The Hostage Prince (3 page)

She reached her hands toward the toff, then stopped, holding them stupidly midway between rubbing at the stains and dropping them back in her lap.

I'm no laundress. What if rubbing the stains makes them worse?
Then she thought,
What does it matter. I'm dead either way.

She should have been terrified. But instead she was angry.

That stupid girl has killed me.
I'll never get to hold a royal babe.

She suddenly realized that she'd actually been looking forward to holding the new prince. Or princess. She couldn't remember the last time she'd looked forward to something, and that thought made her even angrier.

She turned her anger on the nearest thing to her, glaring at the noble she'd spilled the tea on. If she'd given it a moment's thought, she would never have dared to do any such thing.

P
rince Aspen watched the girls tumble and heard the teapot and cups shatter on the stone floor, only slightly softened by the rushes, but he didn't feel the spatters of tea on his well-lined silken breeches or his shirt. Only when some of it soaked through his sleeve was he aware of the heat.

Glancing down at the two girls sprawled at his feet, he saw that one was a midwife's apprentice. He knew her by her starched white apron and striped dress and the ghastly striped hose. He remembered that once the twin princesses Sun and Moon had remarked about a passing midwife that if a baby wasn't ready to come out on its own, all the midwife had to do was a shake a leg at it and the “horrible hose,” as they called them, would frighten the baby into dropping down.

Unaccountably, the midwife's apprentice was glaring up at him.
Glaring,
though he was the injured party here, and she being a servant, of no importance at all.

He drew his hand back to strike her because that was what was expected of him, and then he looked into her eyes. Truly looked. Astonishingly, one eye was green and one blue. He'd never seen anything like it. Fey eyes were always blue—not the blue of robin's eggs or the blue of running water, but the blue of a spring sky after a good soaking rain.

His hand was still uplifted and the other members of the High Court had gone silent, waiting to hear the sound of the slap on the girl's face and to drink in the sound she made in response, probably a whimper, possibly a cry. They would feast on the coloration of her cheek and the bruise after.

But his hand didn't move. He was mesmerized by her two-color eyes, and her cockscomb hair, an odd shade of red. They made him smile. And then laugh. His laughter was high-pitched still, his voice unbroken, although he was already fourteen and well past the time when it should have changed. He hadn't meant to laugh. He knew he'd regret it. Probably get nicknamed Prince Hee-Haw or something.

He had a collection of such names already. But he couldn't help himself. The girl's eyes were funny.
She
was funny. Should be helpless and frightened, head-bowed and shaking, and yet here she was, glaring up at him. He shrugged slightly at her to let her know he meant no harm, but no one else could tell, of that he was sure.

Aspen whispered, “Get up. Get up and get out of here. Do not stop to ask why. Now!”

She got up, bowed, moved swiftly, never turning her back on any of them, which would be inviting death. And then she was gone. The other girl must have left almost immediately after dropping the tray.

Aspen knew it was a mistake when the laughter expanded all around the Great Hall, the Border Lords laughing loudest of all. But he found he couldn't regret it.

Probably will, though
, he thought.
Later.

“PRINCE Aspen!” A loud, familiar voice cut through the laughter. “And have we not taught you better in all this time with us?” It was his foster father, King Obs. Obs of the Hard Hand, as he was called, and his right hand was not only hard but huge. It was the size, someone once said, of a roasting platter. There were whispers that there had been a troll somewhere in the far back of his ancestry. But no one ever said such things aloud. “Your family will not thank us. They will say you are a tortoise, not taught at all.”

For a king's witticism
, Aspen thought,
that's pretty lame
. But then no one ever said this king was the brightest spark in the fire that was the Unseelie Court. Perhaps another gift of his troll ancestry.
Still, they'll all call me Tortoise now
.

He could live with it. He'd lived with all the other names.

