Chapter 4: The Marquise and I |
“Stop doing that,” snapped Clev. “That thing where you arrange things.”
“You’re welcome to sort it all out with Raffertys before we get back,” replied Aaron, who remembered another conversation with Clev. They’d been on a pew up in the church to Man’s God, and there’d been Clev’s feet in his lap, and Clev had been talking about how someone needed to take charge down here. He certainly seemed cozy with Twokin’s best healer and their only blacksmith, which was a decent enough start to controlling the things that mattered. If he’d followed through, though, there’d likely have been fewer guards with the Raffertys’ colors knifed into their backs.
“Is that a thing he does often? Arrange things?” asked Lochlann, who may have been thinking of certain recent arrangements between the Lord of Seasons and the enclavers, which Aaron had only hurried along.
“He’d tell you no,” the stoat doppel said.
“Can we focus, here?” said Aaron. “We need the rats to work with us. And they will, if we get to them first.”
Clev was smiling so broad it looked like his jaw had locked. “They haven’t been working with the Raffertys. But you always were the peacemaker. Glad to be back, Aaron?”
“Not particularly.”
And why the stoat doppel looked stung at that, why he tsked and turned his gaze to the side, Aaron didn’t want to know.
Things would be easier if Rose didn’t care about her uptowners dying; if he only had to worry about their own little group. But she did, which made this his mess to arrange for her, if no one else was going to.
“Aaron,” Lochlann said, like a warning. Like Aaron didn’t know that walking wasn’t a thing she should be doing. Rose looked tired. Better than when she was bleeding on the walls, but tired, like she could spend all the rest of the day nodding off on her clean-as-it-was-getting bed on the floor with a book in her lap. It would be best for her, if she could.
It wasn’t an option.
“...Possibly,” she replied, her feet twitching like she was testing out the idea.
“I’ll carry you again, if you can’t. It’s not far, and the way’s easier. Mostly just twisty.”
He could leave her here. But then Lochlann would stay with, to guard her. And then it would be an O’Shea with a rare sickness left in the raccoon’s paws, and a rat catcher in the blacksmith’s. In Clev’s, too, but Clev was only acting for himself. The blacksmith had a whole family behind her, and a redcoat who knew too much about her allegiances standing right in front of her while she finished the final adjustments on that crossbow. She checked down its sights, and Lochlann wasn’t even paying attention to whether she was doing it with a bolt in the thing or not, because Lochlann hadn’t grown up over-aware of who held the weapons and who didn’t. Aaron trusted everyone in this room. He trusted cats with mice, too, but not in a way that ended well for the mice.
Rose could walk, as it turned out. Just not well, and clearly not for long. She tried a few steps. Then she looked to Aaron.
“The person we’re to met, they’re important?” she asked. “Then carry me until we’re in sight.”
She’d save her legs for when putting on a show mattered. He offered her his back again, by way of approval. And let Lochlann bring up the rear as they went through the door, because one of them had to be the last to show their back to that room, and the lieutenant would have prioritized Rose’s safety if he’d been asked.
“Lochlann,” Aaron said, when they were out and far enough away for little ears to not hear quite so well, “please stop trusting my friends. Things are different than when I was last down here.”
“Because of us?” the man guessed, reasonably enough.
No, not because of them. But elaborating would bring questions, and questions wouldn’t help. The past rarely did.
“Try to stay quiet. Sound is part of how to get around, down here.”
The tunnel they were in was too dark to ever see; Lochlann and Rose too dependent on his directions to call him out on the forced silence.
The rumble of the river came from under their feet, muted by stone and just to their south. Aaron ran his hand along the right wall and took the next crack leading over the sound, making sure to tug Lochlann’s coat until the man rounded the turn, too. Then they were on an incline down, just slightly, and if Aaron didn’t think overly hard on the exact route, then his feet would find the way good as if he’d never left. Maybe he shouldn’t have. If he hadn’t, Orin would have died a prince. Would have been remembered for all the lovely things he could have done, instead of tarnished by reality. No doppel with his face would have been able to walk straight into the castle without the alarm raised. The dragons might have still attacked, but at least people wouldn’t have gone willing into a room with them and closed the door behind. A room Aaron hadn’t seen any Deaths waiting about in, so no, the dragons wouldn’t have attacked like this. Not if Aaron had stayed where he belonged. Not if Markus had lived.
