18. The Mist Thief
Chapter 18
Something struck my door, rattling the hinges. I jolted up in my bed, positioned to reach for the small paring knife I’d taken from one of the meal trays sent to my room. To remain unarmed as I slept never settled well. Even back home, I kept a blade nearby.
The door didn’t rattle again, but raised voices filled the corridor.
Outside was still lost to the satin black of night. I blinked through the lingering fatigue and slipped a woolen cloak over my shoulders, peeking out into the corridor.
Jonas was strapping a dagger to his belt, but had a hooded cloak over his shoulders, speaking frantically to Sander and Von as they left the prince’s side of the chamber.
My husband glanced toward my door, catching my gaze. “Stay put,” he said.
“What’s going on?” I hugged the edge of the door. There was pain in their features.
With the way I shouted at him earlier and demanded he leave, the prince did not need to speak to me, but he strode to my side.
“Something has happened at the home of one of the guards of the palace. Some sort of illness has taken to him and his wife and caused violent delirium. We’re going to help if we can, even if it’s tending to his littles.”
Young ones. “May I come?”
“No, Skadi. I don’t know what it is, and?—”
“I could look after the littles.” I dipped back into the room and returned with one of the only fae tales I had, a thick book with bright paintings on the pages. “I could keep them distracted.”
“I don’t want you getting ill.”
“I’ll stay back. I . . . please, I want to help.”
I did want to help. There was a soft place in my soul I kept for young ones who might be frightened and alone. But another piece of me yearned for a chance to show my new clan I was not a creature who wanted to bring them harm.
Jonas closed his eyes with a sigh. “All right. But if I say to return to the palace, you must return.”
“Agreed.”
Jonas roused Dorsan, insistent my guard could keep watch over my back while the prince aided the ill household.
The longhouse was situated on the edge of the palace grounds, tucked between tall aspens with pens for hogs and goats. It was a fine estate and proof of the generosity of the royal house to those they trusted.
Folk in night shifts, some darkly clad guards, and men and women with baskets filled with vials and pouches, were scattered throughout the yard. Fires roared, burning linens and stuffed toys.
All gods. What sort of illness was this?
“Skadi.” Jonas brushed his knuckles along my arm. “The littles are there.”
Three young ones sat beside a stack of damp straw, a small hound pup in the tallest child’s arms. Thin blankets wrapped their shoulders, their feet were bare, and matching golden hair was on end.
A woman in a blue cloak crouched, urging the children to take something from a vial.
“Stay back?” Jonas asked it like a question, a request.
I nodded, clutching the book to my chest. When the prince turned toward the chaotic longhouse, unbidden, I snagged a hold of his wrist. “Take care.”
No snide comments left his tongue, there was nothing worth jesting over in a moment as this. He left me with a slight nod, accepted a cloth mask from Von, and hurried toward the longhouse.
Dorsan kept a distant but stern presence when I approached the children with a bit of nerves. The woman was urging the smallest girl to take a sip of whatever was in the glass vial. The child whimpered for her mother, and her skinny brother kept glaring at the woman like she might be intending to poison his sister.
“Silvery.” A second girl, a little older than the crying child, lifted her big eyes, pointing at me.
I touched the line of elven silver rings in my ear. Dokkalfar silver reacted to moonlight, and sparkled like gemstones. “Do you like it?”
The girl had red rimmed eyes and damp cheeks, but she nodded with a bashful smile.
I knelt beside the woman trying to aid the young ones. In a few swift motions, I removed a few of the rings and held them in my open palm. “I think they would look beautiful on you.”
The small one hiccupped and dared follow her sister’s movements as she drifted nearer to the glimmering silver.
I smiled when she bit into one of the linen blankets, sucking on the corner, but hesitantly joined her sister, watching the rings shine.
“Would you like one?”
The older girl let out a little gasp, but nodded.
“I shall make you a deal then.” I cast a look at the woman. She was not behaving cruelly with the littles, and I suspected whatever was in that vial had a touch of magic to protect the young ones against illness. “This tonic is here to help you all stay strong.”
