by Aaron Pogue
For a moment, Corin couldn’t breathe. He struggled to put words around some answer to the accusation—Jane’s actions today would almost certainly bring harsh consequences to poor Mary, for one—but some treacherous corner of his mind agreed with Avery. The Nimble Fingers weren’t the only bystanders he’d endangered, nor were these two. What of Auric and Sera? What of Kellen? What of Aemilia who’d paid for Corin’s recklessness with her life?
He clenched his fists and fought the stinging tears that sprang to his eyes. His voice came out harsher than he truly meant it to. “I only strive to undo the wrong your people failed to answer. With scant resources, information, or worthy allies, how much can you ask of me? Every war has casualties.”
“And I will not be one this time.”
Corin clenched his jaw. “We can’t afford to stand here arguing. I do hope you’ll change your mind. I will to head to southwest Raentz. I have some friends among the druids there. If you reconsider, if you choose to help me end Ephitel’s reign, then the persecution of your people will die with him. I leave that to you.”
He turned away, but Jane caught his elbow. “How do you plan to travel?” she asked quietly.
He didn’t answer. Avery was right. He hadn’t thought that far ahead.
Avery raised his voice. “What she means to say is, will you disappear again for months and leave the Nimble Fingers to crumble?”
The elf knew some measure of the flaw in Oberon’s strange power. That did explain how Jane had so easily understood his concern with time before. Now, it only reminded him of his limitations. He didn’t dare sacrifice the time, nor did he know if stepping through the dream might paint as clear a target on him for Jessamine as it had for the druid Council before.
Corin looked back over his shoulder. “No. But I cannot fight Jessamine in her seat of power. Spread the word among the Nimble Fingers. If she asks where I have gone, tell her the truth. I’ve fled the Godlands altogether and taken refuge with the druids.”
Avery smiled, cold and condemning. “So you will spare the Nimble Fingers and sacrifice the druids instead?”
“They are better prepared to deal with her,” he said. “But no. I mean to disappear where she can’t find me. I’ll gather my resources there, then lay a trap that Ephitel cannot ignore. Alone, if I must.”
“And if she finds you first?”
“I’ll kill her, or I’ll pay for all my sins,” Corin said. “Either way, some justice will be done.”
Sympathy and disbelief shone in Jane’s eyes at those words, but Avery only showed approval. “That is as it should be.”
Corin licked his lips. “I wish we had met under better terms this time. We could have done much good together, if you would call me friend.”
“Perhaps. But you are not my friend. You have become another tragedy in a life beset by them.” He almost turned away, but then he bowed his head. “I hope you succeed. Kill Jessamine and Ephitel, and I will call you friend.”
“That’s no small task.”
The elf shrugged. “They’re no small sins that you must atone for. Go in peace, manling, and Fortune favor.”
He turned his back on Corin then, though Jane still lingered. She came closer, worry creasing her brow. “You shouldn’t leave on such terms as these.”
Corin shook his head. “I killed his closest friend and endangered the woman he loves. He will not soon forgive those things.”
Her eyes widened when Corin mentioned the elf’s feelings for her, and a soft red blush touched her ivory cheeks. “You still owe me a great many secrets. I have done my part.”
“You have. But I would ask another favor of you yet. Help him discover what became of Kellen. I have only guesswork and conjecture, but he deserves to know the truth of it.”
She frowned, thinking hard. “How does that serve you?”
“It doesn’t,” Corin said. “It is for his sake alone. But he deserves that much of peace.”
“And you deserve your vengeance,” Jane said softly. “And we all deserve freedom from the monsters you defy. If I can sway his heart in any way, I’ll send him after you.”
Corin blinked, remembering how fiercely Sera had defied him. He glanced toward the stiff-backed elf five paces off. “You don’t fear losing him?”
“I have never had him. And I don’t think I ever will until the man who killed his sister faces justice. Then he’ll at last decide whether he will drift off into Faerie or embrace a life here. With me.”