In the seven years he'd been at the Unseelie Court as a princely hostage, guaranteeing peace between their two nations—just like the Unseelie prince languishing in his father's court—Aspen had been called too many names to remember. The only ones he truly regretted were the ones given to him by Princesses Sun and Moon, twins he'd loved from the moment he'd met them, though they were as far out of his reach as if they were truly the sun and the moon. They'd called him Little Bit, and Weeper, and Sniveler, and Fidget, all things he'd regrettably done in their presence, though mostly as a child. But amongst the fey, first impressions last a long, long time.

A lifetime.

Centuries.

“Slow and steady, your majesty,” he called out to the king. “And wearing a very hard shell. Repels all splatters and shatters.”
Not to mention names
, but he didn't say that out loud.

“Will you excuse her then?” asked the king, his voice thundering but his face clear of anger.

The Border Lords started banging the bone handles of their great knives on the table, causing all of the goblets to wobble. “NO EXCUSES! NO EXCUSES!” Several of them were drooling wine into their beards or spitting out the crumbs of something recently eaten. The usual.

With a wave of his huge right hand, King Obs silenced them. “Speak, Tortoise,” he said. On either side of the king, the Unseelie princes leaned forward to hear Aspen's response. The Heir on the right—hefty, pockmarked and gap-toothed. On the left, the Spare—lean and listless. Their pasty faces wore smiles like a chimera's, all teeth and hunger, but their father's rough intelligence was missing.

“Excuse and accuse are two sides of the same coin,” Aspen said, quoting one of the old Unseelie philosophers he'd recently been studying.

He nodded at Jaunty, his tutor, sitting way down at the far end of the room, and the old hob smiled at him, a green, toothy smile. “I excuse
both
the girls. They are hardly worth accusing.”

King Obs applauded at that, his smaller left hand beating against the larger right, and the rest of the court took it up till the room shook with the noise. The two princes clapped greedily, as if they had been the ones to coin the witticism.

“In honor of the upcoming birth of my child, I accept your excuse. They are both spared. But do not be so quick next time to let such misbehavior go or the underfolk will take advantage of it. And what do you say to that?”

Aspen thought, and then he had it.
A warrior's response
. The king would like that. “They cannot take advantage, sire, because we princes have the high ground!”

“Hah!” The king's head went back with laughter, like a flower on a stalk finding the sun. He laughed so hard, his striped beard waggled, like a black-and-white flag.

The court began applauding with a steady beat, the kind that showed both appreciation and approval. All except for the twins, who only moved their long, beautiful pointer fingers in time to the beat.

But for Aspen, it was praise enough. He smiled. He didn't know it, but the smile changed his entire aspect. Made him look younger, nicer, more common. Had he known, he would have hated it. Would never smile again.

“Come, boy, sit,” the king said.

Aspen bowed his head and sat.

“Bring on the food,” the king commanded. And the room sprang to life as servers once again appeared as if by magic, carrying in haunches of beeves, ducks and pheasants stuffed with grains, eels soaked in vinegar. They brought in cheeses rolled in oats, and loaves of crusty braided bread, as well as roasted potatoes and seven kinds of salad leaves soaked in oil and dashed with herbs. And without even waiting for any courses to be finished—
as if you could call any of this chaos a course
, Aspen thought—they brought in plate after plate of gigantic sugary puddings.

The Unseelie did love their sweets.

As the servers bustled around them, Aspen drew in a deep breath. He thought it barely audible with all the noise from the food being brought in. But up the table from him, Sun and Moon snickered, and Aspen knew it was about him. The sound was not beautiful coming from two such beautiful young women, but he didn't care. It made him love them the more. And that was what he regretted most of all.

“You'd do just as well to worship the actual celestial bodies as those two,” said Old Jack Daw, appearing next to Aspen's seat in a swirl of black robes and giving Aspen a shallow bow. “A hundred years and they have learned little.”

Jack was a drow, a creature as much carrion bird as man, and the king's senior counselor. Despite his advanced age, he was the closest thing Aspen had to a friend in the Dark Court. Even more than Jaunty, he had taught Aspen how to survive his Unseelie exile. And he'd done it out of friendship, not because the king had assigned him to the job.

