Chapter 99

Lucien shaved it.

I had not asked him to. When Rowan and I came up at dusk the next day, the bottles had gone, and the prince of the Seelie house was standing at a square of glass nailed to the wall with a razor in his hand and a cut on his jaw he was pretending not to have.

“There is a law of the courier house,” he said to the glass, “written by my grandfather, who had opinions about couriers. Any prince of the blood may see the book, any year, at any hour, and the clerk may not refuse him or report him. Nobody has used it in two hundred years.” He wiped the razor. “Princes don’t read.”

“You read,” I said.

“I am a disgrace to my house.” He turned, and I saw that his hands were steady. “Saskia says if I am going to be one, I had better be a clean one.”

Saskia, by the door, said nothing at all.

***

The courier house stood on the river where the barges tied up. Everything that went east from the Seelie court went across that counter—dispatches