She said it every time she gave Hodge a cup of mead to drink, and every time it was a little less true. He didn’t begrudge her the words, though. In his private thoughts, he’d long since decided the mead was the only thing keeping him alive. It gave a man strength, and he needed as much as he could possibly get.
Today more than most. Hodge gulped the sweet liquid down without pausing for breath, then handed her the empty cup. “Thank you,” he said; once, early in his reign, he’d forgotten to be courteous, and Gertrude had smacked him, Prince or no. “Now if you’ll pardon me—it’s probably better if you ain’t ’ere for this.”
The brownie’s expression soured. She didn’t like his plan; even her usually invincible talent for seeing the good in people faltered at times. But he was the Prince, and so long as he remembered to say please and thank you, she wouldn’t defy him once his decision was made. “We’ll be nearby if you need us,” Rosamund said, and hastened out of the room.
Leaving him with his guard of two elf-knights. Peregrin had tried to convince Hodge to put on fine clothes; he insisted the Prince’s dignity demanded it, especially when holding something like a formal audience. Hodge—who hadn’t held anything one could plausibly call a formal audience in his entire reign—flatly refused. He was the son of a bricklayer; he’d never once worn a top hat, and he had no intention of starting now. I’d look a proper fool, I would. And if I can’t take me seriously, who will?
Even Peregrin and Cerenel were there less for dignity and more for protection. None of them expected physical danger—but given that Hodge’s death might very well mean the end of the Onyx Hall, nobody wanted to take any chances.
He took a deep breath, then nodded at Cerenel. The knight murmured to the moth perching on his finger, which fluttered out through a crack in the door.
A moment later, the door opened, and Dame Segraine escorted Valentin Aspell into the room.
Hodge’s fingers curled tight around the arms of his chair. He loathed the fae of the Goblin Market; they indulged in all the worst vices of their kind, at the expense of humans, and flaunted it in his face. Their influence had grown through Lune’s long decline, as she became less and less capable of calling them to heel, but since her seclusion they’d flourished like rats. Hodge’s best attempts to check them on his own were laughably inadequate.
On the surface of it, Aspell wasn’t the worst of the lot: that honor belonged to Nadrett. But he had a distinction the other Market boss didn’t, which was that he was a confirmed traitor, sentenced and punished by the Queen herself. Hodge didn’t trust the bastard an inch.
A spark of anger—the first of many, he was sure—lit in his stomach when Aspell made him an old-fashioned bow. Polite though it looked, he was sure the faerie meant it as mockery. His suspicion strengthened when Aspell said, “Thank you for seeing me, Lord Benjamin.”
The formal courtesy twisted Hodge’s mouth. He said roughly, “Don’t waste my time on fancy talk. Why do you want to see Lune?”
Aspell’s thin eyebrows rose, an elegant display of surprise. But ’e ain’t surprised at all. “That,” the faerie said, “is between me and the Queen.”
“What’s between you and the Queen is me. You don’t answer my question, this meeting’s done.”
By the way things should have worked, Hodge had no right to say that; his authority had to do with the dealings between mortals and fae. Not two faeries. He half-expected Apsell to point that out. But the other merely drew in a vexed breath and said, “If you throw me out, you’ll never hear what I have to say about Galen St. Clair.”
“What’s to ’ear?” Hodge grinned. “We already know Nadrett stuck ’im in a photograph. Oh, I’m sorry—was that what you was going to sell us?”
He could almost hear Aspell’s teeth grinding. You came in ’ere with your notions of ’ow this would go—but I ain’t playing your game. I may be the last Prince this place ever sees; well, I’m going to be the best fucking Prince I can. And that means not letting you dance me like a puppet.
When Aspell recovered his composure, the faerie said, “Do you know where the photograph is?”
“Do you?”
That was the one piece of information Hodge was willing to bargain for. But Aspell’s fleeting hesitation told him he was out of luck. “I can find out,” the faerie said.
Hodge snorted. “So can we. Try again some other time, guv. When you’ve got something of value to sell.”
What looked like real frustration twisted Aspell’s face. The Goodemeades had given Hodge a thorough warning about him; they said he was very good at hiding what he thought. Either this was a pose, or he wasn’t bothering to conceal his feelings. Whichever it was, it boiled down to manipulation. “I am not a fool, my lord. I know the Queen has not been seen in years. Unlike many of her ignorant subjects, I know better than to think her dead—we would have felt it; likely we would not be here—but she cannot be far from her end. Is she even conscious? Is that why you refuse to let me see her, because she has fallen into a coma and can no longer speak?”
It came near enough the truth to make Hodge furious. “No, I won’t let you see ’er because you’re a fucking traitor. Or did you think I’d forgotten that? Even if you told me why you wanted in, I probably wouldn’t believe you; there’s no reason I should. But you stands there with your bloody ‘that’s between me and the Queen’ rot, and you expects me to say yes? ’Ow stupid do you think I am?”
The heat in the faerie’s eyes said, Very. Hodge heard Cerenel shift, as if ready to throw himself in front of the Prince—but without warning, the fire faded, and Aspell relaxed. Too abruptly; Hodge didn’t trust it. Aspell said, “You know of the harm I did this court, of course. But I have also done good on its behalf.”
“I know; you was Lune’s Lord Keeper. That was ’undreds of years ago, mate.”
“Not that,” Aspell said. “Much more recently. Do you think I want to see the Onyx Hall fall into ruin? When the purpose of my treason was to prevent that very thing? I have tried to halt the progress of the Inner Circle, more than once. I arranged the bombs last fall, at Charing Cross and Praed Street.” He grimaced. “There should have been more, a few days ago—enough to break the line completely, and force repairs—but I’m afraid those who took them were not so tractable as I had thought; they chose to direct their efforts elsewhere.”
The Goodemeades had told him their suspicions about Aspell and the bombs. His surprise at hearing the faerie confess it so openly, though, was shouted down by his anger. “Oh, and you expects me to thank you for it? Man, if I wanted the line blown up, Bonecruncher would do it tomorrow. But people got ’urt by that. And I didn’t become Prince so I could ’elp fae murder my own kind.”
“Not even to save faerie lives?”
“You won’t die,” Hodge said grimly. “You’ll just go away.”
He hid the pain the words brought. Even his fellow mortals knew the Fair Folk were leaving; it was a common story in rural parts of the British Isles, as common as the flower fairies supposedly haunting the gardens of middle-class girls. Unlike the flower fairies, the stories of flitting were true. He wondered how many people telling the stories, though, knew their immortal neighbors personally. It wasn’t so easy to accept when the faeries were friends.
Or even enemies, like Aspell. Nothing was showing through that bastard’s mask, not anymore; Hodge might have been some exotic bird, stuffed and put on display for a ha’penny a look. “Your predecessors would have considered that a great tragedy.”