The queen turned back to face them. Slag frowned and stared up at the ceiling.
“Your highness-” Malden began.
“You must call me Aethil,” she told him. “As we are all friends in this room.”
“Thank you, Aethil,” Malden said. “I wonder if I might trouble you for that reward in advance, perhaps-”
“Friends!” Slag moaned. “Friends, she says. For fie!”
Aethil’s face fell and she rushed over to the divan to kneel next to him. “Don’t say that, Sir Croy!”
“She calls us friends. Yet when I ask her for a simple favor, she refuses me. It’s like she doesn’t care for me at all. Isn’t it, squire?”
Malden held his tongue.
“I said, lass, and I thought I made this fucking clear, that I require both my servants if I’m to be imprisoned in this cramped cell.” Slag pulled away as she tried to stroke his face. “My squire, and my shieldmaiden.”
Malden saw instantly what he was driving at. “Yes, of course, you can’t possibly be expected to be at peace without Cythera here to-to-bear your shield,” he said.
The dwarf scowled at him. “Quiet, boy,” Slag said, and made to slap him again. Perhaps he saw the steel in Malden’s eye because he did not complete the blow.
“But, Sir Croy,” Aethil protested, “it was so hard getting them to release just Malton to my custody. And you don’t even have a shield here. And you certainly don’t need one to protect yourself from… me.”
“She has other duties,” Malden said. “The shieldmaiden. Vital duties. Really, she must be brought here, to live with us.”
“She must be brought here at once,” Slag insisted.
Aethil pouted. “I’ll do my best.”
“Milady,” Malden said, and before Slag could slap him, corrected himself, “your highness. Aethil. You are the queen here. Could you not simply command it and have it done? Cythera could be brought here on the moment.”
“It’s not that easy,” Aethil sighed. “I am the queen, yes, and in theory I’m quite powerful. At least, I am among the working classes. The warriors and the nobility tend to see me as a figurehead, though, and give the Hieromagus and his council of lords all authority.”
“Oh, for fie! They’ve foisted me off on a creature of convenience. A fucking puppet,” Slag said. “How I deplore this.”
Aethil’s eyes went wide and she rushed to the door. “Don’t fret, Sir Croy! You know I can’t stand it when you fret!”
“Without my shieldmaiden I feel as if I can’t so much as get up off this couch. You do understand, Aethil? Don’t you?” Slag said. “How hard it can be to get through the day without a little help.”
Malden thought the dwarf was pushing it too far, and that at any moment the elf queen would roll her eyes and tell Slag to find a way, somehow, to make do with only one servant. But she didn’t. “There are political necessities,” she said, in that tone people use when they’ve already been convinced, when they are going to give you what you ask for but they want you to feel sorry for what it’s going to cost them. “The lords won’t like it, having so many humans around me, but…”
“But?” Slag asked.
“I hate to deny you anything,” Aethil said. And then she pouted.
Malden had to remind himself that this was the queen of an ancient race of evil warriors who tortured men for sport and had nearly driven his ancestors off the continent.
“Will you make me beg?” Slag asked, his tone hard.
“Let me see what I can do.” She pulled the door open and hurried out.
The instant she was gone, Malden turned and glared at the dwarf.
“What did you do?” he demanded.
“Nothing, lad! It was all her fucking notion. She’s as mad as that poncing wizard-priest thing in the black bedsheet. She knows absolutely nothing about humans, except what she read in some epoch-old storybook. Piece of bloody fiction, all about valiant knights slaying dragons and winning the hearts of lovely bits of tail like her. When she heard there was a knight in her arse-smelling dungeon, she just knew she had to have it for a pet. So she summoned Sir Croy.”
“And she got you instead.”
“I’ll admit, I expected a certain level of disillusionment,” Slag said, almost grinning. He seemed to find the situation as bizarre as Malden did. “I thought she would just send me back, as deficient to specification. I mean, clearly I’m not a storybook knight with a rearing charger and a six foot bloody lance. But the look in her eyes, lad.” Slag shook his head. “You’d think I was some piece of delectable man-meat wrapped up in too-tight hose and a ripped tunic. I feared for my virtue, I did!”
“Your… virtue.”
Slag lifted his hands in confusion. “Son, you have never known real fear till you’ve seen a woman half again as tall as you are rushing forward to embrace you and smother you in kisses.”
“It sounds just terrible,” Malden agreed.
“I didn’t know she was going to fall in love with me. It just happened!”
“She fell… in love… with a dwarf,” Malden said.
“Shh! A very short human, remember! And a fucking knight of fucking blasted, misbegotten Skrae. You bloody well better remember!”
Before Malden could reply, the door opened again, and Aethil stepped through, beaming.
Chapter Seventy-eight
Balint had led them to a great communal kitchen on the sixth level, a room full of long low stone tables and endless rows of sealed pantry closets. These proved to be full of nothing but dust when they were opened. They were too small to hide an armored man, so Morget and Croy ducked behind stoves big enough to be the furnaces of great smithies and waited in the dark.
They had heard an elfin war party coming long before they saw them. The elves made no attempt to be quiet. Their bronze armor jangled and rang as they moved, marching in double time. Croy had no doubt they had orders to butcher any human they came across. Already, it seemed, the elves knew that he and Morget were haunting the Vincularium, killing every living thing they found.
This was the biggest company of elves they’d discovered so far. At first the elves had sent only pairs of soldiers after them, then pairs of soldiers accompanied by small demons. When that proved not enough to bring down the human invaders, the patrols had been doubled in size, and doubled again.
Now they were moving en masse. They were definitely getting the message. Croy smiled hungrily in his hiding place. Good, he thought. Let them know their doom was coming. It made revenge all the sweeter.
In the dark they only saw the elves as they crossed the kitchen, and then only by a few stray beams of red light from a lamp hung in the vaulted ceiling overhead. It was enough for Croy to see that the elves were wary and prepared. Their bronze armor had been browned by time, but the swords in their hands were keen and bright as gold. With them they had a demon perhaps ten feet across, which rippled along the floor as flat as an animate carpet. The staring faces under its skin lifted now and again to peer into a shadow or the cobwebbed interior of an oven.
Croy knew well the military posture, the perfect formations of these elves. He had fought in his share of battles. He knew what well-trained troops looked like. He’d watched common soldiers drilled by serjeants, grizzled men who forced their charges through endless repetitions of the same basic, time-honored tactics until they could march in lockstep and turn with an infantry square in their sleep.
So he knew how they would approach, and how they would react when they first made contact with their enemy. And he knew the precise moment-the moment of maximal surprise-to step out of hiding, and bring Ghostcutter down on the exposed neck of an elfin soldier. Blood spurted in the dark, wetting Croy’s face. He did not blink.
Well over to his right, on the far side of the formation, Morget leapt up with a roar. His axe swept left,