Rose would have died the same night as her older brother, if Markus had lived. Aaron’s own pyre would have been nothing but ashes weeks before it happened, and the only thing Rose or Lochlann or Connor, Mrs. Summers the housekeeper or John Baker the poisoner and book thief, or even Mrs. White the puss would know of him would have been a single tolled bell, announcing his body found. Which was all just sentiment, because even if everything had been awful since—it hadn’t been, but even if it had—he’d still been alive for it. For the chance of it, whatever it might be. So even if it meant the whole city destroyed at the end of this all, Aaron couldn’t regret Markus being dead and burned. His funeral had needed a stickman for its pyre.
He regretted not spending more times in the old ways, though, staying used to places like this; regretted letting Rose carry a light for him, all those times he hadn’t needed it. Because now the dark was back and pressing down and--
Rose’s arms squeezed a little where they were wrapped about his shoulders. A hug. He reached a hand up. Pressed it over one of hers a moment, then let it drop. Behind them, Lochlann tripped over something, but caught himself well enough.
“Aaron?” he whispered, when he’d recovered, because Aaron had stopped for him, and the loudest sound around them was the good lieutenant’s breathing.
“Still here,” he replied, and kept walking.
Aaron regretted boots, too. He couldn’t tell the ground near as well with leather wrapped about his feet. Had to stoop down to check whether the floor was changing from solid stone to powdered dirt yet; had to use his actual hands instead of his toes to find the charming little grain-sized droppings whose increasing concentration marked the next turn, and the next. Had to find out a little rock was there by kicking it, same as the raccoon’s Face had, and wincing as it went clattering off too loudly. Because that was the thing: it wasn’t the dark that was weighing on him. Wasn’t how he couldn’t see. It was knowing how many other things down here didn’t much need their eyes at all. How many of them could sneak on little paws right up behind him, or already be in the tunnels up ahead, and just holding still and being quieter than a fellow’s own breaths would be enough to hide them until they were at Aaron’s back. Or Lochlann’s. Or Rose’s.
The air grew musky.
“It’s soon, now,” Aaron said, and Rose slid down from his back. Aaron took a moment to finally remove the sheath that had been clattering about on his belt, so Lochlann would have a place to keep his borrowed sword instead of just holding the thing “Keep it in there,” Aaron advised. “And keep your hand off it. This is their home we’re inviting ourselves into, and they’ve already some issues with the colors we’re wearing in.”
Rose wasn’t in red. But she was an O’Shea, so that was that.
Aaron guided them to the next turning, where the skittering of little claws in the walls wasn’t just in his head. Then he knocked lightly on the stone, all polite, and waited to see how polite the rats would be in return.
Extremely, as it turned out.
They sent a Face.
They sent a Face with a light.
The little lamp bobbed towards them, half-shuttered in deference to how loud a light could be on the eyes after all that dark. Aaron slanted his gaze off to the side of it, letting his vision adjust without compromising his newfound ability to see who was coming for them.
“Oh, it’s you,” said the little Face he’d been sending messages through all spring, as she squinted doubtfully up at him. “You were the wolf’s Face?”
“Was,” he said. “Didn’t think you were a rat’s Face.”
“Wasn’t,” the girl said. “Decided I liked having food and things, so now I’m here, and my old master can’t do more than piss against the wind about it. They didn’t even make me doppel yet. Said its up to me and the pups to make a match.”
She was wearing better clothes than the last he’d seen her. Or at least, her coat was a thicker one, and better fit, even if it had passed along other children before reaching her. It had a hood. The hood was squeaking. A little pup with a half-white face stuck its head out, like it had been dared by its fellows; at whatever look Lochlann gave it from behind him, it tumbled back down.
“I’m glad,” Aaron said. And shifted his weight, just a little, in case he needed to grind his heel down on the good lieutenant’s foot. There were benefits to proper boots.
“Why’re you always in red if you’re one of us?” the Face asked. “And why’ve you got a real redcoat with you?”
