by Karen Chance
“I’m surprised Bulsi risked coming in here,” she told me, from the bathroom. “He’s really skittish.”
“Bulsi? Is that his name?”
Claire nodded. “He woke up briefly yesterday. I managed to get some soup down him, and a little medicine, before he passed out again. He and Olga talked while I fed him.”
“Did he remember anything about those mystery words?”
Claire looked confused for a moment, and then shook her head. “He was barely conscious. They did a number on him, Dory!”
Yeah, I remembered. And felt my face flush in anger, which was stupid. The slavers didn’t care about wiping out whole villages of fey; how much less would they care about a single child?
“I don’t think he trusts anyone right now,” Claire said. “She was lucky to get his name. Although she isn’t too happy about it.”
“Olga isn’t?”
She nodded.
“Why not? What’s wrong with . . . What was it again?”
“Bulsi. It means wart.”
“What?”
Claire came out of the bathroom, having loaded me up with fresh-smelling towels. “Or lump or bump or protrusion. It’s what his owner called him. Anyway, it doesn’t matter; we’re not keeping it.”
“The name or the kid?”
“Don’t look at me like that,” she told me severely.
I’d hobbled over to the dresser for something to wear, so hadn’t been looking like anything. I glanced over my shoulder. “Like what?”
“I’m not adopting him! We can’t have any more houseguests, or this place is going to pop.”
Couldn’t argue with that.
“Anyway, Olga is trying to find his people, but it’s not easy. She said his dialect is really strange. He might be from one of the mountain tribes. With all the fighting, a lot of groups went to the hills over the centuries and some never came down again.”
“So how do we find them?”
Claire didn’t immediately answer, being busy staring at my rumpled mess of a bed. And a few bloodstains here and there, from where I guess I’d bled through my dressing. I felt around under it now, and found a ridge of puckered skin, but no bullet hole.
Sometimes I love dhampir metabolism.
“I can do that,” I said, as Claire started stripping sheets, but she just shook her head. Housework is how Claire works off excess energy. She sometimes complains about it, but if you try to take over, as I have plenty of times, she gets upset.
Unless she gets to boss you doing it, of course.
“Pillowcases,” she instructed.
I blinked at her.
“They’re in the bathroom closet, third shelf.”
Really? Who knew? I put down some old jeans and moved to oblige.
“I’m not sure,” she told me, answering my previous question. “Olga has been talking to the other slaves, trying to find out about her nephew. And she’s also been asking about the boy—” She stopped abruptly. “What do you think about Kjeld?”
“Kjeld?”
“As a name.”
I handed over pillowcases. “It’s . . . all right. Why?”
“Well, Bulsi needs a new one, and there’s not a lot to choose from. Most of the fey names, boys’ ones anyway, are all about war. It’s all ‘Fighter with Helmet’ or ‘Warrior in Armor’ or ‘Spear of God.’ And Olga says he’ll probably never be a fighter, so a name like that would just make people laugh at him.”
“There’s other things in life than fighting,” I pointed out.
And got an incredulous look from Claire.
“I do other things!”
“Name one.”
“I paint. I play a mean hand of poker.” I thought about it. “I know how to tango.”
“Well, maybe you should teach the fey,” Claire said, dumping my rumpled sheets into her now-empty basket and putting on new ones. “They’re obsessed. Even the stuff that isn’t war related is usually designed to strike fear into their enemies by reminding them of scary stuff. I like Calder, for example, but it means harsh and cold waters. Who would want to be called that?”
I agreed that Calder was a no go.
“And then there’s nicknames, although they aren’t any better.”
“Nicknames?”
“You know how the fey are; everybody has a dozen different names. But, apparently, other people are supposed to give them to you. You aren’t allowed to just name yourself.”
I shrugged. “So name him.”
“I would, but there’s all these rules. Even nicknames are supposed to say something about you. I asked the guards for recommendations, and you know what they came up with?”
“No idea.”
“Inn magri: the thin one. Or óþveginn: the unwashed.” Claire looked indignant. “He’s not unwashed! I bathed him just yesterday! Or—even worse—rotinn, the broken. I mean, can you imagine?”
“Some of the guards are pricks,” I agreed.
Claire gave me a sideways look. “They have one for you, too, you know.”
“A nickname?”
She nodded. “They’re calling you ambhǫfði. It means two-headed. I guess because of you and . . . you know.”
I blinked. I wasn’t sure how to feel about that.
“They say it’s an honor. That all warriors have a string of nicknames, telling their story.” She sighed. “They’re probably going to give you more.”
“Good,” I decided.
“Good?”
“Then I can bore them with all my names, just like they do me.”
Claire laughed. “They’ll probably enjoy it! If you stay still long enough, they’ll tell you all about how they got each of their names, and ask about yours. You can be trapped for hours.”
Okay, that was slightly alarming.
“So, anyway, back to Kjeld. Do you like it?”
“What does it mean?”
She spread out some wrinkles in the sheets. “Large pot.”