Those last words came out in a rush. She blinked against the tears that threatened in her eyes, then leaned forward to brush a kiss on Corin’s cheek.
Behind her, Avery cleared his throat meaningfully. “Keep safe,” she whispered, fervent. “And cling to hope. We aren’t finished yet.”
Then she went to Avery, who never once glanced back at Corin. Instead, he took Jane’s hand and pulled her gently away down the path toward the Piazza Dei. Corin watched them go, watched the light of Jane’s only lantern bob away into the distance. The darkness that engulfed him seemed the perfect echo of the one that filled his thoughts.
Rejected by both Avery and Kellen. He’d lost the druids’ aid, failed to win the elves, and couldn’t make himself ask more of the Nimble Fingers. For all of Jane’s kind words, he couldn’t find a shred of hope that Avery might forgive him. He was alone. Ever since he’d met Aemilia, he’d planned to gather allies to stand against the gods. And now, for all his efforts, he was more alone than ever.
But there was no time to consider it. He was not half a block from the place where Jane had tried to cook the justicar, and they’d left tracks enough to point her to this cellar. He had to move. Relying on his memory and touch, he turned south—away from Jane and Avery—and set off through the pitch-black catacombs searching for an exit.
Though Corin didn’t know the catacombs here in Aerome, he’d spent much of his childhood exploring Aepoli’s. Drowning there in total darkness, ancient instincts surged up to his rescue. He advanced down the tunnel path in a stuttering half step, almost like a dance, tracing the path ahead with a searching toe and then testing the footing with his heel before he shifted his whole weight onto it. And then again with the other foot.
As he went, he trailed the fingertips of his left hand against the wall. He had to shift up and down around the cavities of ossuaries, and when he passed an opening of any sort—a side tunnel or a stairway to the surface, or even a natural pocket on the limestone bed beneath the city—a quiet dread always settled over him until his fingers found the wall again.
But at those passageways he found hope too. He’d almost forgotten all about them, until his fingers touched the notches chipped from stone just before the first stairs up. A crude triangle told him to avoid the stairs. Keep going.
These were not the intricate designs of the Nimble Fingers’ secret language. These were the markings made by desperate urchins. But in their way, they were just as useful. Here they told him that the stairway led to a locked door; there they warned of a vigilant guard on the building’s cellars. The worst were those that indicated there were hungry guard dogs waiting for a careless intruder.
Every exit from the catacombs was marked. Corin passed by the ones that promised a sympathetic almer or hot meals for the hungry. Generosity toward a starving child wouldn’t necessarily extend to a grown man appearing unexpectedly from the dark.
Still, in a city vast and ancient as Aerome, it didn’t take him long to find three vertical strokes. Then he turned aside and left the catacombs for a long-forgotten cellar in what turned out to be a wholly abandoned building. He strained his ears at every step, but there was no one waiting for him as he emerged into the light. He climbed old stairs that creaked frighteningly beneath each step, then crossed a corridor, littered with the detritus of several seasons, to an open door that looked out into an empty stable yard. He lurked in the shadows of the doorway for a while, thinking.
How was he going to fight Ephitel without the elves? The pirates? No. His name d
id hold some fame, but pirates were straightforward souls. They sailed for profit, not for pride or noble purpose. They’d scatter at the first sign of danger, and he needed a more reliable and sustained plan to draw out Ephitel.
That didn’t leave him much. He thought of the farmboy—pure charisma dressed up like an adventurer of old—but even a living hero wouldn’t be enough without an army at his back.
The druids, though . . . they might be enough. Ephitel had expressed his hatred for them when he’d come for Aemilia. They were no mighty power, but they held all the secrets of this world. They would not lightly forgive Corin’s last act toward them, but they could not easily reject him either. They needed him almost as much as he needed them.
Yes. The druids were his only answer. And his best shot at finding them would also lead him to the farmboy. But he would have to take great care in his travel plans. Justicars were masterful thief-catchers, even without Jessamine’s strange sense for anomalies.