She didn’t mention the potential fey. It put Rose’s back up, but it was the polite thing, again.
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“That’s more a question to answer when the marquise is here. Can I beg a paw of her attention?”
“That’s why I’m here,” the girl said, with a shrug. And she stuck close to Aaron, and kept him between her and Lochlann, as she lead them on in.
Five little rat heads peeked out of her hood behind her, though never more than three at a time. Aaron gave them a little nod, which sent all of them ducking down again.
They didn’t go far. Just squeezed their way through a crack, to a place where things widened out and dead-ended. The ceiling was tall enough for Aaron and Rose; Lochlann had to stay ducked. There were glitters here and there where the lamp caught on little crystals in the walls, but mostly it was just a plain space. And smelly, he had to admit, even if the way Rose and Lochlann were breathing too-carefully through their mouths was a bit of an exaggeration. Rats liked the smell, he was told.
There was a bit of a ledge on the far side, right up by the ceiling. And a thin little crack at its edge, which the girl went up to, after setting her lamp down back in the middle where she’d left them. She held out her hands, and a geriatric old rat crawled through and plopped down into them. The Face turned back towards them, leaning up against the wall to make herself comfortable, seeing as she was now serving as the rat’s throne.
The rat stared at them with cataract-filmed eyes. Got a good sniff, her whiskers delicately twitching. She was a plain sort of gray, gone silver-speckled with age. When she sat back, her tail was stiff and kinked with breaks long past.
“Aaron,” she said, like a grandmother kept waiting. “It’s about time.”
Aaron cut that off before it got started. “This is Princess Rose O’Shea, not to be confused with a fey. And Second Lieutenant Lochlann Varghese, of the Royal Guard.”
Rose gave an uncertain but polite curtsy. Lochlann managed to keep his grip off his sword. By virtue of keeping his hands clasped behind his back, but Aaron would take it.
The rat’s tail slapped against the girl’s hand. Her eyes weren’t on Rose, because her eyes couldn’t be on anything anymore, but her disapproval was enough to fill the little room.
“You bring this insult before us?” the rat said, which was the sort of statement a rat catcher would probably find imperious. The marquise had earned it. “Why did you come here, Face of the Wolf King?”
She was properly mad at him if she was dragging titles into things. Old titles, no less.
“I’d thought you should meet her. And she should meet you. She likes her stories, but I don’t think they have any about rats up in the castle. I think she’d be on your side, if they did.”
The rat bared her teeth. Aaron had always found rat teeth startling, for their length and the cavernous gaps around them. They weren’t anything like human teeth, and had no need to be. “And why would we need her on our side?”
“She’s the acting queen,” Aaron said. “Possibly the actual queen. She can change things.”
That got the rat’s ears twitching forward before the old girl could help herself. “Her brothers?”
“Dead,” Aaron said, “or missing.”
Rose’s breath caught at that summary: three words, for a situation that must feel worthy of so much more to her.
“Then when your princess is dead, we’ve the whole tumor cut out. And us about to control all the food the dragons don’t, which should cull those of the militia that would rather die than work with doppels. Things will look different when all this is settled. Which does leave a body to wonder why you’ve brought the last O’Shea here.” The skin over her teeth twitched again. Her tone took a turn down dark amusement. “Would you like her dead, or only missing?”
Lochlann didn’t try to stab anything. Rose didn’t try to talk. Both of them just looked at him, like he was going to clear this up.
“Why waste a perfectly good head to crown?” Aaron asked. “Why change the city, when you can change all of Last Reign?”
That gave the old rat pause for a moment. Her tail twitched behind her, near a spasm with all its breaks. “She’s an O’Shea. Am I to trust what she’ll have done with us, when we’re half as useful and still full rats? We can find another head to crown. It’s not her we’ve been waiting on.”
“Well, she’s the one that’s here,” Aaron said, standing at Rose’s side. It wasn’t a thing he needed to elaborate on.
“You’re acting like you’ve already won,” Rose said. “Like you don’t need the militia every bit as much as they may need you.”
And oh, it was so very clear that Rose was only using her own politeness, when she said they may need you.
