23. Tabitha
Tabitha
The war council happens in the throne room, which is a laugh, because I still can’t sit on the actual throne without the realm having a strop, so I perch on the arm of it instead, like a teenager who’s been told off, while my four men argue tactics.
“We can’t beat him in a straight fight,” Valerian says, for maybe the third time, because he’s a man who’ll keep saying the true thing until everyone agrees it’s true.
“We proved that in the lair. He held all four of us with one hand and didn’t break a sweat.
If we walk up to his stronghold and knock, he kills us and takes Tabby and we’ve handed him everything. ”
“So we don’t knock,” Azaan says. He’s got a map conjured over the fire, Mordecai’s stronghold marked at the far edge of it, and he’s been on the wind half the day scouting it, coming back grey and grim.
“It’s a fortress carved into a cliff. Shadow-wards, same as the lair but bigger, layered.
One way in that I can find, and it’s watched.
He’s not expecting us to come to him, though.
He’s expecting Tabby to come to him. On her own. Like he asked.”
The room goes quiet.
“No,” Luka says immediately.
“Hear him out,” Gavriel rumbles, which surprises me, because Gavriel’s usually first to wall me off from anything.
Azaan looks at me, and I don’t like the look, because it’s careful, and careful means he’s about to suggest something horrible.
“He wants Tabeitha,” Azaan says slowly. “He’s obsessed with her.
Three centuries obsessed. That’s his weakness, little one, not his strength.
A man that fixed on one thing stops seeing everything else.
” He taps the map. “If Tabby walks up to that fortress wearing Tabeitha, if she lets the old Queen forward just enough to fool him, he opens the door himself. He’ll be so busy staring at the ghost of the woman he loves that he won’t notice the four of us coming in behind through the seam I’ve found.
We get the book while he’s distracted. We’re gone before he realises the Queen he’s mooning at isn’t his at all. ”
I feel every drop of blood in me go cold. Because it’s clever. It’s horribly, brilliantly clever, and it also means the one thing I’ve spent this whole book trying to prevent.
“You want me to let her out,” I say. “On purpose. Tabeitha. After what happened on the road. After she nearly kept the wheel.”
“I want you to use her,” Azaan says. “There’s a difference.”
“Is there?” My voice cracks. “Because from in here it doesn’t feel like a difference.
Every time she comes forward she gets stronger.
You’ve all seen it. Last time you needed all four of you to drag me back.
And you want me to invite her to the front, right up against the one person in this realm who wants her fully awake?
” I shake my head, hard. “That’s not a plan, that’s how I lose. That’s how she wins.”
“I know,” Valerian says quietly.
I round on him. “You agree with this?”
“I hate this,” he says. “I hate it more than you do, if that’s possible, because I know exactly what it risks.
But Tabby.” He crosses to me, takes my face in his hands, blue eyes steady on mine.
“We cannot beat Mordecai with force. We’ve tried.
The only door in that fortress is the one he opens himself, and he only opens it for her.
This is the play. It’s the only play. And I would never, ever suggest it if I didn’t believe we could pull you back out after. ”
“And if you can’t?”
He doesn’t lie to me. That’s the thing about Valerian, at the end, when it counts, he won’t lie. “Then we’ll have made a terrible mistake,” he says. “But we’ll have made it together, and I’ll spend whatever’s left of me clawing you back.”
I look round at the four of them. Luka, who said no first and will be sick with it the whole time.
Gavriel, whose shield is stuck to my soul.
Azaan, who spent an hour this morning making a valley burn beautiful just to tell me I matter.
Valerian, holding my face like it’s the only fixed point in the realm.
“Slow and steady,” I mutter. “That’s your usual line, arse-face. This is the opposite of slow and steady. This is throwing the Queen at the wall and seeing if she sticks.”
“We’re out of slow and steady,” he says. “The Sorcerers are coming. We don’t have the luxury of the long way round anymore.”
He’s right. God help me, he’s right. Two fronts, and the clock ticking on both.
“Fine,” I say, and my stomach drops through the floor as I say it. “Fine. I’ll wear her. But you get in fast, you get my book, and the second you’ve got it, you pull me back, whatever it takes. Promise me. All of you.”
“I promise,” Luka says.
“I promise,” Azaan says.
“On the shield,” Gavriel says.
“On my life,” Valerian says. “Every one I’ve got left, which unlike yours is only the one.”
“Don’t joke,” I say.
“I’m not.” And he isn’t. That’s what finally scares me into believing we might survive this. Valerian, not joking.
I look at the throne I still can’t sit on, and I think about the Oracle, go deeper, stop asking the ghost, and I think, grimly, that I’m about to do the exact opposite. I’m about to hand the ghost the keys and hope I can grab them back.
What could possibly go wrong.