Those weren’t knees.
“Oh dear, oh dear.” She scurried up to James with remarkable speed, tutting over his prone body. “Oh dear. Gogo, fetch me the blanket.”
“Yes, Nana,” the door knocker replied. How he was meant to fetch anything Scratch had no idea, but in a moment a roll of fabric zoomed out of the door and unfurled next to James.
“There, there,” the woman cooed as the blanket gently edged its way under James. “Good job. Almost got him now. Drop him in the rose room and then come back for the other. He’ll go in the daisy.”
The blanket rose and carried James into the cottage. It returned in a moment, a touch blood-stained, and repeated the process with the sputtering Gultin.
“What’s going on?” he slurred, floating through the cottage door. “What is this? What’s going on?”
The woman turned, giving Scratch a clear view of her full form. Two reddish-brown furred appendages jutted from the bottom of her skirt, knees bent backward. At the ends, where there should have been feet, the woman had hooves.
“Now,” the goat-woman declared, a serene smile beaming from her wizened face. “Why don’t you children come in for some tea? We have much to discuss.”
Chapter Fourteen
Scratch entered the cottage in a daze. She had never been in the home of a fae before. Was there some sort of etiquette she had to follow? Did she need to bring a gift? All she had on her were weapons: Gultin’s sword, her kitchen knife, and a Pokie. Perhaps Nana would enjoy a slightly used, bespoke silk knife sheath. Unless—did the fair folk even have knives?
She could have slapped herself. Of course they had knives. They certainly had cottages, and fairly regular-looking cottages at that. The room she entered was wood-paneled, with a pair of well-worn couches occupying most of the space. Before them squatted a low table laid with a small dining set: one plate, one spoon, and one cup, all done in mismatched, colorful ceramic work. Low beams latticed the ceiling like the top of a pie, bundles of dried herbs hanging at all four corners. At the center of the ceiling an upside-down dangling bouquet of flowers emitted a soft, yellow light, like an unblinking flame.
Scratch reached up to touch the glowing flowers. Brella slapped her hand.
“Don’t.”
“I wasn’t going to.“
“Yes you were.” Brella frowned. The moment Nana had directed the brewer to enter the cottage, she had stopped crying, sniffling so hard Scratch could almost believe Brella was sucking all her tears back into her face. She was stiff, crinkles of tension blooming beside her bloodshot eyes. Scratch wanted to touch her again, but her hand was still stinging from that slap. She couldn’t risk another.
“Sit, sit.” Nana indicated the couches. “There’s plenty for everyone.”
Scratch blinked. The table, which had before held an empty plate, now groaned under a platter laden with freshly baked scones, steam curling off them in the form of what Scratch could have sworn was a beckoning finger.
She looked to Brella for approval. Can I? Brella ignored her, flopping onto a couch and grabbing a scone for herself.
“Thanks, Nana,” she mumbled through the crumbs. “We were in a pretty tight spot.”
“I gathered. Sit, my new guest. And you too, Vel.”
Vel trembled, his eyes darting toward the two closed doors Scratch only now noticed sat on either side of the room. “Our friend.” He gulped. “Is he . . .”
“He’s fine, Vel,” Nana tutted. “Now, come sit. I made your favorite: gurgleberry.”
Scratch followed Vel to the unoccupied couch and reached for a scone. Fruit dotted the surface like garnet in ore. She bit. Sweetness zinged across her tongue, a mixture of cherries, chocolate, and the memory of one sunny day she and James had spent laughing over dirty books by the Academy pond.
“This is,” she whispered reverently through her mouthful, “the best thing I have ever eaten.”
Nana beamed. “Thank you, child. You’re just like my Umbrella. A healthy appetite.” She pursed her lips. “You could use some fattening up, though. If you stay for a while, my dear, I’d be happy to—”
“We’re only here for a little while, Nana.” Brella wiped her mouth on the back of her hand. “Just until James heals.”