But Corin was himself a masterful thief. He’d spent his whole life practicing that kind of care, and he had new tricks to aid him now. Before he left the doorway, he dressed himself in the glamour of some northern farmer. Then he picked his way down to the docks and convinced a friendly captain to grant him passage all the way to Marzelle, where he claimed to have family.
Corin disappeared that night when the ship put in at Ginoe for supplies. After all, if she asked enough questions of the harbormaster, Jessamine could be waiting for him at the docks there in Marzelle.
Nor did he stay the night in Ginoe. He wove a different glamour, stole a horse, and headed north along the highway. He rode hard, and before dawn he crossed the border into Raentz.
The horse began to falter after sunrise, and Corin had no wish to slow his journey. So he changed his disguise again and stole another horse—and with it, this time, a loaf of bread and four winter-stunted apples. Then he chose a course that took him wide of Marzelle, and pressed hard west, racing the sun.
Even so, he was riding yet another horse beneath the silver light of the moon before he reached territory he recognized. A dark foreboding fell upon him as he neared the little village where he’d fled from Jessamine. He dismounted and left the road to pass Taurb by. He led the horse between two rows of corn; then at the far end, he followed a split-log fence most of a mile to the cart path that led west to Auric’s place.
He should not have been surprised to find it dark, but he was. As he approached the gate to the farmboy’s property, he strained his eyes for some light from the farmhouse, but there was none. That should have been encouraging. After all, he’d warned Auric to get away; the farmboy was much safer gone.
Even so, a dark disquiet hung over him as he passed through the gate. He’d gone halfway up the path before the cause struck him: There was light from the direction of the farmhouse. Starlight.
There was no structure to interrupt the far horizon. For a while he convinced himself this was some nervous fear, that the footpath was longer than he’d remembered, but then his boot struck the cracked stone step that had marked the threshold. There to his right he made out the tall, spindly statue of the stone chimney standing all alone.
He had to strain his eyes to pick out the charred timbers, the littered remnants of a burned-down home. He knelt and felt with his fingertips the raw, exposed edges of the stone foundation.
The house was gone. He could not believe this was some accident. Had Jessamine done this? Had she found them? Or had it been the villagers when they’d learned about Corin’s antics? It could not have been too hard for them to figure out where he had come from.
Cursing himself for being seven kinds of fool, he sprinted back along the path and scrambled up into the saddle of the rundown animal. Corin hauled its reins back around to set the horse and himself on the path and kicked the beast up to a gallop.
He dashed straight to the tavern’s door and leaped down from the saddle. He’d long since lost the mental discipline to hold his glamour, but he no longer cared. He dashed through the door into the common room and bellowed, “Jacob! Where’s that blasted innkeeper? Jacob Gossler! Come out here!”
This time of night in a little village tavern, Corin would have expected the modest common room to be packed with tired farmhands resting from a long day’s work. Instead, it was mostly empty, and those few who had come out tonight were gathered in small clusters, heads huddled together and the hoods of their cloaks pulled up despite the early spring warmth.
Some of those hoods swiveled his way when Corin started shouting, but none lingered long. No one showed his face, and no one answered Corin’s bellow. He watched the door to the kitchen, and a balding, skinny man did peek through the gap, but it was not the proprietor Corin had spoken with before.
Then a quiet voice spoke from a dark corner. “You won’t find him here.”
Corin turned that way, searching, and he found the thin, clinging mist of a glamour roiling around the man who sat alone there. A man he recognized. Corin threw another gaze around the common room, but no one wanted to be seen noticing anything unusual. That suited Corin well enough. He settled his cloak around his shoulders and went to join the druid in the corner.
“What have you done with him?” Corin asked.
Jeff arched an eyebrow. “Which one? The innkeeper? Nothing. He left on his own.”
“And the farmboy?”
“We’ve relocated him somewhere safe.”
