Chapter Sixteen
A GROUP OF SERVANTS WERE SENT IN FIRST. THERE were thirty-six, precisely the three dozen he’d requested.
They were mostly adults, but the group also included a handful of gangly striplings on the cusp of maturity.
As the anxious fae stood huddled together along a wall, Malachi and his Cadre exchanged gazes, communicating what didn’t need to be spoken aloud.
At least not yet. It was, however, quite telling that the sentries had marched servants of a lower station in front of Malachi before they faced interrogation themselves.
It could’ve simply been the inflated beliefs of their own superiority, or they could’ve been buying themselves time to cover their own asses when they did have to face Malachi.
A smile that lacked warmth curved his lips without him giving conscious thought to it; the sentries would soon learn the error of their ways, regardless of their reasons.
One of the young servants, a stripling nearly as tall as Malachi with a scrawny torso and long limbs, gasped at the cruel smile his king wore. Then he began dry heaving.
Kadeesha, who stood directly to his right, hissed in a breath. “You do not really mean to interrogate children, do you?” she gritted out. “I won’t—”
His smile turned more mirthful as he cut a look at her.
She was obviously biting her tongue, a first for the archprincess.
“I mean to do whatever necessary to extract answers. That is what you desire, right?” His voice boomed, making the servants press closer together and causing the Aether princess to scowl. Both were effects that he’d wanted.
“I will not stand idly by if the young among them are tortured,” she warned.
“But you aren’t concerned about the adults being tortured? Even if they are innocent?” That was a revelation; it spoke of a certain level of callousness he wouldn’t have assigned to her.
Kadeesha’s jaw clenched. “I don’t relish or condone harming those who are innocents. I would’ve demanded the guards present themselves for interrogation first, and only turned to servants as a last resort. And even then, I would use a gentler hand with the latter.”
His lips twitched. It was the way she talked about herself, placed emphasis on the I, as if she were leagues above Malachi in every way.
Really, her not-so-veiled condescension should’ve grated on him.
Yet he had to fight against the urge to seize the maddening woman and kiss her, get her beneath him until she screamed out his name and an apology.
Rubbing his freshly shaven jaw, he turned away from the archprincess, severing the ability to look upon her and thus quashing such inconvenient thoughts.
Later. He would address them and her slick mouth later.
“You—come here, boy!” Malachi commanded the stripling who was still dry heaving. The boy began to violently tremble.
“It’s all right,” Kadeesha said soothingly. “You will not be harmed.”
Malachi worked his jaw. Who the fuck did this woman think she was? “You have no authority here, Princess,” he reminded Kadeesha. It was another matter they needed to set straight; he found himself needing to make that clear to Kadeesha more and more.
“You asked me to be on this dais. You said it is my blood debt that is owed. Did you forget already?” she pressed back, and now his blood was boiling.
The young boy’s eyes flitted between them, gazing at Malachi in utter terror and at Kadeesha in desperate hope. “I am your king!” Malachi barked. “I will not ask a third time. Come here.”
An older woman who wore a patterned scarf about her head, clutched the boy to her chest, whispered something in his ear, and then prodded him forward when she released him.
The boy gulped and shuffled to the dais.
He dropped to both knees, head reverentially bowed and eyes downcast, waiting for Malachi to acknowledge his show of subservience.
“Rise,” Malachi ordered.
The boy jumped to his feet. His eyes remained fixed on the stone floor.
“What is your name?” Malachi asked. “Who are your people?”
“Theo,” he croaked. “And my people are nobodies. They are servants in the warden’s household. Madrina and Broderick are the names of my mother and father. My family name is Geyls, handed down from my father’s bloodline.”
Malachi nodded. The boy possessed greater courage than he knew. The sentry who’d greeted Malachi hadn’t been able to speak without stammering, and here the boy was doing exactly that. Granted, he looked as if he wanted to shit himself, but he hadn’t, and that wasn’t nothing.
“Where are your parents at present?” Malachi inquired.
The boy looked over his shoulder to the woman who’d hugged him. “My mother is right there. She is a cook servant. My father is a hunter. He is traveling with a hunting party to shore up the keep’s meat stores before the Winter Solstice is upon us.”