“James.” His name sat in the fae’s mouth for a moment, a little ball of sunshine. Then, as Scratch watched in dumbstruck fascination, she swallowed it. “And the other?”
“Uh, Gultin?” Scratch supplied. There was a danger, she suspected, in this fae knowing names. Not just knowing—keeping. But Nana already had Brella’s, Vel’s, and James’s names, so it couldn’t be that bad. Besides, Gultin had just tried to kill her, so her empathy was somewhat limited where he was concerned.
“Gultin.” She ate his name, too, the little ball of light traveling down her throat. “And you?”
Brella flinched. “Nana—”
“She ate of my table, Umbrella.”
“Yes, but she doesn’t need you like—”
“She does.” Nana’s nostrils flared. “You all do. Or would you prefer to be discovered by one of the dozens of parties pursuing her?”
Vel looked up from the untouched scone in his hand. “Dozens?”
“Yes, child. I may not know who she is, but I can certainly feel the eyes on her. The hands reaching for her, too. And the steel.” She licked her lips. “I can taste it.”
Scratch’s stomach clenched. “Swords.”
“There’s wealth around her.” Nana held out her hands, palms forward, grabbing at nothing. “A bounty. The people are desperate for her.”
Brella made a sound that might have been a growl. “They can’t have her.”
Well, that was surprising. A jolt zinged across Scratch’s stomach, followed by a fizzing warmth. But, no—it probably wasn’t personal. Brella needed her to fight off more pursuers, or to factor in whatever mysterious end, whatever secret, the woman still held close. Despite herself, Scratch felt her ribs tighten.
“Of course, they can’t, Umbrella. I can smell how important she is.” The fae’s tulip nose twitched. “In ways you haven’t begun to understand.”
Scratch raised a hand, confused and tired and a little warm with anger. “How am I important?“ There was enough she didn’t know, enough knots to unpick. She couldn’t stomach another.
“It’s not for me to tell, child,” Nana replied, infuriatingly calm. “Things will be revealed as you’re meant to know them. Now.” The fae’s focus was palpable, a poke rather than a caress. “Your name.”
“Patience,” she croaked, stiff and uncomfortable. “Patience Keyes.”
Nana opened her mouth. It was dark inside.
“Not that name, child,” she hissed, displeasure curling her lips.
“That is my name.” Though it lifted the hairs on the back of her neck. She still heard it in her mother’s sharp voice, raised in anger. Patience. Patience!
“No.” Nana’s voice took on a strange timbre, an added chorus of voices underneath hers, pulled from somewhere deep. “I need the name you are called. The name you are known by. That is the name with power. Far more power than the name you were given at birth.”
“I—” Her words died in her throat. She felt ten years old again, rising from her first fight with scraped knees and dust in her eyes. “Really?”
Nana’s fire dimmed. “Really, child.”
“Scratch.” As she said it, something like the reverse of a shadow, a little negative space of light, traveled from her mouth to Nana’s. The goat woman opened for it, held it on her pink tongue, then swallowed. As she did, the room came into sharp focus. The wooden walls weren’t simple at all. Symbols and words etched in an inscrutable language ran the length of the beams, glowing with faint light. The gurgleberries glistened in the scones, lightning bolts of yellow energy running beneath each rosy membrane. The glowing flowers dangling from the ceiling opened their mouths, revealing rows of tiny, needle-sharp teeth.
“Oh,” Scratch said.
> Nana rose, holding knitting in her gnarled hand. A long scarf with shifting patterns trailed from two golden needles to the wooden floor. In the yarn Scratch could make out the images of four people, three tall, one short, traipsing through a tree-thick wood.
“Now that we’ve all eaten,” Nana declared with a satisfied grin, “I should go take care of your friends. It seems as though I have a great deal of mending to do.”
Chapter Fifteen
“He’ll be okay, right?” Scratch asked, watching Nana disappear behind a closed door. “James. She’s not going to hurt him?”
“No.” Vel fell back against the couch and closed his swollen eyes. “She’ll help him. For now.”
“For now?”
