“Give me the dates.”
My phone buzzed with her text. She had just been waiting to hit “Send.” I shook my head ruefully. She knew me well.
“As long as I have you on the phone—”
“Yes?” She sounded suspicious, which was completely unfair, since she was the one who had called me. And I had already agreed to babysit an entire college while she wasn’t around to take care of it.
“Chris mentioned that there had been some incident where they lived before.”
“And?”
I blew my breath out in exasperation. She wasn’t going to make this easy at all. “Maggie wants me to convince Chris to come to the Monday meetings. Chris is reluctant because of the previous group they belonged to. Help me out here — what do I need to know to make Chris feel more comfortable?”
“Where do I start?” She paused for a minute, and I heard a door close. So she didn’t want anyone walking in on the conversation, but she wasn’t concerned enough to put up a silence ward. “I’m giving you background only. If Chris doesn’t trust you enough to tell you the full story, I won’t tell it either.”
“Even though you trust me?”
“I want Chris to trust us both. That’s not going to happen if we talk about them behind their back. Even if we tell ourselves it’s in their best interests.”
That made sense.
“All right. So what can you tell me?”
“When I met Chris, everyone in the local coven assumed they were a normal male witch. The area being what it is, Chris was not open about being nonbinary, preferring to suffer misgendering rather than open harassment. I didn’t even find out until after they moved here.”
That didn’t surprise me much — I knew my share of people who labeled others as male, female, and confused. I made a sound of acknowledgement so she would continue.
“I recognized Chris as a gorgon when I first saw them, mostly because of my Sight.”
“Did you say something?”
“Not me. Another witch, one with Isis as her patron, wanted to know which patron granted Chris their healing magic. Chris didn’t want to talk about it, so she dug around and discovered their family. She was more than a little upset that Chris wasn’t human.”
“Sounds like Dorothy’s twin.” No, I hadn’t actually heard Dorothy say such a thing — as far as I knew, she didn’t know nonhumans currently existed on Earth. But it seemed a logical extension of her hatred for anything outside her narrow band of “normal.”
“Hmm. Close-minded people are everywhere.” There was a world of grief in her sigh. “She exposed the gorgons to the witches, sure that the witches would agree that the monsters needed to be destroyed. It was not a pretty fight for anyone involved.”
That, I could readily believe. “But — what is there that you’re not telling me? This sounds like a full story to me.”
“I told you — that’s Chris’s to tell. But there is more to it.”
“I hope someday they trust me enough to tell me.” I thought again of Dorothy and the other witches. “I can see why Chris might not want to go to Maggie’s. That ‘kill anything that’s different’ trope is pretty strong.”
“I’m sure the two of you will work it out eventually. Meanwhile, I need to finish getting ready for my class.”
We both hung up, and I let the phone rest in my lap. How many of my friends, of those I was becoming better friends with, like Sverth, would be welcomed into a witches’ circle? How many would want to be? The trolls had told me they didn’t mix with those of the air, such as Hsien. No doubt they would find a mixed gathering of witches incomprehensible. I wished we could all just get along, but I was pretty sure there wasn’t a magic spell strong enough to make that happen.
The depth of magical solidity near the Chinatown T stop on my way to work told me that Iárn was about. When had I become able to tell the difference between the trolls by feel? I chalked it up to familiarity, in the same way that I could tell witches apart by the feel of their magic. I considered detouring rather than passing the T today. Iárn never wanted to talk to me unless there was work to be done or there were more problems in the world.
To be fair, the gaps that the trolls had been complaining about in the magic bedrock were real enough, so his words had merit. I just didn’t want yet more work on my overly full to-do list. Rather than detouring to meet him, I stayed in the stream of tourists heading out of Chinatown via the T, nodding to neighbors that I saw leaving their homes for the daily grind.
Iárn’s shaggy head loomed over the crowd at the T, hunkered into the shadow of an overhang but still out in the open. He had clearly seen me. Resigned, I altered my path to fetch up near him.
As usual, he cut to the chase. “Logan is unraveling. You did not do your work properly.”
My mouth fell open. That gap had been hooked closed, zipped up from one edge to the other, and backfilled with magic. It had taken Sverth and I working together to get it done — but looking back on it now after the chasm in Canada, we’d definitely had the training wheels on. That was the tutorial before taking on the full challenge. There was no way it had failed now, after the time that had passed, if the other one hadn’t broken, too.
“I don’t believe you.”
His eyes settled on me, and I worried briefly about the advisability of calling the troll a liar. It didn’t matter, though — it was true. I didn’t believe I’d done the work wrong.
“I do not blame you. Sverth has much to answer for. He did not teach you properly, and now the work must be redone. I will send someone else to you.”
Now I was concerned. Sverth told me that he had a lot riding on this, and now if Iárn thought that he had failed, there was going to be a price to pay. No.
“Excuse me?” Iárn asked.
I hadn’t realized I’d said it out loud, but now I repeated it. “No. If there is an error, which I do not believe, then Sverth deserves the chance to repair it as much as I do.”