Malachi inclined his head at the older woman the boy had identified as his mother.
She didn’t look truly old, but the slight crow’s-feet in the corners of her eyes revealed some aging.
Their presence meant she was a fae who’d been alive for many, many centuries, likely more than a millennia.
“Approach,” Malachi ordered the woman. She did so with her head held pridefully high.
She somehow kept her head high even as she bowed.
When Malachi bid her to rise, she stood by her son, draping an arm around him with all the ferocity of a mountain bear warning predators away from her cub.
“What would you do to keep your son safe and alive?” Malachi asked.
The woman’s deep brown skin paled several shades lighter. She quickly recovered, putting on a brave—and admirable—front. “Whatever is necessary, Your Grace.”
“Good.” Malachi pitched his voice low and menacing. “Then I’d like to know if any who are gathered here in this banner room, or any servants not inside, are aware of or directly involved in treason against your king.”
“My mother would never—” The boy rushed to his mother’s defense but she cut him off with a cluck of her tongue.
The mother then straightened her spine and stared Malachi in the eyes.
“I do not know of any treason within the warden’s household that runs among her servants who are gathered in the banner room, or who are not in attendance.
I will swear an oath to that to save my son’s life if I must. But gossip often reaches servants’ ears even when we do not wish to know certain things.
It is a function of your betters regarding you as invisible.
I have heard whispers of others, soldiers among the warden’s army and …
visiting nobles who are guilty of what you speak. ”
He could detect no falsehood in her words or bearing.
Which wasn’t surprising, because the older woman was spot-on about how nobles tended to view their servants.
It was a lesson his mother had taught him early on: to especially treat the serving staff with generosity.
They were the ones who unavoidably would always be privy to your secrets—and fear alone was a very thin motivator to secure loyalty.
Yet fear wasn’t without its power, and so not using it—as Kadeesha had wanted—would have been a waste of this moment.
To think that he’d ever willingly hurt a child made him sick to his stomach, and, for some inexplicable reason, he hated that she thought that of him.
Which he might explain to her later—if she were on her knees, apologizing. Or …
Celestials damn it!
He told himself to focus. “Tell me the names of the soldiers,” Malachi said.
He didn’t bother to ask about the nobles; they were too many stations above the woman.
It meant their names uttered from a servant’s lips would hold little worth as testimony that Malachi could cite as proof of their crimes.
Among the ten names she spoke was Gengin, the redheaded sentry. “Thank you,” Malachi told the older woman when she was finished.
Shionne wordlessly descended the dais and dug a purse filled with gold pences out of the satchel she carried.
“Your king extends this generosity in gratitude for your aid,” Shionne told the older woman, who gaped at the bag as if it had snakes slithering past its closed strings.
She smoothed her stunned features and reached for the bag, her small hands curling around it.
Before letting it go, Shionne advised, “Take your boy and vacate the keep. Do it at once to secure your safety. There’s enough gold here for you to start a life elsewhere, do anything you want.
When you are settled, send correspondence to the palace with your new location and the king will arrange for regular annual living stipends to be delivered. ”
The woman’s eyes grew wider. Unshed tears shined in them.
She bowed and then straightened. “You are very charitable, Your Grace,” she spoke quietly to Malachi.
“However, what should I do about my husband, who is away with the hunting party? Should I be worried about his life being in danger the moment he returns? He will not know what has transpired …”
Malachi inclined his head. “Your concerns are merited.” He reached into an inner pocket of his cloak and pulled out one of two smooth yellow stones he’d stashed there.
It was a beacon stone, one of the essential supplies he and his Cadre always journeyed with when they set out on any excursion.
He handed the stone to the woman, explaining what it was.
“Give Shionne your husband’s name, a description of him, the location his hunting party set off for, if you know it, and she’ll deliver the mate of this stone to him so he can find you and the boy,” he assured the woman.
She clasped Malachi’s hands as she took the beacon stone. “Your charity is boundless, Your Grace.”
The Aether princess coughed beside him.