THE SHARDS WERE STILL BURIED in the stone. Needle-sharp, they glinted in the light thrown off by the fire. I peered closer at them, frowning. “There are five hundred and sixty-three of them,” Renfis said. “One of our metal workers tried to pull them out with forceps, but they’re so fine, he couldn’t grip them properly. Two of them snapped. The ends are still buried inside the stone, which…well, it’s not good.” There was a bruise above Ren’s cheekbone; it was turning a vivid, sickly shade of purple as he spoke.
“What the hell happened at training today?” I asked under my breath.
Ren’s eyes remained locked on me, refusing to look at Fisher, who stood on the other side of the war room. “Nothing. Why do you ask?”
“Because both of you are bleeding and walking like you got your asses handed to you!”
“Fisher’s in a bad mood is what happened at training,” Lorreth, the dark-haired warrior with the war braids, said. He sat on a stool by the fire, his light blue eyes slowly tracking the movements of everyone inside the war room. He watched Kingfisher, who was locked in a very heated argument with Danya, but evidently it was Ren and me he was really focusing on.
“Fisher’s fine,” Ren said evenly. “We both are. We’re going to see Te Léna later. In the meantime, can we concentrate on the task at hand for a moment? Do either of you have any suggestions as to how we might get these shards out of this stone?”
There was something he wasn’t saying, but he clearly didn’t want to talk about. I let him have his secret. “Why not just shear off all of the pieces
and sand the ends flush with the stone?” I suggested. “Danya could just have a new sword made for her.”
Ren laughed breathily. “It’s not that simple. Danya’s sword was special. It was like Nimerelle once, imbued with old potent magic. It’s…” He winced at the bristling spines of metal protruding from the stone wall. “It was a precious Fae heirloom. Danya’s birthright. A godsword forged by the ancient Alchimeran masters. Such swords are religious icons to the Fae. It represented Danya’s rank and marked her as an original member of the Lupo Proelia. Like most—”
“Sorry, Lupo what?”
“Lupo Proelia. Kingfisher’s wolves,” he said, sighing. “There are eight of us, usually. Though our numbers have been reduced of late. We fight as a team, working together, just as wolves do. I’m sure you’ve noticed the wolf on some of our armor.”
I’d noticed, all right. The sigil was on the plate Fisher wore at his throat. It was stamped into his chest protector, too. And I’d noticed his tattoo more than once. Last night, for example, when the head of the Lupo Proelia had plowed me like a godscursed field.
“As you already know, Nimerelle still carries a kernel of magic in her blade. All of the other Alchimeran swords became dormant centuries ago, but Danya’s blade was still very important to her. To our people as a whole. We can’t just sand the shards back and discard the rest. It’d be sacrilege.”
“Amazing. So you’re saying that I was in camp for less than five minutes and I destroyed an ancient weapon that has profound cultural importance for all of Fae kind,” I said, recapping.
“See! She doesn’t even care!” Danya cried, pointing at me. “She understands the weight of what she’s done, and she doesn’t give a shit!”
“She does care.” Fisher heaved out a sigh as he crossed the map room, approaching what was left of the sword. “She just has a terrible sense of irony.”
I didn’t appreciate the hateful look Danya sent me, nor did I feel too warm and fuzzy about the way she kept stabbing her finger at me. “I’m sorry, are you just permanently on the brink of a nervous breakdown, or have I shown up at an inconvenient time for you?” I sniped.
Her jaw dropped. “Unbelievable. Are you seriously going to let her speak to a High-Born Fae like that?” she said, eyes on Fisher.
“What do you want me to do about it?” he replied. “She has a mind and a mouth of her own. I am the keeper of neither.” He picked at one of the fine filaments poking out of the stone, frowning at it intently.
“Would you let one of the men talk to a superior with the same level of disrespect?”
“No, I wouldn’t,” he admitted. “Then why won’t y—”
“But she isn’t a member of this army, and you aren’t her superior,” Fisher said. “Now. Do you want to give her a moment to see if she can fix the sword you tried to kill me with? Or do you just want to pace about and yell some more?”
Danya didn’t know what to say to that. She gaped at Fisher, then at Ren, then Lorreth, bypassing me altogether.
“Lorreth,” she began. The male sitting by the fire threw up his hands, shaking his head.
“Oh no. No way. I’m still sporting a bruise from where you clocked me last night. You were way over the line, the way you went for Fisher. It’s your own fault that your sword’s in pieces. In a wall,” he added. “I think it’s impressive, what the human did. And no more than you deserved besides.”