Corin shook his head. “It isn’t safe enough. Jessamine is hunting the princess now. She knows they’re involved. We need to move them outside the Godlands altogether.”
“Think so?” There was a hint of laughter in the druid’s tone, though it didn’t touch his eyes. “And where would you suggest?”
“The Wildlands,” Corin said.
Surprise raised both the druid’s eyebrows this time, but Corin leaned forward, intense. “It’s better than anything you can offer. I know it’s dangerous, but that should work against whoever they send against him too. And he has experience there. I’ll go with him, and together we can work out what to do next.”
Jeff leaned back, lacing his fingers behind his head. “You think the druids are prepared to listen to your advice?”
“I think that if they don’t, they’re going to lose this war.”
Jeff sighed, and his shoulders slumped. “They don’t yet want a war. They’re furious that you’ve provoked a justicar—”
“Call her by her name,” Corin snapped. “She’s one of yours, after all. And now she’s murdering the Nimble Fingers.”
“I’d heard. I’m sorry.”
“So am I, but that doesn’t stop her. We have to end this.”
“And you have a plan?”
Corin hesitated. He didn’t have a full plan. Not yet. He’d been patching something together ever since his confrontation with Avery, but now that Jeff had asked him right out . . .
“Aye,” Corin said, and in his mind all the pieces fell into place. “Aye. We’ll fortify some blighted hole in the Wildlands, and then we’ll let her find us. I’ve already laid the start for that.”
“You think we can defeat her?”
“Any one of us alone, no. Kellen couldn’t take her, and neither could a firebomb. But with the druids’ aid? With the farmboy’s heroism? Sure. We will end her reign of terror, and then we’ll hang her corpse out as a lure for Ephitel.”
Jeff pulled back at that. “He’ll come in force.”
“Let him try,” Corin said. “There are mountain passes in the Wildlands that a dozen men could hold against an army. And there are monsters there who’d harry any force they sent against us. We could hold, and eventually Ephitel will tire of waiting for his vengeance, and he’ll come against us in person.”
“He has a nation full of soldiers to hurl against you. How can you believe he’d be so foolish as to come in person?”
“Because it’s exactly what I’d do. What I’ve been doing. And that much we both have in common. This
is personal, and he will not wait long for satisfaction.”
“You’re sure of it?”
“I’m sure.”
“And then you will behead him with Godslayer?”
Corin dropped his eyes. The sword. Where was the sword? Jessamine was searching for it, so Ben was still at large. But where? Corin had hoped the innkeeper could at least tell him whether Ben had ever been through here.
“What do you know about the innkeeper?” Corin asked. “You said I wouldn’t find him here.”
“I was referring to . . . to the farmboy. But no, you won’t find the innkeeper—or half the locals who lived in this town two months ago.”
“Why?”
“Jessamine came here. After she lost track of you in the Isle of Mists, she came back here. She was much the worse for wear—”
“That was Kellen’s doing,” Corin interrupted.
Jeff nodded. “—and angry for it. She took that anger out on the townsfolk here, but they couldn’t help her any. Auric and Sera were already six days gone by then, and we’d tracked down everyone who knew anything significant and convinced them to leave town for a little while. That notion caught on among the others too, and most of them have made it a good long while. No one wants to live in a town that’s angered the gods.”
“She’s moved on,” Corin said. “She’s working on the Nimble Fingers now.”
“And when she’s done with them, she’ll come for the druids,” Jeff said dismissively.
Corin blinked. “You’ve already heard?”
“Heard what?”
“The druids. You said she’d come for the druids now.”
Jeff stared at Corin for a while, saying nothing, then nodded in sudden understanding. “You told them to point her our way.”
“Aye. I thought you could handle it. Better than the Nimble Fingers, anyway, and—”
“No,” Jeff said, raising his hands. “No, you were right. The Council won’t see it that way, but I don’t feel inclined to tell them. It would have happened eventually, regardless, and this way probably saves some lives.”