by Wendy Palmer
'Because I doubted you would fall for it,’ said Jarrett. He unsheathed his swords. ‘Come now, Trick, be sensible.'
Trick's hands burned and the red pulses made his eyes water. He let Jarrett come closer. His only chance now was to ensure the firestorm took the DarkElf too.
'You wished for a cleaner death, didn't you?'
Trick caught his breath. He had muttered those words in the stable of the Port Told barracks, with only the boy who looked like Mouse to hear. ‘That was you?'
'It's easiest to take on the aspect of someone you've met. The flaws are less obvious that way.’ Jarrett leant forward and set the tip of his sword to Trick's throat. ‘I didn't think you'd find the real boy, but that didn't help you, did it?'
Trick stared at him. ‘But why?'
'Why tell your cousin where to find you? Why watch you to make sure you wouldn't run before I wanted you to?'
Trick nodded, mute. He had collapsed when he had tried to leave Mizzle at the barracks, and he had blamed her silently for months. Now Jarrett admitted to it with no shame and no regret, just like he confirmed he had helped Avenir take Mouse from his master. Trick had known that already, and had expected guilt at what was done in Mikcul's service. That Jarrett had showed none should have warned him.
Jarrett went on. ‘How else could I get Mizzle to trust a DarkElf?'
'That didn't help you, did it?’ He could mock him, with the sword pricking his throat and the stone burning his fingers.
'Fool,’ said Jarrett, with a vicious smile that showed all his teeth. ‘I meant you.'
He was at sea. ‘I'm not a—'
'I raised you, Trick. Don't tell me what you're not.'
Trick was stunned silent again. Jarrett poked him gently with the sword and he felt blood bead on his throat.
'You use DarkElf magic and think like I do. What do you think that makes you? I gave you the potion we give all DarkElf sons.’ He poked him again, harder. ‘You think you know only a few words of DarkElvish, of Ancient? Look deeper, boy. You think your memory is natural? You think you're just guessing what other people are thinking? Did you really think the males are defenceless against the female glamour?'
Jarrett reached for the stone and Trick did not try to stop him.
'I was worried,’ Jarrett said, ‘when you fell in with that Mermaid's family. I thought the boy and his sister might turn you back. But the Cult took care of that, didn't they?'
The DarkStone went incandescent red in Trick's hands. He had a moment of satisfaction when Jarrett recoiled and then the light faded away and neither of them was dead.
He got another breath. Mizzle stood in the doorway, both swords to hand. She had found them where he had thrown them. That was no matter—he had not meant to hide them from her, but to stop himself from using them on her.
She strode towards them with swords in her hands and swords in her eyes. She had saved them both from the stone and he did not know why.
Jarrett turned to face her and struck at her with his swords. She dropped backwards to avoid the blades, landing on her fists and kicking both feet up into Jarrett's face.
He reeled back into Trick while Mizzle flipped back to her feet.
Without a pause, she ran at Jarrett. He parried a few blows, the clash of the swords ringing out while Trick got out of their path.
Then Jarrett gave way and fled to the other side of the hall, cried out a DarkElvish word Trick had never heard before, and vanished.
'He crossed.’ Mizzle spun and marched to where Trick sat.
He still held the stone, cold and dead now. Mizzle stood over him. He waited, head bowed, expecting to die at her hand at last. He did not want it differently, no matter how it might shake her confidence in herself and her control.
She took the DarkStone from his hand.
Still he waited but again he was surprised to find he yet lived.
She sat beside him and bent her body to her knees.
She was using the stone to make herself safe for him, he surmised. That was no good thing.
'Just kill me, Mizzle,’ he said, and meant it.
'I do not think it punishment enough,’ she said, her voice muffled in her knees.
He heard that touch of humour in the smoke-and-mirrors voice. She might have taken the energy he and Jarrett had created to take the edge off her killing temper, but she was not using the stone the way he had feared. She sat up again and looked at him from the edges of her eyes.
