The Shadow Prince

“When I told you earlier that the Oracle had said my Boon—Daphne, that is—could restore something that had been taken from the Underlords, and I mentioned the word Cypher, you acted as though you knew something. You said something about rumors.…”

Dax stands up abruptly, leaving his tablet on the table, and exits the kitchen.

I jump off the counter. “You said you would tell me what you know,” I call after him.

“Shhhh!” I hear his command to be quiet coming from somewhere near the entrance to the garage. I hear a door open and close. The light from Dax’s tablet catches my eye. I glance down at the screen and see that he has entered the words abecie caelum into a search engine. The second word is Latin for sky, the first word is one I don’t recognize. I scan the rest of the page and see the words: 0 results found. Did you mean: abecu caelum?

Whatever Dax had been searching for, he wasn’t having much luck.

I hear him coming back and I look away from the tablet.

“Sorry,” he says, entering the kitchen. “I needed to be certain that Simon was still out. He has ears like a hawk—I had thought he was well out of range, and yet he still must have overheard us speaking in your room this afternoon. Trust me, Lord Haden. I did not tell him that you had gone to the grove.”

“I know,” I say. “But he obviously has sources beyond good hearing if he knew about me trying to grab Daphne. I told no one about that.”

I remember hearing someone entering the grove just before I left. Perhaps he had someone following me, or he himself had doubled back to the house and had seen me leave and he’d followed. One thing I should have been more careful about was not underestimating Simon, as Dax had instructed.

“What is he?” I ask Dax. “Simon isn’t an Underlord, but he’s most certainly not human.”

“I don’t know what Simon is, but he doesn’t look a day older than when I first met him six years ago. He could be three hundred years old, for all we know. My best guess is that he’s a satyr cloaked in the form of a human. That would explain his heightened senses and slow aging. Not to mention his love for vegetables. But it doesn’t account for his certain powers of persuasion, if you know what I mean.”

“I do,” I say.

No mere mortal—nor mere satyr, for that matter—could bring a lord of the Underrealm to the point of invoking elios like that. And the way I couldn’t move just because he told me I couldn’t—it was as if he were controlling my body with his words. If he could do that to me, I imagine most mortals don’t stand a chance against his persuasiveness. I look around at Simon’s opulent home, and think of the garage full of cars and how easily he had procured new identities for us, and realize just how useful that kind of power would be.

I can’t help wondering why he’s living in a house with three young Underlords and not off ruling a country somewhere. Then I remember what he had said—that all of us “have things riding” on my quest. Does even he know more about my true purpose than I do? And why hadn’t Ren or the Court bothered to fill me, of all the people involved, in on the details?

“What is a Cypher?” I ask Dax. “And why does the Court want it?”

Dax sits at the table, turns off his tablet, and sticks it inside his knapsack, which sits on one of the chairs. He gestures for me to take a seat across from him. Instead, I sit on Simon’s polished countertop and let Brim climb back onto my shoulders. She purrs contentedly next to my ear.

“What do you know about the Key of Hades?” Dax asks.

“I know that the Key was more than the instrument that locked and unlocked the main gates of the Underrealm. I know that it was Hades’s Kronolithe—the thing that granted him his immortality—and without it, the Sky God was able to kill him. I know that the Key was stolen by the Great Traitor, and because of its loss, we Underlords have been locked inside the Underrealm, godless, for centuries. And this brought an end to the Thousand-Year War between our ancestors and the Skylords.”

“All true,” Dax says. “Except the war isn’t over; it’s just at a stalemate, as far as many in the Court are concerned. Why do you think they train us to be warriors? It’s because they hope to restart the war someday. Someday soon, if there’s any credence to the rumors I’ve heard.”

“But how is that even possible? Only a few of us can pass through Persephone’s Gate at a time. And only once every six months. How can the Court wage a war without an army?”

“What if they could open the main gates again?”

“But they would need the Key for that.”

“Exactly,” Dax says. “And to find the Key, they need the Cypher.”

“Daphne? But she’s just some mortal girl. How could she help the Court get a Key that has been lost for millennia?”

“That is not a piece of the puzzle I have been privy to.”

I can feel my heart racing and energy pulsing through my veins. The Oracle had said that the fate of the Underrealm rests on my shoulders, but part of me had tried to dismiss her words as hyperbole. Had I truly been Chosen for such an important assignment? Could I really have the means to help restore the Key of Hades to the Underrealm? I can only imagine the kind of glory and honor that would accompany such a victory, if Dax’s speculations about the Cypher are correct. Had I truly been Chosen by the Fates to accomplish the greatest task that any Champion had ever been entrusted with?

But that is the thing; I hadn’t been entrusted with anything. The Court hadn’t told me any of this vital information. As far as I am concerned, I have been sent to the Overrealm blind—thinking I am merely to bring back another Boon for the harem. I had to find out this information from a servant. Is that because they have so little trust in me that they think I will fail if I have any clue of what an important task is before me?

“How do you even know all this?” I ask Dax.

“There are benefits to being treated with as little regard as furniture,” he says. “Many in the Court have a tendency to say too much when servants are around, because they do not care that we exist. What I have told you is what I have pieced together from snippets of conversations and the rumors that circulate among the servants. I can tell you that in the last three years or so, your father has made many journeys to consult the Oracle of Elysium, but it was only now that the Oracle agreed the time is right for obtaining the Cypher.”