Brothers in Arms
Copyright© 2026 by Oz Ozzie
Chapter 7: A Dark Place in the Castle
I walked the palace passages working at my breath, slow and deep, the way Davil taught — for my chest was still heaving, my hands not yet still. Cage the beast. Cage it. I had sworn it not a quarter-hour gone, standing over the wreck of the sun-room door, and already the swearing felt like the easy part.
And then there was a man at my shoulder.
He had not been there, and then he was — walking beside me, matched to my stride, as though we had set out together. I had not heard him come. I stopped, and stared. I did not know him. I had never seen him. His clothes were plain and dark and told me nothing — no badge, no colour, no rank a man could read. He stopped when I stopped, and turned, and looked at me. Not up at me, as a servant looks. Level. As an equal looks at an equal.
That, more than anything, set the hairs up on my neck. No one in the castle looks at the prince as an equal.
“If you would come with me, my Lord.” And he tipped his head toward a turning that ran down, away from the windows, into the deep of the castle.
I took a breath before I answered. “Because?”
“The Truth-Teller wishes to speak with you.”
He let one eyebrow rise as he said it — a small thing, almost a dare. Will the prince come, or is the prince afraid?
The Dark Lord. Did I wish to meet the Dark Lord? But the question answered itself; one does not decline such an invitation any more than one declines an eagle. And there was reason in it — surely this was about the mission. Perhaps the Truth-Teller knew more of the Old Man of the Forest than any other man alive. I nodded. “Very well. Lead on.”
I followed him down. Where the passage left the daylight he took a torch from a bracket on the wall, and we went on by its light, down and down, the way narrowing as we descended, the air growing close and cold and old. I had never been in these parts of the castle. I had not known they were here. I tried to hold the shape of the place in my head as we went — and the longer I tried, the less it held, for by my reckoning we were far below the foundations now, and somewhere out beyond the line of the walls, in earth that should have been open field above. A whole world under the white stone, and I, who prided myself on knowing the secret ways of my own home, had never once suspected it.
I had spent years learning a single hidden path across one outer wall, and thought myself the master of my house’s secrets. And here was a castle beneath the castle, and I had walked over the top of it my whole life and never felt the hollow underfoot.
He brought me at last into a low stone room, lit by a fire in a grate and nothing else, and left me there, and the Truth-Teller rose from a chair beside the fire to greet me.
I will not try to set down his face. I have tried, since, and cannot hold it; it is the kind of face the eye slides off, that you forget while you are still looking at it. That, I have come to think, is a thing he made of himself on purpose, over long years, the way I made my disappointment.
“Prince Gord.” His voice was quiet and dry and entirely without warmth, though it did not sound unkind either. It sounded interested. “Sit, if you like. You have had an eventful afternoon.”
So he knew of the sun-room already. Of course he did.
“You have your party in hand, I hear,” he went on, before I had decided whether to sit. “Josen will lead you.”
I had braced, all the walk down, for the danger in that name. It did not come. He said it the way a man names a card already turned face-up on the table — and worse, he said it with a thin thread of amusement running under it, as though Josen leading the King’s own daughter into the wild were a small private joke he and I might share.
“You know him,” I said.
“I know where he is. I have known for some time.” The amusement again. “It is a different thing from knowing where a man is, my Lord, to do something about it. You will learn the distinction, I think, before you are much older.”
I said nothing. I had walked in here meaning to learn from him, and I was learning already, only not the lessons I had come for.
“And the others?”
There was no cost in this one. “Lord Trimmel. I mean to ask him.”
The Truth-Teller inclined his head a fraction, as a man does at a sum that comes out right. “A sound choice. Loyal house. The King will be pleased.” A pause. “You will take one of mine as well.”
It was not a question, and I had known it was coming since the council. “Which of yours?”
“The man who brought you down. He is competent. In the town and in the country both — a rarer thing than you would suppose.” He paused. “He goes by Cinder. Not the name his mother gave him, you understand — none of mine keep those; a true name is a handle a man can be lifted by. He has worn Cinder a long time. It will do for your road.” He offered nothing further, and I asked nothing further, because I did not in truth care in the least. The Black Coat could come. He would ride out with us under the eyes of the whole kingdom, and he would not be anywhere near us when it came to anything that mattered; Josen had seen to that already, in the plan I had carried back up the hill that morning. But I let none of that cross my face. I only nodded, as a man nods who has been given a guard he must accept and means dutifully to keep.