“Asshole,” she spat. “I should have hit you harder.”
“You couldn’t have if you’d tried,” Lorreth shot back, grinning.
I wasn’t paying attention to their bickering. Danya was wrong; I certainly did care that I had destroyed something so precious. I stared at the wall, pondering the shards, trying to strategize a way to pull them from the stone, when I felt the faintest tapping at the edge of my senses. The whisper I’d sensed inside the quicksilver back at the forge was a loud roar in comparison to this, but…I swore I heard it.
I spun around and found Fisher. “This sword wasn’t just tempered steel.
There was quicksilver in the blade.”
He nodded, displaying the faintest hint of satisfaction. “There was. Not much. Trace amounts. But yes, that’s why it answered you when you commanded it to stop.”
“So…back in Zilvaren? It was never the iron, or the copper, or the gold that reacted to me? It was…”
Kingfisher nodded. “It’s always been quicksilver. It was bound to many different alloys and metals before, back when there were plenty of Alchemists and the pathways were still open between our worlds. It made
weapons more powerful. Turned them into conduits that could channel vast quantities of magic.”
My mind spun. “That’s why metal was so hard to find, then. Madra took it all. She wanted to keep the quicksilver away from the people. She knew there might be people like me within the city, capable of controlling it.”
When Kingfisher said no more, Ren inhaled and spoke instead. “Our historical records show that most Alchemists could only command objects if the item in question was comprised of at least five percent quicksilver. And even then, it was typical that they could only transmute the quicksilver from its solid to its liquid state so that it could be forged. There are no records of objects being fragmented like this.” He gestured to what remained of Danya’s sword.
“Okay. So that makes me…an anomaly?” I looked to Kingfisher. I wanted his input on this. Regardless of the cat-and-mouse game we were playing with each other’s feelings, if Fisher actually had any of those, I still wanted to know what he made of Ren’s revelation. He wouldn’t meet my eyes, though. He leaned back against the map table, resting his weight against its edge, his jaw clenching and unclenching as he stared at the ground.
“That makes you the most powerful Alchemist ever recorded,” Lorreth supplied. “Capable of changing how we’ve been fighting this war in ways even we can’t imagine. Most of us were infants when the paths between realms closed and the Alchemists became extinct. Some of us hadn’t even been born yet. We have no idea what battlefields used to look like, with an Alchemist in camp, ready to forge new weapons that draw magic—”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa! I don’t know how to forge weapons that can draw magic! I can’t even figure out how to make a relic!” I’d broken out into a cold sweat. “I’ve made zero headway with it. Not back at the Winter Palace. Not at Cahlish. The trials I ran here this morning were a total waste of time, too. If you’re under any illusions that I am somehow going to be pivotal to winning this war, then please rethink that strategy.”
“Precisely. If she can’t even figure out how to wipe her own a—” “Danya, I swear on the seven gods, if you don’t shut up, I will toss you
out of here myself,” Ren muttered darkly.
Danya rocked back as if she’d been slapped. Her lips trembled, eyes filling with tears. “You can’t be serious,” she whispered. “You? You’re just going to blindly fall in line with all of this? We are the ones who stayed.
Who’ve fought in the mud and watched friend after friend die. When this human was born, we’d already been committed to this fight for centuries!”
“You’re right,” Ren snapped. “We’ve been stuck here, in the middle of nowhere, in a forgotten corner of our land, defending a border that the high- born assholes up north couldn’t give a fuck about. For centuries. If this line falls, the entire realm falls. We won’t be fighting this war another hundred years from now.”
“We will if we have to—” Danya began.
“No, we won’t. Because every day, our numbers decline, and Malcolm’s horde grows larger. There’s no game left to hunt here. Belikon isn’t sending supplies to the front anymore. We have no wood for our fires. No food to fuel the troops. No clothes to keep them warm. No weapons to fucking arm them. So yes, I’ll support a plan where a human magically shows up and helps us turn the tide of this thing, because without her, we’ll all be drowned soon enough. And I’m not talking about in another hundred years, or even fifty, or even ten. We have one year, Danya. Twelve months. If we don’t figure this thing out, by this time next year, Malcolm will have won.”
 |
“Put your head between your legs. Maybe that’ll help.” Lorreth carved off a slice of the apple he was eating and used the edge of his dagger to pop it into his mouth. Behind him, the sky tilted, see-sawing, the edges of the war camp a blur. I braced my hands against my thighs and bent double, straining to breathe. My chest was so tight.
