Cardan slips out of the sheets. He’s naked, which is briefly shocking, but he goes and pulls on a heavily embroidered dressing gown with no apparent shame. His lightly furred tail twitches back and forth in annoyance. “She woke me,” he says. “If she was intent on murder, that’s hardly the way to go about it.”
“Empty your pockets,” the Roach tells me. “Let’s see your weapons. Put everything on the bed.”
Cardan settles himself in a chair, his dressing gown settling around him like a robe of state.
I have little. The heel of bread, gnawed but unfinished. Two knives, crusted with dirt and grass. And the stoppered vial.
The Bomb lifts it up and looks at me, shaking her head. “Here we go. Where did you get this?”
“From Balekin,” I say, exasperated. “Who tried to glamour me to murder Cardan because he needs him dead to persuade Grimsen to make him his own crown of Elfhame. And that is what I came to tell the High King. I would have told you first, but I couldn’t get to the Court of Shadows.”
The Bomb and the Roach share a disbelieving look.
“If I was really glamoured, would I have told you any of that?”
“Probably not,” says the Bomb. “But it would make for a quite clever piece of misdirection.”
“I can’t be glamoured,” I admit. “It’s part of a bargain I made with Prince Dain, in exchange for my service as a spy.”
The Roach’s eyebrows go up. Cardan gives me a sharp look, as though sure anything to do with Dain can’t be good. Or perhaps he’s just surprised that I have yet another secret.
“I wondered what he gave you to make you throw in your lot with us ne’er-do-wells,” the Bomb says.
“Mostly a purpose,” I say, “but also the ability to resist glamour.”
“You could still be lying,” says the Roach. He turns to Cardan. “Try her.”
“Your pardon?” Cardan says, drawing himself up, and the Roach seems to suddenly remember to whom he’s speaking in such an offhanded way.
“Don’t be such a prickly rose, Your Majesty,” the Roach says with a shrug and a grin. “I’m not giving you an order. I’m suggesting that if you tried to glamour Jude, we could find out the truth.”
Cardan sighs and walks toward me. I know this is necessary. I know that he doesn’t intend to hurt me. I know he can’t glamour me. And yet I draw back automatically.
“Jude?” he asks.
“Go ahead,” I say.
I hear the glamour enter his voice, heady and seductive and more powerful than I expected. “Crawl to me,” he says with a grin. Embarrassment pinks my cheeks.
I stay where I am, looking at all their faces. “Satisfied?”
The Bomb nods. “You’re not charmed.”
“Now tell me why I ought to trust you,” I say to her and the Roach. “The Ghost came, with Vulciber, to take me to the Tower of Forgetting. Urged me to go alone, led me right to where I was to be captured, all because he didn’t want me to have Dain’s Court of Shadows. Were either of you in on it with him?”
“We didn’t know what was going on with the Ghost until it was too late,” the Roach says.
I nod. “I saw the old forest entrance to the Court of Shadows.”
“The Ghost activated some of our own explosives.” He dips his head toward the Bomb, who nods.
“Collapsed part of the castle, along with the lair of the Court of Shadows, not to mention the old catacombs where Mab’s bones lie,” Cardan says.
“He’s been planning this for a while. I was able to keep it from being worse,” she says. “A few of us got out unscathed—Snapdragon is well and spotted you climbing the hill of the palace. But many were hurt in the blast. The sluagh—Niniel—got badly burned.”
“What about the Ghost?” I ask.
“He’s on the wind,” the Bomb says. “Gone. We know not where.”
I remind myself that so long as the Bomb and the Roach are okay, things could have been a lot worse.
“Now that we’re all on the same dreary page,” Cardan says. “We must discuss what to do next.”
“If Balekin thinks he can get me into the masquerade, then let him bend his will toward that aim. I’ll play along.” I stop and turn to Cardan. “Or I could just kill him.”
The Roach claps his hand on the back of my neck with a laugh. “You did good, kid, you know that? You came out of the sea even tougher than you went in.”
I have to look down because I am surprised by how much I wanted to hear someone say that. When I glance back up, Cardan is watching me carefully. He looks stricken.
I shake my head, to keep him from saying whatever he’s thinking.
“Balekin is the Ambassador to the Undersea,” he says instead, an echo of my own words to Dulcamara. I am grateful for a return to the subject. “He’s protected by Orlagh. And she has Grimsen and a mighty desire to test me. If her ambassador was killed, she would be very angry.”
“Orlagh attacked the land already,” I remind him. “The only reason she hasn’t declared outright war is that she’s seeking every advantage. But she will. So let the first blow be ours.”
Cardan shakes his head.
“He wants to have you killed,” I insist. “Grimsen has made that a condition of his getting the crown.”
“You should have the hands of the smith,” the Bomb says. “Cut them off at the wrists so he can make no more trouble.”