The woman hurriedly nodded when I looked to her for confirmation.
I smiled back at the young ones. “If you will take it, I will show you how to wear elven silver. They say it has a bit of magic from the gods of the night within it. Whenever you feel alone in the dark, they will always shine brightly, reminding you that you’re not alone.”
There was suspicion in the children’s gazes when the tonic woman nudged closer. It took a bit more coercing, and a few more rings added to the trove of rewards on my palm, but soon each young one had a dose of the tonic in their bellies.
Sniffles and silent tears remained, but a few curious smiles broke out when I was careful to hook the elven silver around their curved ears. They did not have holes in their lobes, but I managed to fashion some of the rings into bracelets with long blades of grass with the promise to return with chains or twine soon.
“Thank you,” the woman whispered. “It’s an elixir to stave off fierce disease. Since we don’t know what it is, it’s the best prevention we have.”
“What are the symptoms?”
The woman glanced over her shoulder, a shudder rolling through her body. “Thrashing, and shouting. They’re delirious. Screaming in pain. It is as though something is rotting them from the inside out.”
There were toxins that could cause a mind to go rabid in the deep wood of the fading isle. I wondered if alver lands had something much the same.
“Not even Niklas has found a tonic to stop it,” the woman went on, “and he has been here since before midday.”
“Is this Niklas a healer?”
“An Elixist, the lead of the Falkyn guild, and brilliant with his mesmer.”
The Falkyn guild, the smugglers.
I looked at the longhouse. Distant shouts were there. Folk kept bringing things from inside and tossing them into the pyre. A smuggler, but it seemed the alver clans trusted him as their hope for this house.
“Meriba.” A woman raced for us, a man with a russet beard holding a bundled child in his arms at her back.
I tried not to stare, but the woman had odd eyes, green so bright they almost glowed and the dark center was sliced through like a cat’s.
“Lady Tova.”
The woman adjusted a leather satchel on her shoulder. “We’ve talked about lady, Meri. Call Bard lord all you wish, he loves a good preen, but not me. Can K?re remain with you? Boy won’t sleep without one of us lately.”
“Of course.” Meriba took the small boy from—I assumed—his father’s arms.
“We’ll be back . . . when we’re back.” The cat-eyed woman studied me for a long breath, then rushed toward the longhouse.
“Have you met Tova and Lord Bard?” the woman asked. “He’s one of the queen’s brothers.”
Gods, they were part of the royal house.
“Tova is one of the king’s Kryv. And this boy”—Meriba bounced the sleeping child who couldn’t have been more than three turns—“is the cleverest thief in the making. He’d take to your silver like these littles.”
She chuckled and settled on the grass with the young one, humming a gentle folk tune.
I drifted toward the other children. The boy was clearly the eldest, maybe around eight turns.
“You’ve been brave while caring for your sisters. What is your name?”
“Pavva.”
I opened the thick bindings on the book of fables. “Do your sisters enjoy stories, Pavva?”
He glanced at the pages, using the back of his hand to wipe beneath his nose, and nodded.
“Do you read?”
Again, the boy nodded.
“Would you like to read to them, or should I?”
Pavva hesitated, then pointed to me, and nestled beside his young sisters.
The smallest girl held up her new grass bracelet. “Wook, Pav.”
Her brother smiled and tapped the gleaming silver ring on the end, then let the girl snuggle close to his side with her damp blanket.
Once the littles were tucked close, I began to read the first fable. A tale of a poor farmer who stumbled upon the three Norns at the base of the tree of the gods. To keep him from telling other mortals how to find them, the Norns offered the traveler a gift—the opportunity to rule over every land, to have every eye turned to him until the final war of the gods.
“What the traveler forgot,” I said, a low, eerie timbre to my tone, “was the Norns are often the trickiest of the gods.”
The littles forgot to weep, they forgot to be afraid. All three had scooted closer, eyes rapt with intrigue.
“Can you guess what the truth of his reward became?”
“A king?”
