Chapter 3 #2
I followed him to the inn’s front door, desperately suppressing the urge to unfold the cloak again to check if all six blades were still really, really in there.
If one of them slipped out, it would drop to the ground, I firmly reminded myself with every step.
I’d hear the clatter. There was no clatter, which meant I was still safe.
All the same, my chest felt a little too tight for my lungs.
My guardian pushed the inn’s front gate open as if it belonged to his own home, stepping into the candle-lit hall beyond before turning to hold the door for me. Inside the room, a woman’s voice started, ‘Ancelet! What’s been taking you so—’
Then I slipped in after him, and she abruptly went silent.
The main hall of the Ash and Elm was just as I remembered it, a low, smoky room, a fireplace at the centre and a handful of tables around it.
Worn fur rugs on the stamped earthen floor.
Wooden barrels in the corner. No decoration but a familiar wreath of ash branches on the wall – Seidrinn loyalists indeed, a reckless display that would have landed them in a cell if any fireborn had ever been around in this rusty backwater village to lay eyes on it.
The room was much quieter now than when I’d been here with Lark.
Worse … without Lark’s shadow to hide in, every pair of eyes in attendance was aimed straight at me.
‘Oh,’ the woman who’d spoken before said, a little choked now. ‘Oh, dear.’
Shit.
How bad did I look, exactly?
‘Evening, all.’ The necromancer smoothly filled the silence from behind me, and that was an even greater shock – because that greeting came out in a tone I could only describe as … mists take me, as cordial?
Gone was the sharp sneer in his words, that edge as biting as midwinter frost. Instead, his voice was suddenly brimming with equal parts apology and amusement – the result charming, rueful, and just a fraction sheepish, the sort of voice one couldn’t possibly hold a grudge against.
‘Night, more like,’ someone grumbled affably by the fire.
He laughed. He fucking laughed. ‘Yes, begging your pardon for the late return. I picked up a stray cat along the way, and, well …’
‘Oh, dear,’ the sturdy woman in the back of the room repeated, rising to her feet with the thunk of a mug hitting a table.
She was tall and tanned, with arms that looked as though she knew her way around an axe and greying blonde hair that she wore half-loose, half-braided.
‘Where did you— Or, no, don’t tell us anything we shouldn’t know.
I’ll get her something clean to wear. And a comb. ’
‘Maybe a piece of soap, too,’ the necromancer suggested, not even looking my way as he stepped past me. ‘Thank you, Hedda. Don’t know what I’d do without you.’
‘Sweet-talk your way into someone else’s home, no doubt,’ she shot back, levelling an amicable glare at him of the sort that suggested the axe was still an option.
It was much too familiar, that look. As if she didn’t even see the hell-cursed horns on his head.
‘I’ll bring everything to your room. Please don’t let the girl touch the blankets before she’s had a wash. ’
‘We’ve kept your fire going,’ a dark-skinned, grizzly-bearded man added from the nearest table as Hedda hurried out.
His face I recognised more easily than I liked – the innkeeper who had thrown Lark’s generous tip back onto our table and looked as if he’d wanted to spit on it. ‘I know you don’t like the cold.’
The necromancer’s shoulders slumped a fraction – as if that was a genuine relief. ‘Please remind me to compensate you for the wood.’
I expected another of those about-to-spit expressions, but all that slid over the innkeeper’s weathered face was a mirthless grin. ‘Wood is the one thing we have a-plenty around here, your lordship.’
A shrug. ‘I quite insist.’
‘Ah.’ There was a small silence, a short and wordless discussion caught in a back and forth of pointed glances. The innkeeper was the first to avert his gaze, corded shoulders sagging. ‘Thank you in that case, Ancelet.’
Only then did the name land.
Ancelet Averre.
Who did exist, undeniably. Who was about the right age, even, to be the tall man who’d just dragged me out of a prison cell in rather spectacular fashion – late twenties, some cousin of the royal line, checking all the boxes.
The problem was that Ancelet Averre was currently staying with House Garnot as a diplomatic emissary to King Varraulis.