Ren’s words rang in my ears. I wanted to unhear them, but they replayed over and over, provoking a fresh wave of panic to hit me with every repetition. A year. Just one. They’d done everything they could to tip the scales in their favor, and nothing had worked. Now, it was merely a waiting game. The clock would run out, they wouldn’t be able to hold the front here, and a hundred thousand ravening vampires would sweep across Yvelia in a blood-red wave of death.
Unless I could figure out how to work some fucking metal. Gods, sinners, martyrs, and ghosts.
We were all so ridiculously fucked.
“You do get used to it, y’know,” Lorreth said conversationally. “That overwhelming sense of impending doom. Eventually, it becomes background noise. You don’t even notice it at all.”
“Where’s…Fisher?” I gasped. I’d stumbled out of the war room after Ren had left to go and talk to some returning scouts. Danya had stalked out of the tent and headed off toward the river, growling under her breath. Lorreth had emerged ten minutes later and had sat down on a tree stump ten feet away, as unfazed as ever. But Fisher had not come out of the tent.
“He went back to Cahlish.” Lorreth sank his teeth into another slice of apple.
“What?”
“Said he was going to see Te Léna.”
Te Léna? The sweet healer had taken such excellent care of me after the vampire attack, but I hadn’t thought much about her since. Only, this was the second time Fisher had gone to see her recently, and neither time he’d been injured.
Gods, what the hell was wrong with me? This realm was paused on the brink of total destruction, and I was angry and plenty afraid of what that might mean for me and everyone else in Yvelia…but I was also jealous. And that? That made me feel pathetic. I swallowed the questions I wanted to ask Lorreth—Are they together, Te Léna and Fisher? Does he like her? Do they have history?—ashamed that I’d even think them. Instead, I asked a far more appropriate question.
“Where the fuck…can I get…a drink?”
|
The wooden building at the center of camp was a tavern, and it had the best drinks. So far, I’d had five heavy pours of some very potent whiskey, and I was beginning to feel fuzzy around the edges. My anxiety was long gone, and now I was starting to see the ridiculousness of it all.
“At the end of the day, it’s simple,” I said.
Lorreth peered into his glass, as if there were definitely still some whiskey left at the bottom of it but he was just having trouble finding it. “How so?” he asked.
“He’s a fucking liar. He’s been lying to me this whole time.” Lorreth frowned. “Who, Fisher?”
“Yes, Fisher. Who else?”
The male shook his head. “Impossible. He’s an Oath Bound Fae.” “And?”
“And we can’t lie.”
One eye closed, the other half-cracked, I studied him dubiously. “That’s some convenient-smelling bullshit if you ask me.”
Splaying his hands, Lorreth shrugged. “When we turn twenty-one, we kneel before the Firinn Stone and make our decision. Every one of us. We have a choice. Bleed on the stone and make our vow. To always be truthful. To always be bound by our word, no matter what it costs us.”
“Or?”
“Or we choose the Lawless path. A Lawless Fae may lie. They may cheat. They may steal. Useful tools in many situations, I’ll admit. But they come with a price that Kingfisher—and the rest of us, I might add—was not willing to pay.”
I arched an eyebrow at him. “And that was?”
He shrugged nonchalantly, as if the answer were obvious. “Our honor.” I harumphed at that.
“So you see, no matter how much we might want to sometimes, we’re physically incapable of breaking our word or telling a lie.”
“Hmm. Yeah, well,” I admitted. “Kingfisher did say that back in the forge at the Winter Palace. But I dismissed him.”
“On what basis?”
“On the basis that a liar who didn’t want to get caught telling a lie would one hundred percent lie about being unable to tell lies. Gods, that…was confusing.”
“What did you even think he’d lied about?”
It came back to me at once. My thinly veiled ‘how big is your cock?’ question. And Fisher’s slow, arrogant smile.
‘Big enough to make you scream and then some…’
Turned out he’d been telling the truth about that, I realized with a healthy dose of annoyance. Fuck. “That’s not important,” I said. “What’s important is that he’s known that you guys need me to make weapons for you otherwise you’ll lose to Malcolm. But he made an oath to me that I only had to turn those rings into relics for you all, and then he’d let me go home.”
Despite being about ten percent more intoxicated than me, Lorreth’s eyelids shuttered at this. “He made that deal with you?”
I nodded, then drained my glass.
“Well, if he made that oath, then you don’t need to doubt it. Even if he wasn’t bound by his own magic to honor an oath, which he is, then Fisher would honor it on principle. It’s just who he is.” There was a tense note to the warrior’s voice when he said this. The details of my bargain with Fisher seemed to have taken him by surprise, though he hid it fairly well.