“Your Serenity,” Jack added, then looked at the king. Long, dark ears nearly pointing at the ground, Jack bowed much more deeply to the king than he had to Aspen. Then, pulling up a rickety stool next to Aspen, he snatched a slice of meat off a passing tray.

Aspen caught a whiff of decay as the old drow popped the meat into his mouth.
Must have been a slice destined for the ogres' table. They like their meat uncooked and half rotten.
“I know the twins are far above my shallow skies,” he said petulantly. He looked down at his still-empty plate. “I am not a fool.”

Jack chewed rapidly. “By your display with the serving girl—”

Without thinking, Aspen corrected the old drow. “Midwife's apprentice.”

Jack gave him a look that would have curdled milk on a baby's tongue. “As I said, by your display with the . . . girl . . . I might argue the point. Mercy—”

“Is not highly prized here,” Aspen finished for him, again without thought. “I know. You have been telling me that ever since I arrived.”

“And yet you still haven't taken the lesson.” With a sharp black fingernail, Jack dug a piece of gristle from between two of his few remaining teeth. “You have been listening to that silly old fool Jaunty when you should have been listening to me.” He peered at the gristle as if interested in its history. “Perhaps it's true that you can take a Seelie lord out of his court but you can't make him Unseelie. You are soft, boy. Too soft.” He licked his lips swiftly, once, with a thin forked tongue the same drab grey as his skin. “And you need to learn when to keep silent. Oh, not for the way you speak to me. That is as it should be. You are a lord, and I . . .” He hesitated. Maybe even changed his mind about what he was about to say. Then said, “I am not.”

Aspen thought it showed wisdom on the drow's part. Or craft. He wasn't sure which.

“But enough of lessons you refuse to heed. Lord Bloody-Knives-and-Kneecaps has brought me news from the borders.” He flicked the gristle to the floor and motioned Aspen in closer. “News not fit for all ears.”

Aspen leaned in despite the ghastly odor of Jack's breath. “What news?”

“Nothing good,” Jack whispered. “Your father's armies mass there. War may almost be upon us.”

“He wouldn't!” Aspen cried.

“Quiet, boy!” Jack hissed. “He may be pushed to it. The Border Lords are raiding nightly. And they do not stop at mere cattle thieving. There's the occasional dead lord and violated lady and children roasted on a spit. The truce is hanging by a spider's thread.”

Aspen shuddered at the news. “And if the truce is broken . . .” He felt a line of perspiration start to meander between his shoulder blades.

Jack drew a spindly finger across his neck. “The hostages will be the first casualties.”

Aspen pushed his still-empty plate away. One of the problems with sitting this far from the king's table was that a person might never get served. “You mean
I
will be the first casualty.” He was not only their most important hostage, he was—as far as he knew—their
only
hostage. Though he supposed there could always be one secreted away in the dungeon or in a pigsty. He wouldn't put that past the king.

Or the queen.

“Yes, my boy,” Jack said solemnly. “You will be the first casualty of the Seelie Wars. As will the Unseelie prince hostage in your father's hall.”

“Yes,
Your Serenity
,” Aspen reminded the old drow, though his heart was not in it. He was wondering instead why Jack had said
wars
in the plural.

Jack leaned in again to whisper, his carrion breath hot on Aspen's ear. “But do not despair yet! Lord Bloody is not the most reliable of my sources. More news will probably come tomorrow and may set all to ease.” He reached across and pulled Aspen's plate back.

Now the plate was filled with food, a glop of gravy and pieces of nearly raw meat plus something grey that was once green. Aspen felt his stomach turn over.

“But if not,” Jack added, “you had best eat. You will need your strength.”

Aspen looked at food which had somehow made an appearance on his plate, and sighed. It might as well have been made of paste and mud. He was definitely
not
hungry now.

“To do what? I do not think any amount of strength will keep my head from being separated from my shoulders once war actually breaks out.” He tried for a kind of wry resignation, the way the older princes spoke, with a casual shrug. It came out instead in a childish whine. He hated that.