There was silence again. Then great squeals of ratty laughter, much louder than such a little body was made to produce. The sound startled the Face, and set all the pups in her hood to squeaking shrilly. The rat was left gasping, the ribs under her fur heaving in a way that looked near-painful.
“I told you she doesn’t know,” Aaron said. “None of the uptowners seem to.”
The rat didn’t need to say it: that none of the uptowners wanted to know. Forgetting was an active sort of verb, and ignorance the child kept locked in its home.
“And so you ask me to teach her,” the rat asked, her sides still moving painfully, “instead of kill her?”
There went Lochlann’s hand, finally on his sword. As if he’d need more than to dash her against the stone. The rat was old. And taunting them, and she could see she was taunting them, eyes or no, because it wasn’t hard to predict how a redcoat might react to threats like that. To this whole conversation. To the mere presence of a rat, even before she’d opened her mouth and committed the sin of speech.
The Face had made a point of telling them how not-doppeled she was. The pups in her hood were old enough to run, and the five of them going five different directions meant not all could be killed, which was the sort of odds that rats thought in. But the gray rat was too old too run. Too old to do more than sit there, and try their patience.
She was grooming herself now, rubbing little circles in her whiskers with paws that didn’t move half so well as the last he’d seen her, being the smuggest little lump of fur to ever smug. Because if an O’Shea or a redcoat did kill her, the colony wouldn’t be any worse for it.
But Aaron remembered her fur when he’d first found his way to their colony; how soft it was, how she’d nipped his fingers, and gotten up in his hair and demanded he carry her around; how she’d offered him a place here, same as the girl now holding her had taken. She hadn’t been a young rat when they’d met. But she hadn’t been old, either. And she’d never be replaceable, no matter how well she’d be remembered.
“If we’re past the formalities,” Aaron said, when the moment had gone past tense and into awkward, at least for him. “May we come in to talk?”
“Oh, very well,” she said, with a stretch that cracked her spine. “But the rat catcher waits here. And once your O’Shea is in, she’s not coming out unless we like her.”
“I think you will,” said Aaron. “I do.”
Neither of them mentioned what would happen to Lochlann, in the worst case.
“I’m not staying here,” the man said, mentioning himself.”
“Little militia boy,” the rat crooned, “used to having a choice. Not here you don’t, rat catcher.”
She didn’t much care for anything the lieutenant had to say to her after that. She just turned her back, and clambered up the Face’s sleeve until her paws found stone again. She bit her own paw, which was when Rose’s gasp said she understood what was happening.
The rat pressed her blood to the wall. It cracked from floor to ceiling, shuddering apart into a doorway, which was when Lochlann got it.
They both could have known from the start, if they’d thought it through. The Face couldn’t have fit through a rat hole to come greet them, and it wasn’t like she’d have been sitting in a dead end with an unlit lamp, waiting on someone to come. And they’d both known about the old ways up in the castle, which was one more thing than Aaron had going for him, the first he’d found this place.
It wasn’t really like the old ways. For one thing, it was a real opening, sitting there bold for anyone to see instead of being invisible until a fellow was already through. For another, it didn’t lead to some whole new warren in the walls. Just the other side of this particular chunk of rock. And there were other ways in, far less dependent on things men had spent centuries trying to forget. This was just the biggest of them. Aaron didn’t well fit through most of the others.
“You know how to use the Letforget?” Rose asked, touching the rough stone of the entryway. The Face had already gone through after picking up their lamp, the rat on her shoulder.
“A friend taught us a few things,” the rat said, “a long time ago.”
Rose stepped through, hand still on the stone, stopping to examine the other side with a kind of professional interest. Aaron followed her. Lochlann followed him. Right up until the opening itself, which didn’t let him cross the rat’s door anymore than a dragon wearing Orin’s face had been able to cross Rose’s.
“I can’t stay out here,” the good lieutenant said, like a rat catcher could have ever been welcomed in the heart of the colony. The empty antechamber out there was a safer place for him than the raccoon’s clinic would have been; that was what mattered.
“I’ll keep her safe,” Aaron said. “Just stay there; it’s not a place people come, unless they know the way already, and have business here besides.”