I wanted to change the subject either way. “Tell me…” I leaned forward across the table, pointing at Lorreth’s mouth. “Those teeth. Fisher said they were a remnant of the blood curse. But…they still work, right? You can still use them to drink blood?”
Lorreth instantly sobered. His pupils narrowed to black dots. Looking around, he assessed the tables on either side of us as if he were making sure no one else had heard what I’d just said. “Uhh, that’s not the kind of thing we talk about in taverns, actually,” he replied in a low voice.
“Why not?”
“Fuck. I need way more alcohol for this conversation. Hold on.” He gestured to the bartender for a refill, and the craggy-faced creature Lorreth had informed me was a mountain troll came and poured us both another round. When he’d gone, Lorreth sighed. He held up his drink to mine.
“Sarrush.”
I clinked my glass against his. “Sarrush.”
Lorreth took a deep breath. “All right. Okay. So. No one else has told you anything? About…any of that?” he asked hopefully.
“Nope.”
“Well…” Lorreth hadn’t flinched during the conflict in the war room, when Danya had tried to slit Fisher’s throat, nor when Ren had dropped the staggering news that they were on the cusp of losing the war. But now he looked mighty uncomfortable. “Yes, our canines work just fine. The same as a vampire’s would. But blood drinking is very taboo. No, it’s worse than taboo. It’s scandalous.”
“But the Fae still do it sometimes?”
A pink tinge was developing on his cheeks. “Yes.” “But you don’t need blood to survive?”
“No, we don’t.”
“Then why would they do it?”
“Because…” He cast another wary look around, shifting awkwardly in his seat. “It’s a sex thing. If a male drinks from someone, it’ll make his dick harder than it’s ever been in his life. It makes you euphoric. Both of you. While you’re fucking.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah. Oh,” he said. “But it’s a slippery slope. If we bite someone, we can still lose ourselves to it. It takes an immeasurable force of will not to keep drinking. It’s…not something that’s spoken about in polite company.”
My brain was so fogged by the whiskey that I didn’t know what to make of that. I supposed it explained Fisher’s reaction when I’d told him to bite me. But beyond that…I didn’t know what to think.
“If you have more questions about this, then maybe they could be discussed another time. In private. Preferably between you and whoever has suggested they might want to, ahh, drink from you,” Lorreth mumbled, burying his face in his glass.
I blushed hotly. “Yes, of course.” I hadn’t said a word to anyone about what had happened between Fisher and me. I’d scrubbed myself raw in the shower in the hopes that I’d be able to mask the smell of him on me, but the Fae could detect things like that underneath the scent of soap, apparently. Did that mean that Lorreth knew I’d had sex last night? And specifically with Fisher? It didn’t really matter if he did. Worrying about it wasn’t going to change anything. And I didn’t even know the first thing about Lorreth, so who cared what he thought? He was a stranger. But I liked him. I didn’t want him to stay a stranger.
“How did you wind up here, anyway?” I asked. “In Yvelia? I was born here,” he said.
“No. In the middle of this war.”
“Oh.” He waved a hand noncommittally. “Huh, well, let’s see. I was a traveling singer once, if you can believe that.”
He did have a pleasant enough voice when he spoke, but I couldn’t picture this huge, dangerous-looking, lethal warrior as a singer, of all things. “A good one?” I asked.
“A mediocre one. Turned out I was better suited to killing than I ever was at performing. Anyway, I met Fisher one night out on the road. He was on his way to help some friends. I was lying in a ditch when he found me.”
I buried a smirk. “Drunk?”
“No. Dead, actually. Or very nearly, anyway.” He winked, though he suddenly looked a little washed out in the muted tavern lighting. “I’d been attacked by two vampires. Strays. They weren’t part of the horde. But they were hungry. They took one look at me—a scrawny kid with a lute strapped to his back. Alone—and decided I’d make a decent meal. They nearly drained me dry.”
“Shit. That sounds awful.”
“Well, it wasn’t any fun, that’s for sure. But it was a long time ago. I’ve suffered worse since. Anyway, we were miles away from anywhere. I wouldn’t have lasted until they could get me to help. If I’d died and come back turned while I was with them, there was a chance I could have killed a number of the party, and some of them didn’t want to risk that. They told Fisher it would be best to run me through and have done with it, but he refused. He made them set up camp for the night, and he transported me to Cahlish. He carried me in his arms, for fuck’s sake. I was a lot smaller then,” Lorreth stressed. “He put me in a bed, and he had healers come and tend to me, and he waited to see what they’d say. They weren’t optimistic about my odds. I had more venom than blood in my veins, and there are limits to what even the most skilled healer can accomplish under those circumstances. They told him to go back to the wolves, and when I passed, they would bury me beneath a yew tree out in one of the fields that bordered the estate. But Fisher didn’t do that.”
