Page 94 of Lady Knight and the Thief

“Meaning?”

“Well…Cade likes it when they areoutduring 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 whodoesuse 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 naïveté 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.

31

Between the Stacks

ThelibrariesofA’aravosParavale had always fascinated Torren. When he had first come to live at the palace in the Wylds, Torren often disappeared between the stacks, drawn back out only by the promise of sweet treats.