I was sure of it. I was very, very sure of it, because Aranc had been spitting nails at the news that his two rival kings were strengthening ties after the enmity of the last few years – the sort of fury that was a rare occurrence even for Estien’s short-tempered king.
Too little time had gone by since that outburst for this to make sense.
Unless Ancelet had died, returned, lost an eye, and travelled hundreds of miles in the span of twenty days at most, it simply wasn’t possible for him to be here.
Which meant this man was lying to people who treated him like friends.
I’d been awake for too long. The web of lies and half-lies was starting to cause a splitting headache.
‘Thraga.’ Far too late did I become aware of his voice; he must have spoken my name at least twice before. ‘Come with me, will you?’
I could hardly refuse.
A stray cat, he’d called me, and I certainly felt like some feral creature dropped in the middle of a scene of civilisation as I wordlessly followed him to the other side of the room, unable to meet the curious glances of the other guests.
Anger tended to come easily to me. Charm did not.
I was comfortable with knives in my hands, not with a pitcher of beer at a table, and this situation did not seem to call for violence – which meant there was little I could think of doing except shuffling after not-Ancelet and hoping they would all stop thinking of me the moment I stepped out of sight.
He ushered me into the corridor that led to the back half of the inn, exchanging some last amiable remarks with the innkeeper and another man before meticulously closing the door behind him.
The smile slid off his face in the same moment, and that was a more disconcerting sight than the fire that had spilled from his fingertips in Svein’s Creek – the abruptness of that transition, as if a mask had been yanked off his face in between one eyeblink and the next.
All he said was a curt, ‘My room.’
I clutched the cloak with my knives in it to my chest as I stumbled after him, dizzy with hunger and exhaustion.
I shouldn’t be setting foot in his room, of course, clothed or no.
Lark would be beside himself if he heard how much danger I’d put myself into.
But I’d been promised warmth and soap, and my ability to resist that lure was shrinking with the heartbeat – and hell, if all ended well, Lark would never need to hear the most reckless details.
Just one more secret to keep.
I’d simply forget this entire night had ever happened.
His room wasn’t the one in which Lark and I had slept all those years ago.
One small blessing, at least. Lark had asked for the largest room at the time, but clearly that request had been ignored with most of his others: this one was significantly more spacious, with a broad bed, a table and two chairs, and a fireplace currently filled with pulsing, glowing embers.
Two travel bags stood in a corner; a notebook and a map lay on the table.
There was little more to be seen in the way of personal belongings – nothing from which I could easily determine who this man might be, if not Ancelet Averre.
Hedda had clearly already been here. A washtub of warm water stood by the hearth, with a small pile of clothes and a comb next to it.
‘There’s a mirror under that blanket there,’ the necromancer said from the doorway. ‘I’ll go get some food.’
He was gone before I could reply.
I dropped his cloak to the ground, managing only with the greatest of efforts to keep myself from following its example.
Six knives, still there. I knelt and sorted them by size, because it helped soothe my mind, then sank down onto the floor anyway, because for a moment the thought of standing was too daunting to face.
The room was very, very warm.
I closed my eyes and breathed in that heat, felt eight days’ worth of icy shivers ever so slowly sink from every fibre of me.
I know you don’t like the cold, the innkeeper had said.
Which made sense, because fireborn couldn’t use magic without warmth – it was the whole damn reason they kept drawing up the fire from what had been Seidrinn’s sleeping volcanoes before their arrival.
And, admittedly, they were keeping the island from freezing over …
but I’d worked for Aranc long enough to know the powers were not an unwelcome side effect at all.
All of which the owners of the Ash and Elm ought to know. And yet they’d gone out of their way to keep this fire going.
So were they … friends?
Don’t mention Bjarte. Don’t mention Svein’s Creek at all.
One-sided friends, then?
I wasn’t made for intrigue. Lark would have made sense of this, no doubt, because Lark had navigated the intricacies of Estien’s court as if he had never done anything else in his life, as if he hadn’t been born and raised on a humble cabbage farm – but he wasn’t here, and without him watching my back, I’d probably be talked straight into some deadly fireborn scheme within days.
