Billoc Cannot Speak

The service corridors of the Shadow Fey palace breathed with a quiet malice all their own — torchlight the colour of old bruises, stone that remembered the press of ten thousand years of petitioners and servants and the quietly desperate. Into these passages the four companions from Zobeck had settled like stones into dark water, each working whatever current they could find.

Magnolia moved first to honour what she had promised. The kitchens had fed the party and asked nothing in return but the druid’s goodberries, and Magnolia did not make promises she intended to break. She channelled the last of her morning’s power into fifty bright spheres and laid them before the head cook, who took each one without ceremony and crushed them into a great copper pot of soup. No word of gratitude passed between them — the courts of the Shadow Fey were not built for gratitude — but the cook’s eyes acknowledged what had been done, and word moved through the lower service halls with the efficiency that only kitchen gossip can achieve. The party’s standing in those corridors rose another degree.

Above the kitchens, Aldric faced a reckoning of a different kind. The wardstone he had shattered with his own fireball on the Shadow Road had not been forgotten, and King Mago’s summons was not a request. Aldric examined the stone where the goblin king’s blacksmith Ten-Pound Hammer had set it out — and recognised, with a diviner’s eye, that it had served as both message relay and alarm, a more delicate instrument than it had appeared in the chaos of the crossing. He worked carefully. What emerged from his hands was the stone restored and somewhat improved, its enchantment cleaner than it had been before his fireball found it. Ten-Pound Hammer turned it over twice, then nodded once: the matter was settled. Mago, who appreciated a debt repaid with interest, made Aldric something more than a petitioner. He named him Reader of the Lower Court — a functionary’s title, but a real one, with real weight in the petty proceedings below.

The weight came due almost immediately. A mute goblin named Billoc stood accused of theft, his hands bound behind him in the posture that the court used to signal guilt before the case was heard. Aldric looked at him and understood the injustice before a word of accusation was spoken: Billoc’s only language was his hands, and with them bound behind him he had no voice, no defence, nothing. Aldric argued the point in front of Mago without flourish — there was no proof of theft, and a man who cannot speak cannot be said to have refused to answer. Mago weighed it and found it sound. The bindings came off. Billoc’s hands moved through signs the party could barely follow, but the gratitude in them needed no translation. He slipped away into the passage-work of the lower court, and the party noted that a grateful goblin who knew the palace’s hidden routes might prove worth finding again.

While the advocates worked in the hall above, Tam found his way to the stables. He had always been more comfortable with animals than with courts, and the great hunting hounds of the Black Prince were magnificent, sullen things that wanted only what Tam had in abundance: meat, patience, and the language of his ranger’s gift. He fed them from his hand and spoke to them in the old way, and they accepted him. The kennel master, a lean man named Kolya, watched all of this with the reserved approval of a craftsman recognising someone else’s craft. He talked, as kennel masters do when they find a sympathetic ear: the great blue horse Lazulin, the Black Prince’s chosen mount; the hunt itself, a high court occasion with quarry conjured by Count Sammas Hallowgrin; the rules that governed who might ride and who might only watch. The path to the Black Prince’s hunt was not yet open, but Tam had found the door and made a friend who stood beside it.

Judith, meanwhile, turned her attention to the guard hall, where a company of Shadow Fey soldiers moved through their routines with the practiced efficiency of men long deployed and mildly bored. They were from Allosis, a posting in the shadow realm she had not known before this afternoon, and they answered to a Captain Memorethian. She pressed the conversation as far as it would go — showed her blades, found the register that would impress soldiers, turned what had begun as a stumble into something credible. It was not a great return on the effort. Memorethian’s soldiers told her nothing of consequence and offered no particular warmth. But she had walked into a room full of armed Shadow Fey and walked back out, and the shape of the guard disposition was clearer in her mind than it had been at morning.

When the candles in the service corridors burned down to their second mark — the lower court’s rough reckoning for evening — the four of them took stock in the way that travellers do when they are far from home and climbing by inches. Aldric and Magnolia had reached a standing that earned them real attention in these halls. Tam and Judith were two rungs below, but the gap was not yet a gulf. Somewhere above them, the Summer Court continued its endless, glittering session; somewhere in its depths the Queen sat on a throne the party had not yet been permitted to see. The season was turning, as it always was, and the time they had was not infinite. But they were in the palace, they had kept their promises, they had freed a man who could not speak for himself, and they had made a friend in the kennels. In the lower court of the Shadow Fey, that was not nothing.