“What…did he do?”
Lorreth tossed his head back and laughed. “Something I’m sure I’ve given him innumerable reasons to regret since. He made me his brother. By blood. He gave me a part of his soul.”
“A part of his…?” I hadn’t heard him right. The alcohol was making my ears play tricks on me. If souls existed, and I wasn’t entirely convinced that they did, then you couldn’t just go around giving pieces of your own away.
“It’s an ancient rite,” Lorreth said. “One very few know how to perform anymore. But Fisher’s father had almost died once, and his friend had used it to save him. So, he’d made sure Fisher knew it, too, in case, one day, he was able to use it to save the life of someone who was important to him.”
“But you were a stranger…”
Lorreth’s sharp blue eyes glittered hard as diamonds. He took a sip of his whiskey and set the glass down, regarding it. “Yes. A stranger. And Fisher did it anyway. He bonded a small part of himself to the scrap of life
that was clinging on inside me, and that was that. I was still sick as a dog, but death loosened his grip on me. I knew I was going to live, and so did Kingfisher. He told me he was leaving to find the other wolves and that he’d be back in three months. He said I could go as soon as I was feeling better, if that’s what I wanted to do, but that there was a place here for me as well, if I preferred the idea of that instead.”
“And you chose to stay here. And to fight.”
Slowly, Lorreth nodded. “I had no family. No one who needed me to be anywhere else. So I figured fuck it. I only have a life because of him, anyway. Might as well work my ass off and do enough good with the time I have left to be worthy of the gift that he’d given me. I stayed at Cahlish. The moment I was on my feet again, I started training. Before that point, I’d never even held a sword, but I gave it everything I had. And I ate. I ate so much fucking food, Cook would scream the moment he saw me strolling into the kitchen. When Fisher came back three months later, he didn’t find me at Cahlish. I was waiting for him at the war camp, half a foot taller and twice the weight I’d been when he’d left. Most importantly, I was ready to kill vampires.”
“Wait. You crossed Omnamerrin? On foot?” I asked incredulously. Fisher had said only Fae with suicidal tendencies attempted to cross the mountains that stood watch between Irrín and Cahlish.
“I did. Took me nine days, and I nearly got buried by an avalanche, but I made it here in the end.”
“You’re lucky you didn’t die. Wait, what would have happened? If you had died? What would have happened to the piece of his soul Fisher gave you?”
“Good question. If I die first, the part of Fisher’s soul that he gave me returns to him, making him whole again. Everyone celebrates. The end. But if he dies first, he’s stuck here, waiting for me to die before he can move on. He’d be trapped in a non-corporeal state, unable to touch anything or anyone, and unheard by everyone. That’s the price he paid when he chose to give me the gift of life. It’s happened before. When a Fae male or female who gave a piece of their soul dies first—whether by natural or unnatural causes—the recipient can continue living in perfect health for another two thousand years.
Take Saoirse, Queen of the Lìssian Fae, for example. Her mother, the previous queen, saved her life when she was a child by giving her part of her soul. A hundred and eighty years later, her mother is murdered by unknown assailants, and Saoirse rises to power. She’s young, beautiful, and enjoys being queen. She surrounds herself with adoring males willing to die for her and declares she plans to live forever. She takes tonics, elixirs, and is rumored to drink vampire blood to extend her life. Nearly three thousand years have passed since her mother’s death, and Saoirse still doesn’t look a day over thirty. Meanwhile, her mother’s spirit has been chained to her, forced to watch the world of the living without being able to interact with it, without being able to move on to her eternal rest…”
Lorreth looked sick to his stomach. I had to admit, I felt a little sick myself, too. The idea that anyone could condemn their own mother to such a lonely, awful existence, as well as the inevitable madness that was sure to set in, was incomprehensible to me.
“Fisher says he’s not worried about what happens to him if he dies first,” Lorreth said. “And I’m not worried, either. Truth is, I plan on dying first, anyway. But if the fates guide the stars in a different direction and our better angels claim him first, I won’t permit a single breath into my body beyond the last one Kingfisher takes. By my own hand, I’ll make sure the piece of soul he loaned to me finds its way back to him. And if the fates consider it just, and I’ve done enough to earn a place at his side, I’ll go quietly and happily with my brother into whatever lies beyond.”