Which wasn’t many, these days.
“We’ll be awhile,” he added, as fair warning.
“I can’t stay here, Aaron,” he said. But he could.
Aaron turned to the Face, and the rat on her shoulder. “Will you leave him the light?”
“No,” said the rat. “I don’t think we will.”
She touched the wall again, which shut the entrance in the rat catcher’s face.
Aaron stared at the place where Lochlann had been staring back, and now wasn’t. The good lieutenant was a grown man, not a kid: a little dark wouldn’t hurt him. But Aaron knew how very much it wouldn’t help.
“If you kill him, or let something else out there do it,” Aaron said, casual-like, “I won’t forget it.”
Not forgetting was a thing rats understood. He’d had a chat with them, once. The one where he’d learned that a group of griffins was a protectorate and kirin a council, cat sidhe a cabal and foxes a reckoning. He’d opined that rats should have been a remembrance, instead of dragons. The alliteration alone would have been worth it.
“Remembering’s what we have to do, if the uptowners won’t,” the not-so-old rat had told him. From inside his coat, where she was treating his pocket pantry like a scavenger hunt. “But it’s not what we are. It’s not what we want. It’s not even our nature.”
“We’ll do with him what we do with your princess,” the rat promised, here and now. It wasn’t necessarily a thing she wanted. Just a thing she’d have to do. It was a thing she was just as certain of as Aaron, except in the opposite direction.
“So you’ll kill him if you kill me,” Rose said, her mouth in a hard line. She was still standing. Aaron wasn’t sure for how much longer she could.
“So glad you understand, O’Shea,” the rat said. “Come: meet the marquise properly.”
She patted the Face’s shoulder. The girl started forward, her lamp’s light flickering with the movement even behind its glass. At either side of the tunnel in which they walked, at a dozen holes and ledges up its side, that lamp cast shadows grotesquely moving about rats who weren’t. They paused what they were doing as the little group went past them. Some carried rat-sized sacks of grain, on their backs or together in pairs and triplets.
“I thought you were the marquis,” Rose said.
“I am,” the old rat said. “We are.”
They were passing storerooms now, and the doppels working them in human form or not: a woman stood worriedly gnawing her wooden stylus in between marking the raised dots that served as numbers in their cavern’s dark, as the line of rats around her brought in more and more food for her assistants to sort and weigh and package. Pups darted around the growing stacks, happily mauling to death any weevils and other such competition that they could find. They all looked up, eyes reflecting red as Aaron’s little group passed. Another rat scolded Rose with squeaks and chattering teeth as she nearly stepped on it, then went back to scolding the ratty traffic in the hall, to keep all the ones coming moving on the right and all those going out again to the left.
Sleeping spaces lay empty, with only blanket tangles to mark where piles of rats would normally be asleep. Babes that looked human were carried on chest or back as the adults worked, with their furrier counterparts carried in every available hood and pocket to keep them out from underfoot. The colony was fully roused, turned to the frantic tasks that would determine exactly how long the lower town could hold against a siege. It wasn’t a thing they wanted to do; it certainly wasn’t in their nature. But it needed doing.
“We rats remember, but we’re not a remembrance. And we’re certainly not whatever humans care to call us. We’re a loyalty. A steadfast. And we have been, and we will be, whether anyone living likes it or not.”
They reached the heart of the colony. The lamplight, reflected off hundreds of eyes. The fur, black or brown or white or spotted, writhing in one mass. The tails twisted and tangled near to breaking, as each body of the whole moved. The Face stopped them some way back and lowered her hand down. The old gray rat climbed off. Skittered over. She turned, twisted until her own long-broken tail rejoined with the whole. Sighed, and relaxed back to her full awareness.
“We,” the rat king spoke, “are the marquise. And now you will listen, last O’Shea, to what your family has done. And then you will rule, acting queen, on what should be done with you. And we will see if we agree.”
It was not the O’Shea they’d stood loyal to, all this time.
Her people writhed behind her; with her. Watched from all around them. Stuck five little heads from out a hood, with eyes too intelligent for pups that hadn’t doppeled yet.
Lochlann would be fine, all alone out there.
Rose and he were very far from alone, in here.