“Why should I believe he would do any better the second time around?” This time, there was an edge to his voice — not anger at me, nor even at Sverth, but betrayal. Iárn was hurt by what he thought Sverth had done.
“Because he would not fail you if he had a choice.”
Iárn stepped back, partly into the wall itself, as though it only existed to the extent he wished it to. Perhaps it was true. I’d seen so many tunnels opening from this T station that I began to wonder if it was entirely a troll construct. Maybe all of the T stations were, and the trolls could fade in and out through the walls wherever they chose. I’d need more of the trollmiod to see, though, and even then there was no guarantee I’d see all of what was happening magically at the T station. I didn’t understand how the trollmiod affected me.
“Sverth did not tell you this.”
“Not in so many words, but I believe it to be true.”
“You also believe that the repair work was done as it should have been.”
To hell with it. I was going to be late to work, but right now, that didn’t matter.
“Take me there now. You don’t believe it was done right, watch me do it. Help me do it. Give me the aid Sverth did and see what I learned. Then you can decide where he failed, if he did.”
“The gap is there. There is no question about that.”
“Show me.” I used my Mom voice.
For a minute, I didn’t think it was going to work. He was the leader of the trolls, and no doubt hadn’t had anyone else bossing him around for years. Decades? Centuries? Whatever. He agreed.
The wall opened behind him, and he motioned me in. I started walking, knowing what to expect and unworried about the disconnect between my head and my feet. Occasional flickers in the dark caught my eye, a lingering aftereffect of the trollmiod, but not so many as when I had traveled with Sverth. The feeling of Tiamat’s presence was stronger, too — not near enough to reach out and touch, but more evident, more real. I didn’t mention either of these magical feelings to
Iárn.
I stepped out into the dim recesses of the luggage sorting area once again. Without looking around, I sat on the floor and reached to find the gap. The echoes of my own magic came back through the ground, guiding me. But the gap was only mostly sealed. I frowned.
“Now do you believe me?”
“This … isn’t how we left it.” I tried to sort out my impressions of the magic, but I still wasn’t familiar enough with troll magic to be certain what had changed — even after this, even after Calgary. I needed more information.
Closing my eyes, I tied in to the magic net I had created before, all the hooks and eyes, the loops that tied them. My magic was untouched — I knew well enough what it felt like when someone had sabotaged my work — which meant the difference was in what Sverth had done. I pulsed outward from my work, seeking the boulders, the filling, all that had gone into place to fill this deep gap. Some of them were … not missing, precisely, but diminished. Had I misestimated how much Sverth had given me to work with? If so, the fault lay within me, not within him.
I touched one boulder of magic that seemed unchanged, fitting just so into the matrix to lock others into place. It shook beneath my magic, and I felt a portion crumble off with a whiff of something akin to rust. Or, no — more acidic than that. Yes, acid eating away at the boulders to make them crumble and fail where they lay. A different form of sabotage than I had seen before — my ward had been sabotaged by adding to it, not subtracting from it — but I had no doubt it was sabotage.
How to counteract it? Neutralize the acid, like pouring baking soda over leaking battery acid. Would that weaken Sverth’s magic more? I would have to risk it because surely doing nothing would let it all fail. The real question was what did alkaline magic mean?
I’d paid more attention in my physics classes than my chemistry ones, but I vaguely remembered something about electron donors being a form of base. Time to see whether my magic, which I thought of in terms of electricity, could also act as an electron donor. Rather than picturing it as an electric current, I imagined something akin to a waterfall, heavy and thick with electrons, pouring over the gap. My magic still wasn’t enough to fill the gap on its own, but it could “soak” the outside of Sverth’s boulders, reacting with the acidic magic that was there to form a bonded magic that was both inert and space-filling, strengthening the bonds that were already there and making this gap impervious to further tampering.
Taking a deep breath, I opened my eyes and glared at Iárn. “It’s fixed. And it wasn’t Sverth’s fault.”
“You have given me no proof of this.”
Of course I hadn’t. I didn’t know how to scoop up this other magic and show it to him, demonstrate the sabotage. All I had to go on was my knowledge that this was not how Sverth’s magic had felt to me, so someone else had been here.
“I will.”
I didn’t know how, I didn’t know when. But I would prove Sverth innocent and find the saboteur. And then I was going to expect an apology from Iárn.
Later, though. Now, I needed to get to work. And then hunt down Sverth and ask him what he knew about this — and whether it could have happened to the chasm in Calgary as well. Because if it had, we needed to get there and fix it before it started crumbling. Not for the first time, I wished the trolls had cellphones so I could get in touch with them when I wanted, rather than just when they felt it was necessary.
“I look forward to it.” His voice told me he hoped I was right. Why couldn’t he just give Sverth the benefit of the doubt? But no, to be a fair leader, he had to be impartial. He would need evidence. “Meanwhile, I will send another to you to patch the second site. It is just as well that you and Sverth have only done one so far. Look for Níal outside your work in a couple of days. She will be in the alley, where I met you the one time.”
