He remembered Merren saying, “I thought it was half a joke, this Sword Catcher thing, when I heard it. Who’d do that?” By Law, Kel knew, his loyalty was owed to House Aurelian, but in reality it was given to Conor. Conor, the only person who had ever really known what Kel’s life was like, what made up his days—and in exchange, he knew Conor the same way. In fact, no one knew that Conor but him: the boy Prince who could only have a little brandewine before it made him sick, who cried when his horse （a bay stallion who hated him） broke its leg and had to have its throat cut by Jolivet. Who fretted that the world was so big, he could never see all of it, though he had never been farther than Valderan.
The Trick rose up before Kel’s eyes then—a blue-black needle of marble, threading the sky. He slid the talisman down the chain around his neck so it lay just above the open collar of his shirt. He approached the front doors of the Trick, two wooden half-moons banded with iron. Outside them were stationed a group of three Castelguards; they sat at a folding wooden table, playing yezi ge, a Shenzan card game.
They shot to their feet at Kel’s approach, their faces paling. “Monseigneur,” said one, apparently the bravest. “We were—everything has been quiet, no sound from the prisoner—”
What were they afraid of? Kel wondered. That he—that Conor—was checking to make sure they had shown alacrity in the performance of their duties? They were guarding one weak old man in a prison no one had ever escaped from.
Kel tried to imagine a Conor who would interrupt his own evening to come down to the Trick and shout at a group of guards for lazing about on duty. He failed.
“Gentlemen.” He fought the urge to incline his head politely; Princes did not bow to soldiers. “I’ve come to see the prisoner. No”—he held a hand up—“there is no need to accompany me. I prefer to go alone.”
As they melted away, ushering Kel into the prison tower, he had to hide a smile. It had been so easy. And it felt good, it always did, to put on power like a cloak of invulnerability from a Story-Spinner’s tale. The trick was to fight against enjoying it.
It was a calculated risk, he thought, as he began to climb the tower steps, coming here as Conor. There was always the danger the guards would gossip about his visit, and another Palace denizen would point out that Conor had been in some sort of diplomatic meeting. But he was betting that the gossip about Sarthe and the new Princess was juicy enough to distract them from anything else.
Kel had been in the Trick recently enough, but only during the day. The narrow spiral staircase he climbed now looked deeply shadowed, illuminated only by the occasional hanging carcel lamp, casting spidery shadows against the stone walls.
When he reached the top, he found it equally dark. There was only one lamp. Thankfully, there were windows set high in the walls through which pale-blue moonlight poured, making the Sunderglass bars of the cells glow as if they had been carved from opals.
He walked the narrow aisle until he found Fausten’s cell. It was the only one with the door closed, though for a moment Kel thought it was empty. Then he realized that what he had taken for a heap of rags in the corner was the King’s old adviser, crouched against the wall.
He was in the same clothes he’d worn when the guards had dragged him out of the Shining Gallery, only they were filthy now, the constellations sewn onto his cloak now a scatter of bright beads across the floor of his cell. The stink of piss and old sweat was rank. There was something else under it, too, a metallic smell like old blood.
Kel approached the cell reluctantly. He was no longer thinking about fighting the enjoyment of power. He was asking himself why he had thought he could do this.
Fausten looked up, his face a pale smudge in the dimness. He blinked into the shadows. “My—my lord,” he stammered. “My King—”
Kel flinched. “No. Not the father, but the son.”
A faint look of cunning flashed across Fausten’s face. “Conor,” he breathed. “I have always been fond of you, Conor.”
A faint nausea twisted in the pit of Kel’s stomach. “Fond enough to sell me to the Malgasi without a word to me of whatever bargain you had made?”
Fausten’s eyes glittered, ratlike, in the half dark. “I did not sell you. There is no profit for me in any of this. Your father made this bargain, long ago.”
“But why?” said Kel, and when Fausten did not answer, he said, “My father spoke to me some time ago of a danger. A terrible danger he believed was coming to Castellane, and to me. But he would not say what it was.”
“Why ask me?” said Fausten. “I am but an old man, thrust unjustly into prison. All I have ever wanted to do was protect your father. You know I do not belong here.”
“I’d know it better if you answered my questions,” said Kel. “Was the danger my father spoke of some machination of the Malgasi Court?”
“The Malgasi Court,” Fausten echoed scornfully. “All you think of is politics. There are greater forces at work than any worldly powers.”
“Please, spare me your talk of the stars,” said Kel. “I have seen how helpful that was to my father.”
“Your father,” said Fausten, in a hollow voice. He wobbled to his feet. He came closer to the bars, taking small delicate steps, as if he were picking his way among flowers. Though there were certainly no flowers here. “I have always been loyal to your father,” he said, catching at the Sunderglass bars. “The Court of Malgasi is a cold, cold place. When your father was there, he was only a boy, a fosterling, a third son and ignored. He was open to any voice that whispered to him. And whisper it did.”
“Who whispered to him?”
Fausten’s rhuemy eyes wandered. “Atma az dóta,” he muttered. “It was not his fault. He did only what he was persuaded to do.”
Atma az dóta. Fire and shadow. “What did my father do?”
Fausten shook his head. “I promised. Not to tell.”
“It was something bad,” Kel said, dropping his voice. Low and confiding, as if he were speaking to a child. “Wasn’t it?”
Fausten made an inarticulate noise.
“What I don’t understand,” said Kel mildly, “is why, if my father committed some terrible malfeasance in Malgasi, was Ambassador Sarany so determined that I marry Elsabet?”
“Iren’s daughter,” said Fausten. His eyes had begun to roll from side to side. “She was so beautiful, Iren. But then the fire left her, her light all dimmed, and she was only fury. Why does she want you to marry Elsabet? For the same reason Iren let your father live. Because she prizes your blood. Your Aurelian blood.”
Well, of course. Every noble family prized royal lineage. Kel felt like grinding his teeth together with frustration. “Fausten. If you do not tell me what the danger is that my father spoke of, then I cannot intervene with him for your sake. If you do help me—well, then, perhaps I can convince my father you were acting in his interests. That you were not merely a puppet of the Malgasi, manipulating him at their whim.”
Fausten made a gasping noise. “It is not so simple,” he said. “Nothing is so simple.” He turned his rat’s eyes on Kel. “The danger is not the Malgasi Court. It is far closer than that.”