“She has his name.” Brella took another scone—it must have been her third—and chomped into it. She wasn’t looking at Scratch. “She knows him. And now he owes her.”
“Owes her what?”
Vel shrugged. “It varies. After she rescued me from a pack of bandits, I had to give her a phial of my blood.”
Scratch recoiled. “For what?”
He shrugged again, absently fingering the tan skin of his elbow pit. “Not sure. Time works differently with her. Maybe she’ll use it after I’m dead.”
“How old is she?”
“Time. It’s . . . weird.” He fluttered his hands around as demonstration. “I don’t think even she knows.”
Scratch ran out of questions after that, so she let her mouth fall shut, her eyes closed. She was wrecked, battle-fatigued and mentally sluggish. She wanted to sleep, but feared missing any information, any bit of truth that could get her back to her feet.
Brella cleared her throat. “Scratch, can I talk to you?”
She opened her eyes. Brella was staring at her warily, with defensiveness writ across her set jaw. “Uh, sure.”
“Alone?”
Vel scowled. “I’m comfortable. And I’m sad. You can go elsewhere.”
“Fine. We’ll go to the lavender room.”
“Where is—oh.” As Scratch spoke, a new door appeared in the far wall. Or maybe it had been there all along and she hadn’t noticed it before. Actually, come to think of it, she had seen it before. In fact, it was the first thing she had noticed about the room: a wooden door decorated with a painted sprig of lavender. And, gods, it was beautiful.
“Oh,” she cried. “Of course. The lavender room.”
Brella’s melancholy cracked, letting a smile shine through. “You’ll get used to that. You can only find things in here you know about. But once you know, it feels like—”
“A treat.”
“Yes, Scratch. A treat.” Her smile broadened, then fell. “Come on.”
Scratch practically skipped toward the door, flinging it open and tumbling into a much larger room than should exist in a cottage. The air inside had a sleepy, perfumy smell. Four windows opened to lavender fields, stretching off in lilac waves toward the horizon. A massive bed with purple dressing took up the majority of the space, with two towering side tables against the head and a trunk big enough for Scratch to lie in at the foot.
“I forgot there weren’t chairs in here.” Brella glared at the bed like it had wronged her. “Scratch, do you need a leg up?”
As it turned out, she didn’t need a leg up, but her ascent wasn’t exactly graceful, and she face-planted into a mound of lavender pillows.
“Why is it so big in here?”
Brella lifted a shoulder. She had managed to hoist herself up cleanly and was now lying against a neat stack of cushions. She was roughly twice Scratch’s size, but even Brella looked like a doll in this bed. She stared at her feet.
“Not all of the fair folk are the same scale.”
“So are you saying . . .” Scratch peered over the side. “Giants?”
“Try not to look so delighted.”
“Why not?” She fell back against the pillows, sinking into the soft plushness. “It’s delightful.”
“Of course it is. It’s meant to be.” Brella pursed her lips. “You saw what she did with your name. She’s kind, as kind as she can be for what she is, but she needs to eat. She would love to keep you here forever.”
Scratch sat bolt upright. “She’d eat me?”
To her horror, Brella didn’t respond with an immediate No. “Not exactly,” she said instead, after a pause that went on far too long. “Not your body, anyway. More like your spirit. The rest of your life. Your potential.” She smoothed her apron. “You see why we can’t stay here long.”
Scratch stifled the urge to fling herself out the window. “Just until James is healed.”
“Yes. Nana’s told us she’ll have a way to avoid people coming after you. I have an idea but . . .” She gazed out at the swaying lavender. “She’ll know best.”
“Sure.”
They sat in silence, two tiny figures on a giant’s bed, under the nowhere-ish eyes of hundreds of lavender stalks.
“I should . . .” Brella tugged at a braid. “I should apologize to you.”
Scratch stilled, the tantalizing prospect of answers dancing before her. “For what?”
“For coming apart like that. It wasn’t fair for you to have to, um,” she winced, “care for me.”
Heat licked at Scratch’s cheeks. “It was fine.”