I did not like the name, nor the small pleasure the Truth-Teller took in the giving of it. A man named for what is left when a fire has done its work is not a man you are glad to have at your back on a long road. But I had asked for the Black Coat as little as I had asked for any of this, and I had no power to refuse him, and so I let the dislike sit where it could not be seen, and said merely my thanks for offering his support.
I will allow that some small cold part of me was pleased with how easily the deception sat. I am learning the trade of this kingdom, I thought. I am getting good at it. I did not yet stop to ask myself whether that was a thing to be pleased about.
I wanted to ask him why Josen was safe. The question sat right at the front of my mouth. And I found I was afraid to ask it — and then, in the next breath, his faint endless amusement told me why I need not. He would not answer, because the answer was his and not mine. Josen was safe because it suited the Truth-Teller, just now, that Josen be safe. Su had vanished because it suited him that she vanish. The King dozed in his sun-room and raged at shadows, and down here a man the King’s name answered to sat by a small fire and moved the pieces about and was amused. He was not the King’s creature at all. He was playing his own long game, on his own board, and the King was a piece on it the same as I was.
I thought, then, of the two men whispering in the Drunken Pig, and the oath they had spoken like a worn prayer, and before I had quite decided to, I said: “There are men in the city who mean harm to the crown. Who call themselves the Brothers in Arms.”
I had imagined, foolishly, that I might be telling him a thing he did not know.
The amusement deepened — the nearest to warmth I saw in him the whole evening, and the coldest thing too. “The Brothers in Arms.” He gave the name a small fond turn, as a man names an old dog. “Yes. I have three of my own among them, my Lord, and one who sits rather near the head of the table. I know when they swear in a new man, and where they drink, and which of them is bedding another’s wife.” He spread his hands to the little fire. “A pack of disappointed Lordlings and their hired muscle, when you scrape the paint off it. They mean to move against the great houses — to pull down a Lord or two, seize the hoards they guard, and set themselves up in the wreckage. Next midsummer, by my best account, when the harvest is in and there is something worth the seizing. They are no trouble. A pot wants somewhere to let off its steam, or it bursts where you would rather it did not. So I let them simmer.”
And I went cold all through, and kept my face from showing it by a discipline I did not know I had until I needed it.
For I had heard them, with my own ears, four nights gone, over a bowl of grey swill in the Drunken Pig. And it had not been midsummer. It had been midwinter — this winter, the near one, when the garrison is thin and drunk. And it had not been the Lords. Sworn to kill the King and all his blood before they kill the kingdom — those had been the very words, said as a rhyme, worn smooth in the mouth. Not the great houses. The royal family. Aelea.
The Truth-Teller had it wrong on both counts, the season and the prey. The most knowing man in the kingdom, who held a ledger of every fact in the kingdom, was wrong about the one thing it was his whole office to be right about — and was wrong, I understood in a rush, because the men he trusted to tell him true were telling him false. His own agents were feeding him a tidy, distant, comfortable lie, and he was sitting here pleased as a cat with the certainty of it.
And I could not say one word of it.
I turned it over in the half-second I had, the way Davil taught me to turn a fight, and every road out of it was a trap. Were the men in the pub the ones lying, and not the agents? It was possible. In this kingdom anything is possible, every man wears a face over a face, and probably not is a thin plank to walk over a drop. And worse — far worse — what if the Truth-Teller had it right, and was only saying it wrong, here, to me, on purpose? What if the false plan was a hook, baited and dropped in front of a prince he did not yet trust, to see whether the prince would rise to it? For if I opened my mouth now and said no, my Lord, it is midwinter, and it is the King they want — then I had told the master of the King’s secret police that I carried the inside of a plot to murder the royal house in my head, knew its season and its target better than he did, and had said nothing of it until this moment. There is a word for a man who knows such a thing and keeps it, and says nothing of it to the King’s own master of secrets until he is cornered into it in a locked room underground. The word is traitor. And whatever was done to Su had been done by the man sitting across this little fire from me, for less.
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