30. Malicious Machinations #2
“Good mornin’, Lassie! Make my day merry and come give me a kiss,” He said and strode across the gardens with a jovial smile upon his face. His silver hair was braided tight against his skull today, and his beard was groomed to a fine point.
Cypress cracked a smile and said, “You can kiss my feet and thank me for it.” Then she raised one leg, wiggling her toes for Rhene to kiss.
Torren’s hand circled Cypress’s ankle and drew her gaze back to his storm grey eyes.
“Do you like to be worshipped, Cypress?” he rasped while his hand roamed up her calf.
Her breath caught, but then Rhene stood in front of them before she could formulate a response.
“Thank ye, Lassie,” He said in all seriousness, then kissed the very tip of her big toe with the lightest of touches.
Cypress couldn’t help but laugh. “I wasn’t serious, Rhene,” She said through her giggles.
“Aye, but I was. So, what’s the plan?”
Cypress pressed herself into the corner of the bench, knees tucked under her chin and arms wrapped around her legs. “We haven’t gotten that far,” She grumbled.
She refused to look at Torren. The weight of his gaze sometimes made coherent thoughts difficult.
“Well, we can’t just walk in through the front doors of the Keep and ask them nicely,” Torren jibed.
Cypress wanted to punch him in the ribs.
“Clearly, there are bound to be wanted posters all over the Keep with our faces.”
“What about my face?” Rhene asked, “They don’t know me. I could walk in through the front doors.”
“Rhene. You’re a nearly eight-foot-tall Fair Folk with silver hair. You’ll be at best recognized, at worst, killed on the spot,” Torren reminded him for the fourth time in a flat voice.
“Ye don’t know that,” Rhene said and crossed his arms.
“He does, Rhene,” Cypress said.
The day passed in relatively the same fashion. One of them would suggest an option for infiltrating the castle; another would point out how it would fail.
Cypress at one point took to watching the plants sway in the breeze coming through the open arches.
“We’ve been through this, Rhene. I don’t remember enough of the Keep to go in by myself. I need Cypress if I want any chance of slipping through unseen. She knows all of the passages.”
“If the two of ye go, then I’ll come too. One more sword is better.”
Cypress shook her head. “You’ll stand out too much. I can potentially hide Torren and me within the servants, if need be. You’re too…” she started, but struggled to find the right word to describe exactly how much Rhene stood out.
“She’s trying to be nice, Rhene. You’re too obviously Fair Folk, even with a Glamour.”
Rhene sighed, but relented. “I know, I just can’t stand the thought of ye both going without help.”
“Would you feel the same if I were a man?” Cypress asked and turned to glare at him.
Beside her, Torren sat back with his hands raised.
“Lassie, that’s not what I meant,” Rhene tried, but Cypress shook her head.
“Do I need to remind you I was Captain of the Prince Guard for several years, a Knight of Grethnah? Do. Not. Coddle. Me.”
Without a word, Rhene nodded his head.
Silence hung over the group for several moments before a thought struck Cypress.
“What is the date?” She asked. Cypress had lost count of the days during their travels; the ever-shifting road of the Wylds made the days seem both shorter and longer than natural.
“Twentieth day of the eighth moon."
“How fast can you forge an invitation for a ball and have suitable garments for us?” Cypress asked, her mind already putting puzzle pieces together.
They would infiltrate the castle under the guise of an invitation to the ball with human names, and then quietly slip away down the hidden passages.
Torren shrugged. “If you want to dance, Lass, I can arrange that?”
She sighed in exasperation. “No, idiot, there is always a ball held at the end of summer, to celebrate the end of Cade’s season. It’s a masquerade. If we can get in, then when there are many more people than usual in the Keep, we have a better chance of going undetected.”
Understanding dawned across Torren’s face, though the first thing out of his mouth was “Cade’s season?”
Cypress pulled a face. “Yes. Season. The joust comes first, then the ball at the end of the season.”
Torren looked to Rhene. “How have we not thought of this?”
Rhene shrugged. “I suppose because we’ve never had the Captain of their guard on our side.”