'Sparrow woke me and apologised. He said he realised you had told him you were going because you knew he would tell me. He was very sorry he had baited your trap for you.'
'I bet he was,’ said Trick, without remorse.
'I said you had this idea of re-joining your wife, and I would help you.’ Trick shifted but she went on. ‘Sparrow said, it is not Linnet. He said you have always been like this.'
That shocked him. ‘I haven't.'
She shrugged, that human gesture. ‘He said it is more obvious since the Dragon took her.'
He had nothing to say to that and turned away.
Mizzle said, ‘Murchuri does not mean you are obligated to me because I saved your life. It means I am responsible for your life, because I saved it.'
He was shocked again, staring at her in open-mouthed disbelief. ‘It is a LightElf concept,’ she explained, with that edge to her voice. ‘I do struggle with it.'
He turned away from that. ‘Where did Jarrett go?'
'He crossed,’ she said again.
That place on the other side of the grey In-Between. ‘But you said he can't come back without a bridge.'
'Then he has one.’ Mizzle made her swords shrink. ‘This is how he was dogging me and serving Mikcul at the same time.'
He had never wondered how Jarrett was travelling in Bourchia while supposedly under guard with Mikcul in Livania. He had been more stupid than he had suspected.
'You knew him?’ She made it less than a question.
'I knew him.’ He hesitated. His first clear memory was a foul taste in his mouth and Jarrett taking a glass from him. That had been the potion that turned him into a DarkElf in human form. Jarrett had raised him and taught him his customs and his language and his magic and he had never noticed. He turned from the thought. ‘He worked on the pirate ship I was born on. But he went over the side during a storm. I thought he was dead.'
Mizzle nodded but said nothing.
The words fell out of Trick. ‘He always said he had lived among humans who had cared for him when he was a child and lost, and he rejected DarkElvish ways because of it.'
'He lied,’ Mizzle said. ‘The DarkElves rejected him because of his taint.'
Jarrett had urged Mizzle to turn the DarkStone on her pursuers. ‘Do you think he wanted the stone to take revenge on them?'
'Perhaps,’ she said, looking down at it. She tucked it away, and stood.
He remembered Jarrett coming to them for the first time. They had discussed the stone then, and he had assumed Mizzle had trusted him enough to share her secret with him. But her lack of surprise now spoke of a corresponding lack of trust. ‘Why did you tell him you had it?'
'I did not,’ she said and walked away.
He suspected her of lying, and dismissed it. She hadn't, if she said she hadn't. Jarrett had already known. He watched her as she looked over the charred body of Zircon and went to the door.
Mizzle didn't like Jarrett when she didn't use the stone, he realised suddenly, thinking of all their interactions. And she thought clear and straight when she wasn't fouling herself with the strings and tethers the stone forced on her as payment.
And she was far more dangerous to deal with, when she turned silver eyes back towards him, impatient. He got up, levering himself past a ripping pain in his stomach.
She waited for him and caught his wrist when he tried to go past. She peeled back his shirt and they both looked down at the bloody weeping wound. ‘I had not finished healing it,’ she said. ‘Fool.'
All this time, her magic had been turned on him to heal him, not to ensnare him. And he got off lightly if all he got was a single word and a refusal to heal him again. He could not believe that was all.
Skye was tethered outside. Trick stepped over the bodies of two dead cultists, the ones who had captured him. ‘Found her?'
'She came back to the Keep.'
'How did you find me?'
'I have used the stone and it calls to me.’ She nodded back inside. ‘One of you was very angry.'
'We both were. She was the First Priestess of the Cult.’ He did not know if she had guessed enough to know what that meant to him.
'If she had known how to use it, she could have levelled the forest.'
He shuddered. Mizzle mounted Skye and set her off at a walk. He trailed after the horse, limping a little from the pain in his stomach. Only when Mizzle turned in the saddle and looked back at the hall with a frown, did he remember the child Zircon had threatened him with.