Something to look forward to.
I groaned and made myself get up. Not-Ancelet could be back at any moment, and I’d be damned if I let the bastard help me.
A blanket hung over a copper frame on the other side of the room. I pulled it off to uncover the mirror beneath – yellowish and not perfectly smooth, but clear enough to recognise the walking, breathing corpse staring back at me.
Oh dear, Hedda had said.
In hindsight, that had been quite an understatement.
There had never been much of me – my build not so much slender as sinewy, nothing but bone, muscle and scars left after years lived in the service of survival.
Now, after Lark’s death and a week of prison meals …
a stray cat, the necromancer had said, and hell, I did look like the bastard had pulled me from a gutter somewhere.
Gaunt cheeks, hollow eyes. Mud in the white-blonde tangles of my hair.
Hay on my bloodstained tunic and trousers; my wrists red and chafed, my eyes red and bleary.
If I hadn’t still been standing, one could have been excused for believing me three days deceased.
This wasn’t even what Kjell had called rock bottom. This was reaching rock bottom, then digging a grave in it.
I kicked off my boots and began to peel away every grimy, sweaty layer of clothing.
My socks were so dirty I didn’t even dare to throw them onto the fire for fear of poisoning the air I breathed.
My trousers could have stood on their own, stiff with dirt as they were.
I took off everything but my undershirt, washed as quickly and thoroughly as I could with that still on me, then unfolded the clothes Hedda had found for me and made sure I would be able to cover my shoulder again.
Only after that confirmation did I strip off the last piece of clothing, leaving on nothing but the small vial of blood around my neck – revealing the rune mark I’d been born with, that glaring evidence of the forbidden powers I wielded.
Three stark white lines on pale skin. Thorn.
I swallowed, glanced at the closed door of the room, and shot into the soft, clean tunic I’d been given as a replacement.
Five minutes later I was fully dressed and as clean as I was going to be without a bath, my hair mostly untangled, the mud mostly gone. The Averre necromancer hadn’t returned yet, and I figured that was as good as permission to take a closer look at his belongings.
It seemed smart. It was what Lark would have done.
The map was of the sort they sold in every bigger town around Estien, nothing of use to be seen on it.
The notebook contained strings of names I didn’t know and lists of villages I did know but couldn’t pinpoint as particularly interesting.
Two, three shirts hung over the back of one of the chairs, of good quality but not as excessively luxurious as the garments worn at court, and in the pockets—
My fingers bumped against something small and hard and cold.
A ring.
A signet ring.
Voices sounded somewhere, miles and ages away. I no longer cared about voices. I scrabbled for that little piece of metal with shaking hands, turning it frantically in my palm to see the symbol engraved in it …
A sun.
I froze.
A circle surrounded by eight curving rays – an undeniable, unmistakable sun, and my mouth went dry as I stared at it.
The crest of House Averre was a dragon, because of course the bastards couldn’t forego any chance to remind us all of their mythical forebears, and it was that symbol I’d seen over and over again on the clothes of their members, the banners of their vassals.
The sun, on the other hand, was a personal emblem.
King Varraulis’s personal emblem, to be used only by him and his next of kin – siblings, wife, children.
From his age, the man who called himself Ancelet Averre must belong to that last category.
Three sons. Two of them alive, last I heard of them. But then there was the third, the youngest, who had died a sudden and mysterious death four or five years ago—
The voices were suddenly close.
I jerked to my feet just in time to see the door swing open.
And there he stood, tall and knife-like – black curls just a fraction tousled, dark linen shirt loose around his slender frame.
A last ghost of a smile lay on his lips.
As if he’d been in the process of switching out the mask between one conversation partner and the next, and suddenly that made sense, suddenly everything made sense …
‘Durlain Averre,’ I said hoarsely.
He blinked.
Then closed the door behind him, without looking around, without taking that piercing one-eyed gaze off me for even a moment, and coldly said, ‘That was quick.’