She nodded, accepting the attempt at mending the newly formed friendship between them. “So, how long?”
Torren shrugged. “My people could probably have us outfitted by tomorrow night, sooner if we need the time?”
“If we can get to the keep by the full moon, we will be in a perfect position to slip in while the majority of people are making entrances, and decline the formal introduction by the steward. Once we’re in, I can slip into the servant corridors, and there we will be able to walk unseen through the entire castle. ”
“And if the servants see us?”
Cypress grimaced. “Depends on who sees us, if we’re seen.”
“Meaning?”
“Well…Cade likes it when they are out during the ball. Carrying trays of food and everything else through the halls. He thinks it makes him seem more powerful. So, the corridors are largely unused during celebrations because of it.”
“So who does use them during celebrations?”
“Personal servants.”
“Not guards?”
Cypress shook her head. “There are separate ones that lead straight to the dungeons. The servant’s corridors are much narrower and confined. A knight in full armor would struggle to hold any sort of defensive position.”
Again, Torren nodded, and then he and Rhene began discussing the logistics of getting there.
Cypress stopped paying attention to their conversation, instead lost in the depths of her own mind. Before her journey, never once did Cypress stop to think of the Fair Folk. To consider how their life was because most lived in the Wylds.
Of course, she had known of the Fair Folk’s existence, of the so-called treaty between the kingdoms, but beyond that, her knowledge was minimal. Cypress’s life had existed entirely within the Keep, and at the end of her sword as Captain Cy.
Cypress had traveled through the estates of the noble houses around the Keep, and never once thought it unusual that there was a distinct lack of Fair Folk amongst the people there.
Everyone at the keep, in Grethnah, had easily accepted his second child, too. The solely human child, as heir apparent, despite the treaty. Cypress hadn’t ever given it a second thought.
Cypress’s entire life, her entire way of thinking, had been molded and shaped, manipulated by Caelith and the houses of nobility that had secretly been decimating houses of Faerie for likely centuries.
With what Torren had revealed to her, Cypress now realized what his grandfather and mother had discovered. The houses of Faerie had been unknowingly sending their daughters to slaughter, their children with them.
And if they had all been confined to the Keep, alone and away from their people, leading up to their labor, none of them likely felt safe within the walls of the castle where they raised children, the future rulers of Grethnah.
Cypress wondered if any of them had sensed that the child they raised was not the same as the child they bore, the one created by their own flesh and blood.
If they had discovered the changeling in the bassinet and then suddenly fallen ill, or had an unfortunate accident.
Despite her na?veté and lack of information about the deception, Cypress had known the joust felt off, with the noble houses of Faerie absent.
There either wasn’t anyone brave enough within Faerie to dare tempt the humans into taking another of their people, or they’d been ordered to stay within the Wylds.
Or, Cypress realized, maybe they were all too preoccupied with the Wyld Hunt waking, of the decimation of their people on two fronts, to be concerned with attending a joust for a spoiled human Prince.
Cypress sighed and tried to come to grips with what had been under her nose this entire time. She had no reason to doubt Torren’s words. The blood oath between them prevented him from lying to her. And, she’d witnessed the devastation from Crown raiders herself.
Oswald had delivered her arrest warrant personally, with wings and pelts of Fair Folk strapped across the back of his horse.
Still, she felt as if she owed Caelith and Cade everything. Her life, her station, all of the things she’d been given in her rooms at the Keep.
She owed it all to the crown, or else she would likely be a timid creature in the bowels of the Keep, subject to a life of scrubbing pots and carrying linens from the bowels of the castle to the top of the towers.
But she could not stand by, blind to everything any longer. She couldn’t. She wouldn’t.
Cypress was going to help Torren in any way she could to stop the Hunt. and then, as Duchess of Eobbaara, wherever in the Wylds that was, she would help him make a better life for the people of the Faerie.
Whatever it took, she would stop the killings. The people of Faerie deserved to feel safe.
And Cypress would make sure that happened. Even if it was the last thing she did.