I grinned.
“Well, trolls like to eat! And a large pot of . . . whatever . . . means you aren’t likely to starve. And you can even feast others!”
“Sounds good to me. Or you could just ask him what he wants to be called.”
She shook her head. “I can’t. He speaks almost no English, and even Olga can barely understand his dialect. But he’ll be around a little while recovering, and I refuse to call him Wart the whole time!”
I laughed. I couldn’t help it. I had a kid named Stinky.
“Anyway, word is that the mountain tribes have been hit hard by the slavers, because they’re usually small groups, and too weak to fight back. But there’s a lot of them, and they’re spread over a large area, and sometimes they war with each other and”—she sighed—“it’s a mess. And with the little one’s condition, even if Olga does find his people, they may not claim him.”
“So what happens then?”
“I don’t know.”
She fluffed pillows.
“He’s very sweet, though.”
More fluffing.
“He liked my soup.”
I didn’t say anything; I wasn’t stupid.
I was seriously stiff, though. It felt like the years were finally catching up to me. A lot of years, I thought uncomfortably. All the freaking years.
Until I stretched, and oh. My. God. Oh yeah. Oh fuck yeah.
Claire was looking at me in sudden alarm. “Did you just crack every bone in your spine?”
“Yeah.” It felt so good that I did it again. And then rolled my neck around, hearing what sounded like miniature fireworks going off.
“How do you do that?” She looked disturbed.
I extended my arms, laced my fingers together, and cracked my knuckles. “Like that.”
“S
top it!”
I laughed, and contemplated chasing her around the room, cracking things at her. But that might impact the chance of breakfast, and I was out of sandwiches. “Food?” I asked hopefully.
“Get a shower. I’ll have something for you by the time you’re done.”
That, I decided, was a plan.
Twenty minutes later, I was clean, moisturized, and dressed. But not downstairs, because Claire had a tray waiting for me when I emerged from the bathroom. She’d also brought a chair for herself.
Uh-oh.
Not that I wasn’t happy to have company, but Claire wasn’t a big fan of bedroom eating. If this was a normal conversation, we’d be having it at the kitchen table. So it wasn’t going to be normal, and judging by the closed door, she didn’t want it overheard.
Well, crap.
“Relax,” she told me. “I just want to fill you in.”
“You want to fill me in?” I ambled over to the spread on the spread. “I thought that was my job.”
“Louis-Cesare brought you home. He told me what—” A phone rang. She sighed, pulled it out of a pocket, rolled her eyes, and put it back.
“What was that?”
“Nothing. Sit down and have breakfast. Or lunch, I suppose.”
“Lunch? Shouldn’t it be dinner?”
Which is how I found out that I’d slept the clock around.
“Shit!” I was halfway to my feet, when Claire pulled me back down. “Sit. Eat. Listen.”
Which is how I also found out some other things.
“So that’s why we’re talking behind closed doors,” I said.
I was looking at a newspaper pic of Blue’s latest activities. It showed an illegal market in some abandoned subway station. It didn’t specialize in the fey per se, but in forbidden ingredients, the kind of stuff you couldn’t walk into a normal potion shop and buy. But some of those did originate in Faerie.
Need a basilisk’s egg for an unbreakable ward? Got you, fam. Want kelpie blood for detection-proof glamouries? Step right up. How about naga venom, for a poison no antidote can treat? Sure, for a price.
It was exactly the sort of place where you’d expect to find fey bones and the fey supplying them. Because butchering a bunch of helpless slaves is safer than constantly going into Faerie, isn’t it? Or it was.
Until things suddenly got a lot Bluer.
All that was left now were broken cages and blood. Enough of the latter that I was assuming slavers number four and five had just bitten the dust. Along with probably a bunch of their crew.
What a pity.
Claire nodded. “If all this gets out—when it gets out—nobody knows what will happen. But that”—she fluttered a hand at the paper—“will probably get a lot more common!”
“I understand why Olga felt she had to tell the Elders,” I said. “This affects the whole Dark Fey community. I just wish she could have held off for a few days, until we know a little more. We don’t need riots—”
“Oh, there will be riots. You can count on it!”
I looked up. “You think it will be that bad?”
“The troll council does! That’s why they’re meeting now, to try to figure out how to spin it. But that’s just it—there is no way! The Dark Fey believe that these weapons are powered by the souls of their people, souls that will never again be able to reincarnate. You can’t spin that!”
She got up and started pacing.
“And the worst thing is, it’s not just some crazy superstition. Louis-Cesare said it had some truth to it.” She turned and put her hands flat on the bed. “He can’t be right, can he? Tell me he isn’t right!”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “But Mircea confirmed that it was life energy. Vamps can tell the difference between that and regular magic. And there was plenty of it floating around, after the consul almost got incinerated.”
“I don’t believe it.” She abruptly sat back down on her chair. “I don’t believe it!”
She did, though. The green eyes had just gone incandescent.