“It wasn’t. I’m supposed to be guiding you. I know the woods better. I shouldn’t have left you alone like that.”
“You didn’t leave me alone.”
“Of course I did.” She pulled a frayed thread at the corner of her apron. “I know I was unreachable. When I was . . . crying, I mean. If you needed me for anything.”
“But I didn’t.” Scratch reached out, laying a hand on Brella’s. She took it as a victory that Brella didn’t flinch away. “You saved us. You and Vel, calling Nana. And if you hadn’t gotten Hester—”
“Hester.” She licked her teeth. “That was his name? The man I killed?”
“Yes.” It wasn’t worth telling Brella how mediocre Hester had been, how mean and petty, even as early as the Academy. He was still a person. That was the rub of it. No matter who you killed, no matter how antithetical to your needs their living was, they were always people. “Hester. And, Brella, of course you felt . . . bad.” Brella was right: soldiers really weren’t poets. “This was your first kill.”
Brella snatched her hand back, face paling. “My first?”
“Maybe your only one. I just, I mean that we’re on a rescue mission to get Frances. We don’t know what we’ll run into. You might have to—but hopefully not.” The last bit of color drained from Brella’s face. “This could be it. One and done.”
A line of tension appeared by the corner of her mouth. “One and done?”
“I don’t mean—” She cursed herself. “I just mean that everyone’s first kill is difficult. When I had my first—”
“How many people have you killed, Scratch?”
The question hit with the abruptness of a blast of sunlight. Her eyes stung, angry tears gathering that she dared not spill.
“I . . . I don’t know.”
“You don’t—”
“A lot, okay? I’ve been in the King’s Guard for years. I’ve killed people.”
Brella’s nostrils flared. “You don’t know how many?”
“Fine,” she said, her own voice muted in her ears, like she was speaking from the fuzzy, algae-coated floor of a lagoon. “You want to know how many? I’ll tell you. From the most recent one, today. Before, at least four in the Western Wilds. One because she struck at James and was winding up for a second attack. She had a flail. Weapons like that cause so much chaos on a battlefield. It’s possible—likely, even—she killed some of her own. One came at me with a spear. I took him under the ribs. It was a clean kill. Another I knocked off her horse and I’m certain she was trampled. And I say at least four because I wounded three more. One was close to fatal, but the other two didn’t fare particularly well, either. I don’t know what became o
f them, but it’s highly unlikely that all three survived. Before the Wilds, I killed an assassin that sneaked into the King’s quarters. He had been hired by a mad earl. I stuck him in the back as he lifted his dagger to the King’s throat. Then, in Kyria, I was fighting with a battalion in our second wave. I was at the battle of Killjean, when—”
“Enough,” Brella rasped. “Enough.”
“I didn’t enjoy it, if that’s what you think.” Believe me, please believe me. “Being a soldier is not just killing people.”
“Then what is it?”
“It’s . . .” What was it? An organizational purpose for a child born in chaos? A prism for the unfocused light of a mind that burned and burned?
“It’s figuring out how to leave a battle with the fewest losses possible.” That was true. That was true. “It’s strategizing so that we do only the necessary violence to achieve our goals. It’s teaching a group of individuals to fight as one. It’s—” She choked as a lump rose in her throat. “It’s mattering. It’s doing something that matters.”
Scratch knew that unless she performed a miracle, she would never get back to the Guard. But here, in this absurdly large bed, she understood what never going back meant. That her mind, so quick and deliberate, so specialized to her work, would go unused. That, most likely, whatever she did next would be something new, and that she probably wouldn’t be particularly good at it.
“You’ve killed a lot of people.” Brella’s voice was dull.
“I . . .” She took a deep breath, then let it out. “Yes. I don’t like to. And the first one was—”
“I don’t need to hear about it.”
Brella finally looked at her. There was something in her eyes, something off. With a sickening lurch, Scratch knew, with uncomplicated certainty, that what she saw threaded through that amber gaze was disappointment.
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