and his crumpled body unconscious on the ground. It had surprised him, that first day, when she’d wordlessly unlocked the cell door. Was he to be given free rein of the Palace? It seemed that way—at least, until he lingered by the doors to the Archives.
“No.”
“Fair enough,” he acknowledged. But her face had already settled into that hard mask she wore. He waited for a response, but something told him he’d be waiting for a while.
They assigned him quarters in the Palace, to his surprise—though Acantha’s constant watchful presence made him feel a lot less like an honored guest than the luxurious accommodation could otherwise have allowed. Still, for someone who was used to sleeping on a bedroll in a room full of mages, the room was delightfully extravagant. Acantha waited stone-faced in the doorway while he flung himself onto the soft bed over and over. Surely she wasn’t going to follow himeverywhere, he reasoned. She had to sleep sometime. Or eat. Or take care of basic bodily maintenance. He’d get some time to himself soon.
But as the days passed, he began to suspect that the guard had her own particular brand of magic. She wasalways there. A wrathful shadow by the locked door of his room when he went to sleep, a stoic sentinel when he woke in the morning—he wasn’t even afforded any breathing room when he bathed. She did at least turn her back on him, though he had a feeling that that had more to do with her comfort than his.
By the third day, his commitment to not antagonizing her was a thing of the past. He spoke to her constantly, despite her complete lack of response, verbal or otherwise. It had started as a joke, but without an audience, he began to feel more like a madman than a comedian. Still, he couldn’t bring himself to stop. They wandered the halls of the Palace together, drawing curious looks from everyone they passed.
“Look,” he said impatiently over dinner on the third day. Meals had become his favorite part of the day, if only because Acantha ate at the same time as he did. It wasn’t much, but he found himself clinging to this small reminder that she was flesh and blood. “Isn’t the whole point of my being here to tell you about magic and the world and everything?”
Silence, of course. Acantha took a stoic bite of her meal, her eyes staring straight past him.
“It just seems like you’re wasting the valuable opportunity that I present by being here.” He studied her face. “You could be asking me things. I could be telling you things. That’s generally how it goes. Come on, Acantha. You did such a good job of interrogating me last time. What changed?”
He knew what had changed, of course. The last time they’d spoken to each other, he’d tricked her into letting him escape. He had to hand it to her, this was a brilliant solution to that particular quandary. Clever with words as he always had been, Cato was rapidly realizing that the art of persuasion relied heavily upon dialogue. And when your target would neither speak nor even react to what you were saying—well, he felt like he had both hands tied behind his back.
That said, he’d gotten out of plenty of scrapes with both hands tied behind his back.
The lack of privacy was a concern, though. He’d made a point of demonstrating to the dragons that he was completely unarmed and, for all intents and purposes, unmagical. That was why he was forbidden from the Archives, wasn’t it? He could almost feel the objects down there calling to him in the absence of his usual armory of tricks. It had been a long time since he’d felt this…normal. He didn’t like it much. Power was addictive. He’d never met a mage who wasn’t in the habit of wearing at least half a dozen artifacts at all times. Take Haspar’s ring collection, for example. Or Inota’s extensive and ever-changing collection of jewelry, or his own fondness for enchanted armor.
He wasn’t completely disarmed, of course. Disarming Cato was impossible—not that the dragons had any way of knowing that. But they’d figure it out pretty quickly if they saw him making contact with his coven. That was why it was so frustrating that he never had so much as a moment without Acantha’s hard green eyes boring into the back of his skull. He took solace in the fact that they’d at least anticipated that contact might be an issue. Preparations would proceed with or without any contact from him.
And if he was honest, it was kind of nice to take another break from the coven. Even if the conversation here was less than sparkling.
It was a whole week before Cato got the chance to talk to someone who was actually willing to talk back. He’d been hopeful that Acantha’s wall of silence was about to lift a little. When they’d left his room that morning, she’d surprised him by walking ahead of him instead of following in his footsteps as had become her habit. He’d temporarily considered walking in the opposite direction just to see if he could get a rise out of her that way, but the truth was he was so grateful for this minute change in their dynamic that he didn’t want to risk ruining it, so he hastened after her.
The Palace, he’d been learning during his rather silent guided tour over the last week or so, was full of rooms that didn’t seem to have much of a purpose other than displaying furniture that looked like it was never used. Acantha led him into one of these rooms, where an enormous table carved from what looked like a single piece of glossy ancient timber stood in pride of place. Every time he’d seen it, the table had seemed almost too stately to touch, so seeing people sitting at it with their elbows resting on it felt wrong, like the sensation of accidentally sitting on something in a gallery that turns out to be an artwork instead of a chair. After that initial unease had passed, he recognized the dragons as being the same ones who’d been with Acantha that day in the Fog.
“Good morning,” he said, surprised to see them. “Sorry, am I interrupting a study session?” There were stacks of imposing-looking books on the table, half a dozen of them open to reveal tiny, densely packed writing from margin to edge.
“Not at all,” said the woman sitting at the head of the table. After a week with Acantha, hearing a real, verbal response to one of his questions actually made him jump. He glanced over his shoulder uneasily—sure enough, she’d taken up position by the door, that thousand-mile stare fixed on her face again. Disappointment washed over him, surprisingly bitter. He’d gotten his hopes up that the silence between them might have been about to change.
“We were hoping you might join our little study group,” said one of the men at the table. Cato smiled as he recognized him.
“It’s Arric, isn’t it? We sort of met last week. You spoke to the Queen for me.”
The dragon looked pleased that Cato had remembered him, though the man sitting at his side clicked his tongue in displeasure. “Yes, I remember that gross violation of protocol very well—”
“This is Hartwell, my associate,” Arric said drily, gesturing to his companion. “And perhaps you remember Morgan?”
The woman at the head of the table gave him a little wave, a faint smile curving her lips upward. She bore such a striking resemblance to Acantha that the smile almost felt wrong. The same forest-green eyes, the same dark red hair—though where Acantha’s was ear-length, clearly cut for practicality, Morgan’s was clearly much longer, swept up on top of her head in one of those elegantly messy buns that Cato had never quite gotten the hang of with his own long, white mane. He glanced over his shoulder at Acantha, then heard a soft laugh from Morgan.
“We’re sisters,” she explained as if in answer to the question he hadn’t asked aloud.