Chapter Fifteen
Jacoby watches as Kintore fastens his cloak and shoulders his pack. He looks around the room once before his gaze falls on her. He steps close and puts his hands on her shoulders.
'You will convince a DarkElf father for the child?'
'I will.'
'I wish—'
'If wishes,’ she says, and shrugs. ‘Too many horses, yes?'
He holds her then and lets her go. ‘Be calm.’ He draws one of his daggers. ‘Take this,’ he says. ‘Give it to him so he knows his father.'
Jacoby accepts it. ‘'Tore,’ she says. ‘Why did you tend to me after those men attacked?'
Kintore frowns. ‘I felt it was right.'
'And when one of them attacked me with iron?'
'It was right,’ he says again.
'But you did not kill him though you wanted to.'
'It—was not right.'
'And you told me the secret of the iron because it was right.'
Kintore nods. Jacoby touches her fingertips to his face. ‘I will teach him as you have taught me, hiruko.'
Kintore bows. ‘Fare well, Jacoby.'
She returns it, deeply. ‘Fare well, Kintore OneEyed.'
* * * *
'I hear weeping,’ Mizzle said. She made no move back towards the hall, just looked over her shoulder as if awaiting attack.
'She spoke of a child,’ Trick told her. He limped back.
After a moment Mizzle followed him. ‘Hers?'
'I don't think so.’ He thought back to exactly what Zircon had said, and remembered again where the gift of his memory came from. ‘It seems to be a bargaining chip.’ His voice sounded normal and he was glad of it. How much had she heard? Did she know what he was? She had not questioned the gaps in his story about Jarrett. Had she filled them in herself from her eavesdropping or had she failed to see them at all?
All was still in the hall, the bare earthen floor hiding nothing. Trick wondered if he had failed to notice a door behind which a child sat crying quietly, but Mizzle led the way to the wooden dais.
'Under here,’ she said, and he thought he could hear it, a soft edge-of-hearing cry, floating ghost-like from the steps.
Trick walked up the stairs and shoved aside the overturned throne, with a wrench that tore his side again. He let himself wince. With his back to Mizzle, she would not know.
A trapdoor lay underneath, with a ladder leading down.
He was dizzy now but did not question that it would be him to climb down. His feet searched out every rung before his hands dared moved. At last he reached the ground again and stood, still holding the ladder, trying not to sway with Mizzle's silver gaze beaming on him from above.
This storage area under the dais was dim and hazed with the golden lamplight falling through cracks in the boards above. Dust shone all about him and he walked through it, towards the soft whimpering.
The child, sturdy, fair-haired, perhaps two years old, sat hunched under the low angled ceiling of the stairs.
Trick bent down. ‘You're safe, come out.'
The boy did not move. Trick got down on his knees and crawled in after him. The boy immediately started screaming, a high-pitched drilling sound that cut straight into Trick's brain. He made a grab for the boy's shirt and got a kick in his face for his trouble.
Trick retreated. He could return to Mizzle empty-handed and tell her a toddler had overcome him. Perhaps she would charm him out, or perhaps she would decide to leave him to starve. Or perhaps she would decide to leave no live enemies behind her.
He crawled in again, and this time grabbed the foot that kicked at him. He hauled the boy out by the legs, swung him upright, and carried the screaming struggling bundle back to the ladder.
Trying to climb the ladder was another matter altogether. He got only one rung off the floor before his dizziness and the weight of the child threatened to drop him down again.
Mizzle leant down and whisked the child up. The screaming stopped. Trick stood on the bottommost rung, chilled and shaking, and looked up.
Mizzle looked down. ‘This is embarrassing,’ he said. ‘I can't climb up.'
She considered leaving him there, he saw it in her eyes, or thought he did. She had chased him all the way out here to refrain from killing him, and here an easy way presented itself.
He thought he was dreaming when she offered down her hand, but he took it, cold and dry in his clammy grasp. She helped him, one slow rung at a time, and he collapsed on the wood of the dais, sweating and exhausted, next to the boy.