“A god?”
I shook my head. “Those Norns wove their threads, changing his fate, until he became a gleaming star in the heavens. For they kept their word—every eye turned to behold him in the night sky, and he was above all the lands. It is a lesson to us all, to never think we can outsmart our own fate. The Norns do not take kindly to those who think they know better.”
I tickled the smallest girl’s chin until she giggled.
Even Pavva smiled.
“Fire.”
I startled and wheeled around. My weary husband stood five paces away. The linen mask was tugged off his chin, his hair was damp with sweat, and there was a heaviness in his gaze.
The littles greeted the prince. Jonas winked at them, but faced me again in the next breath.
“Pavva, your turn to read.”
The boy seemed to understand and took the book from my hands, ruffling through the various tales until he and his sisters settled on one.
I hugged my middle and stepped beside the prince. “Is it well now?”
Jonas dropped his chin. “No. They’ve been forced into a mesmer sleep with elixirs. It will slow the spread of whatever this disease is, but I don’t know if they will wake before we find a cure.”
One palm covered my mouth, a new ache in my heart for three young ones who did not know their world teetered on the edge of pain.
“I’ve known Teodor and Annetta since I was ten turns.”
“I am sorry.” Without thought, I slipped my fingers around his and squeezed. “They sound honorable, and I pray the gods bring them healing.”
“I hope you’re right.”
“What about the littles?”
Jonas lifted his eyes, darkened with his frightening mesmer. “Annetta’s sister lives in the province of Furen, a township on the other side of the kingdom. Word has been sent and I’ve no doubt she’ll be here by the afternoon. She and her husband are good folk; they’ll take the young ones while we care for Teo and Nettie.”
We were not a love match, but there was a sharp pain in my chest seeing the prince without the gleam of taunts in his eyes. I wanted to ease it from him, and I did not understand it.
“What do you need me to do?”
Jonas forced a smile and tilted my chin with his thumb. “Return to the palace, get some rest. There is nothing more to do.”
“I . . . if I can help you . . . I would like to.”
“Your generosity is stunning, Fire, but there is nothing. We do not know what took them, so until we do, I want you nowhere near here. Dorsan.” The prince turned away from me. “Take your lady back to the palace, please.”
My guard stepped to my side without a word.
I let my shoulders slouch when Jonas returned to the crowds near the longhouse. The woman with the tonics offered me a sad smile, as though telling me she would look after the young ones who were snickering as they read fanciful tales.
People were scattered across the palace gates and walls. Curious staff and folk who lived on the grounds, wanting to know what had become of one of their own. Dorsan kept a pace ahead of me, one hand on my arm until we reached my chamber.
“You were regal tonight, My Lady.”
“Pardon?”
Dorsan remained stiff and stalwart. “Your actions to assist where you could, to provide comfort—even to young subjects—is what a leader ought to do.”
He closed my door, leaving me aghast. Dokkalfar never acknowledged my position as heir to the shadow elven throne. They were too busy being leery.
I stripped the cloak from my shoulders, sweaty though I had done nothing more than tend to heartbroken littles, and went to the window. My thoughts were with three children I’d just met and a prince who tried to conceal his pain, but the shadows of his magic always gave him up.
A few clock rounds ago, I told Jonas Eriksson I did not want to be more than our duty. As he said after the negotiation, hearts were not part of this agreement, yet I could not help but feel the weight of worry. How long would he remain out there, clearing out a house, risking his own health with whatever wretched disease had taken an innocent man and woman?
A sliver of dawn was rising in the distance by the time I forced my body to climb back into the bed, tuck under the quilts, and close my eyes. When my cheek pressed against the down pillow, a rough scratch of parchment rubbed against my skin.
My heart stopped. Another wax sealed missive with my name was laid over my pillow. It had not been there when I left the room.
Fingers shaking, I tore the seal.
My blood froze with each word.
They will blame you for this night, and what is to come with the dawn. It is the only way to get you free of here and back to those who understand exactly what you are.
Look for me when he falls.