“They’re killing us! And Faerie—”
She cut off, and then just sat there for a moment, trying to absorb the implications. Because, yeah. There were a lot of them.
If Caedmon was right about the symbiosis between Faerie and its people, then whoever was making these weapons wasn’t just using up the souls of individuals, but draining that of their entire world. Might explain why there were fewer vargar being born these days, I thought. And then I wondered how many more traits had been lost, how many more vital ways Faerie had been diminished.
I also wondered what had happened to all those souls that had been left behind through the years, but not used up. If the bones deteriorated enough, were they lost, too? Just dissipating into the ground of an alien world, and fading away?
I shivered, despite the warmth of the day and the residual heat of a very hot shower. How long had Faerie been bleeding out? Centuries? Millennia?
Because it had to be that long, right? Ever since our two worlds encountered each other, and people started going back and forth. And while the Light Fey seemed to have a policy of taking their dead back with them, what about the Dark?
They might have done it if left to their own devices, but they hadn’t been. Not those who had been used as slaves and killed for sport. And if what Caedmon said was true, the soul of a Dark Fey this incarnation might be that of a Light Fey the next, so every group was hurt, every group weakened.
It was kind of stunning. And appalling. Which probably explained why Claire looked sick as well as furious.
“They should string her up publicly,” said my pacifist roommate. “That bitch!”
“You mean Efridis?”
“Of course I mean Efridis! Who else?”
And there it was. The thing I’d been contemplating in the shower while my groggy brain woke up. The thing I’d been hoping to avoid, because I knew how this was going to go.
I didn’t say anything for a moment, because I am a coward. And then I sighed, and womaned the hell up. “Ermh.”
Chapter Fifty-two
Claire spun around, because she knows me, too.
“What?”
I licked my lips, and not just because there was jam on them. She had that weird elfin thing going on suddenly, with the too-translucent skin and the hair color not found in nature—not outside of a bonfire, anyway—and the too-bright eyes. I tried telling myself it was just the light streaming through my sheers, but I knew I was lying.
I had a theory about it, too. I didn’t know if I looked any different when Dorina was around, except for a weird, glowy-eye thing I’d glimpsed once and tried not to think about. But I suspected that Claire’s looks changed when her twin was awake.
Which meant that she was awake right now.
Making this not the time for this particular conversation.
But, as usual with my luck, it was already too late.
“You are not going to tell me that you still don’t think it was her!” Claire demanded.
“Yeah, well. That would certainly be easier.”
“Dory!”
“Look. I would love for Efridis to be guilty, okay? She’s a threat, if not now then later, and it would make things nice and tidy since she’s already in custody—”
“As she ought to be!”
“—but what I want is less important than the facts, and I’m sorry, but they just don’t fit.”
“What facts?”
I held up a buttery finger. “One. Efridis is a well-known vargr, and she wants Aiden dead. Neither of these things is a secret. Yet she uses her best-known skill to attack us, and does it when her brother is here, who will almost certainly recognize it? And possibly recognize her?”
Claire frowned. “She might not have known Caedmon was here. It wasn’t a planne
d visit and he only arrived that afternoon.”
“And stayed outside most of the day,” I reminded her. “Where any little passing birdie could have seen him. Unless she’s a complete idiot, she’d do some recon before the attack, and Caedmon is hard to miss.”
“But she used the manlikans first. She only came in herself after that didn’t work!”
I nodded. “And the manlikan part I can understand. It could have been blamed on Aeslinn—it’s his element, after all—and he hates Caedmon. Killing his rival’s heir would give him revenge on an old enemy, and might make Caedmon less likely to support the Senate in the war. The fey lead their armies, and Caedmon would be less willing to risk himself without an heir.”
She frowned. “So you think it was Aeslinn?”
“I don’t know. I’m just saying that the manlikan attack didn’t point the finger directly at Efridis. She could plausibly claim to have had nothing to do with it, and try her luck again later if it didn’t work. Only . . . that’s not what happened, is it? Instead, she charges in using her vargr abilities, despite knowing they would put a glowing neon sign over her head.”
Claire shook her head. “It sounds crazy when you put it like that. But when it’s your child . . . it’s not that simple, Dory! You try to think clearly, but emotions get in the way. And she was so close—”
“Okay,” I agreed. “Let’s say she saw her best chance to make Æsubrand heir to two kingdoms slipping away, and decided to go for it. I had a similar thought that night: that the first attack had failed so a second method was being tried. Or that the first was just a feint to get the stairs cleared for the second—”
“And what’s wrong with that?”
“What’s wrong with it is that Efridis didn’t need them cleared. She already had a potential avatar in the room with Aiden, and she knew that.”
“Dory, what are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about the night a couple weeks ago, when she and Æsubrand came here to warn us about Aeslinn’s attack on the Senate. They kidnapped the kids so I’d listen to what they had to say, and Efridis was actually holding Stinky when I got here. So she knows he lives here, and since she had plenty of time to look around before I showed up, she probably knows he shares a room with Aiden.”