She? This would be the first female troll I talked to. That was different, but more to the point, Iárn didn’t know Sverth and I had gone up to Canada already. Why was Sverth hiding what we did? I thought of the sabotage I had repaired. Yes, he would hide our work if he suspected that sabotage was a possibility. In which case, he was going to have to tell me why he hadn’t warned me. It wasn’t just his credibility on the line — if our repairs failed, the dire consequences that the trolls were worried about would happen. I needed to know what was going to be able to guard against failure.
Slowly, I stood up, rolling my shoulders and making certain I hadn’t gained any odd cricks during my work from holding still so long. Troll politics. Exactly what I needed to make my life more interesting.
I was going to need to get a hold on this before I tried asking Iárn about Tiamat’s shrine, that was for certain. But that was a worry for later.
“Fine. How about you take me to work now?” I wouldn’t be too late, anyway.
Chapter 21
Fingers scraped my neck, scratching like glass or nails on a chalkboard. Recognizing Raidne’s touch, I glanced around the street — the usual mix of tourists, buskers, people heading to work, neighbors out to enjoy the day. Not a siren in sight.
The feeling grew stronger the closer I got to work, however, and I found her sitting inside and just to the left of the door, staring at the artwork hanging on the wall — Grant’s work this week, ink drawing on sepia paper, nearly as detailed as his pencil sketches. A sweep of the tables showed that Kari was there with a couple of the other art students, and the musicians were once again working with their headphones on, but Grant wasn’t around. Just as well, since I was worried about the time he was spending in the siren’s company. Their music had a melancholy effect on people. Maybe too much time in their presence would as well.
I paused at the entrance to straighten up the piles of flyers that people had dropped off in the hope that they would get better attendance at gigs or plays. Someone had even left a stack of business cards advertising ghostwriting for term papers. I picked those up to drop into the recycling — it wouldn’t get rid of the business, but I didn’t see any reason to support the dishonesty. That done, I stopped at Raidne’s table.
“What a surprise!”
She looked up with a smile. “It’s good to get away from home occasionally and have some weaker coffee rather than insisting that it should be thick enough to stand a spoon up in.”
I’d had their coffee. It wasn’t that strong, unless they brewed it extra strong for themselves, which was certainly possible. I’d been known to do that myself.
“You’re welcome any time, of course.” I slid into the seat opposite her. “How’ve you been?”
“Not so bad. I thought I’d stop in, see how the finikia have been selling, ask whether there was something else you wanted to try selling as well. We’ve got baklava and spanikopita, both of which travel well.”
I leaned back to stare at the ceiling for a moment to give myself time to think. The finikia had not been selling as well as I hoped, but I still wanted to carry them. More people would be familiar with baklava and spanikopita, however, so they might do better.
“I don’t think any of the customers like finikia as well as I do.” Except perhaps Haris. “Maybe cut the order for that in half and add in baklava and spanikopita to try this next week?”
She nodded, took a sip of her coffee, then said, “About Grant—”
“Yes?” Did she know I was worried about him? About her, as well. I wondered again if it had been a mistake to tell him where to find her. If he’d been stalking her, I owed her more than a simple apology.
“You don’t need to look guilty. If I’d been upset with you, I’d have said so the first time I saw you after he came by.”
She drew back, shifted uncertainly. I waited for her to get to the point.
“Obsession isn’t something new to me.” Her sardonic look wasn’t really necessary. “But I don’t want to see the ground around me littered with those who care for nothing else. There was a time I didn’t care. All I cared about was our song, and those who fell to it, I considered blessed
. But belief faded, and we left our home, and along the way, I woke to the world around me. All of us did, though some of us more than others. Now — I do not want to go back to the way things were.”
That was good to hear. The first time Grant had seen her, he’d drawn a picture of her surrounded by the bones of the dead. Sometimes, the Sight wasn’t kind.
“I want to introduce Grant to my granddaughter.” The words burst out of her. She looked surprised, then smiled in relief and repeated herself. “I want to introduce them. I think they would get along well, and would understand each other just enough to possibly build a life together.”
“And stop him from obsessing over you.”
“Yes, that. But … you obviously worry over him. I have seen the look on your face when I come in to visit if he’s here. I would ease your fears. So this is a kindness for him, and for you, but also for my granddaughter. She has always been alone, and I think she’s looking for someone more like her, without knowing how different she is from the people she has grown up with.”
“She doesn’t know the family history?” Didn’t know she was sirenkin, I meant.
Raidne shook her head, then shrugged. “She suspects something, I’m sure. Hard not to when her mom, who looks older than me, calls me Mother, but I don’t think she has been told the truth. If she is to be told, it would help if she were with someone else who lives on the fringes of our world.”
“That sounds reasonable.” I wanted to ask how old her granddaughter was, but I wasn’t sure the answer would be meaningful.
“You’ve seen her,” Raidne said suddenly. “You saved her.”
I’d tried to save all the sirenkin, so that wasn’t very definitive.
“On Tremont Street.”
Blood drained from my face, and I swayed as I had that day. Raidne’s granddaughter was the one I’d wreaked such havoc for? I could not regret it, and I was glad to know she was not only alive but well, if subject to a matchmaking grandmother. Matchmaking relatives were not easy to deal with.
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