She had killed the child, he saw without alarm, and then realised it slept. He rolled over and looked at her where she knelt next to him.
'Did you care for him?’ The question slipped out of him, seeing a bleakness about her that hadn't been there before.
'Jarrett?’ she said. ‘Not in the way a human would.'
His own question had surprised him. That she answered it surprised him even more. And her ambiguous answer—if he had expected anything, it was a flat denial.
He gave her his theory. ‘It was the stone,’ he said. ‘I think it entangled your judgement of him.'
Mizzle considered him and something crossed her face, fleeting, and too alien for him to recognise. ‘That could be so,’ she said. ‘It would fit, certainly.’ She stood. ‘Can you walk?'
He got up, picked up the sleeping boy—such a blessing Mizzle's small magic could be—and went down the stairs before the dizziness got him again. Mizzle took the boy off him and took him by the hand, while the world went dark and lamplit by turns.
He came back to himself standing outside the hall, with Mizzle settling the boy into Skye's back. She held him there with one hand, and the other slipped around Trick's waist and helped him walk.
Her body was cold where it pressed against him and he shivered and wished she would not touch him.
The stars were not enough to light his way and he must perforce rely on her to lead him through the trackless Wyvern Forest.
She had come at great risk to find him. This far in, LightElves watched the ways.
Lanerol could order her arrest when they returned, for breaking an unspoken curfew.
She had been a fool for him, her rage and need for revenge sending her out. He had only been Lucky that she had found another to vent herself on. And Lucky her self-control was good in any case. But she had gone quiet and grim so maybe she did use the stone again.
They came to a stream, and Mizzle made him kneel and take his shirt off while Skye nuzzled at the fresh cold water. He washed the wound in his side, turning the water murky with his blood. The coldness of the water turned the throb in his side to a sharper pain and he welcomed it.
Something glinted at the bottom of the stream. Without thinking, he tipped forward and plunged his whole arm in. Only Mizzle's grab for him stopped him toppling in, but he came back up with a sword in his hand.
'A LightElf weapon,’ said Mizzle. She reached her hand out to take it from him but stopped. ‘It has iron in it.
'
Her voice held a hint of disbelief. Then she did take it, frowning, and examined it closely.
'Perhaps they had the same idea,’ said Trick. ‘Of acclimating themselves to iron.'
'Perhaps,’ she said. ‘But then, they are further along than us, for we must still use only silver in our weapons.'
He hesitated. ‘That LightElf.’ His gaze involuntarily went to her hand, where the LightElf sword had cut her. ‘She didn't have iron in her blade, did she?'
He had to think not, since Mizzle had not been so badly hurt. And she confirmed it with a shake of her head. ‘But why throw it away?'
She got up abruptly, and offered it back to him. ‘Keep it,’ she said. ‘We left yours behind.'
He took it, and as he did so, a wave of warmth went through him, centred on his hurt side. He looked down and saw the wound knitted together once again.
Trick met her cool silver gaze.
She said nothing, so he said nothing.
* * * *
They rode into Kiara some time past midnight, Mizzle carrying the still-sleeping child on Skye and Trick walking beside her.
The gatekeeper seemed to know who they were, opening the postern gate without demur.
Sparrow waited for them in the Keep courtyard, shadowed and anxious.
Trick got one silent, grateful embrace from his friend. Sparrow had to be just as surprised as he himself that he lived. ‘Lanerol wants to see you.'
Trick would bet he did.
Mizzle slid off Skye, holding the boy, and Sparrow took the reins. ‘In the hall.’ His voice was failing him and he wasn't looking at them. Lanerol had to be angry.
He was, sitting behind his plain table with only the oil lamp beside him lit.
They crossed the hall in darkness to reach his pool of light while he waited with his face like stone.
'You shouldn't have come back,’ he said. ‘Not breach the LightElves borders and then come back and expect more from me.'
Mizzle laid the sleeping child on the desk. Lanerol flicked a glance at his face and back to Mizzle. And back again, dragged as if by weights. He stared at the child for a very long time.