Chapter 15
Graz
T he troll, the orcess and I don’t speak much as we ride for the port, where the same boat I arrived on is waiting to take us back to the city. But I do manage to pry an explanation out of the troll, Kal'zan.
Gusak sent his minions to tail me the moment I left Kalishagg, suspecting I’d lied to him. At least they didn’t get their hands on Vienne. There’s one that small sliver of light in everything that’s happened. I despise her, and hate viciously what she’s done, but when I picture her small, tanned face and big blue eyes, I’m overwhelmed by how much I miss her. How I would have loved to stay in that cavern forever, buried in her exquisite cunt, before she ruined everything.
Despite that, I have to keep Gusak away from her.
This is all really the worst possible outcome. I’ve lost my mate, I’ve lost the pool of magic, and I’ve lost my freedom. Everything is gone in a blink, and I had no choice in the matter.
I have very little will left by the time we reach Kalishagg. I don’t need to be tied up to follow my two captors back to my shop, then down the elevator to the hideout. Kugara gives me a pitying look as we pass her.
I wonder if this is her fault, too. Perhaps she cracked and told Gusak about the map.
We descend the steps, the way lit by torches reflecting off the multicolored crystals that shoot out from every surface. Usually I see this place as home, but now it might be my tomb if Gusak thinks I’ve betrayed him.
At last we reach Gusak’s level, and I’m led to his personal rooms. The troll and the orcess deposit me on a chair, tying my arms down to it, then stand at either doorway until Gusak joins us.
He does not look as angry as I’d expected when he slips into the room then shuts the door firmly behind him. In fact, there’s a hint of a smile pulling at his lip as he strides in. And, oddly, there are a pair of glasses perched atop his nose, which I’ve never seen before.
The boss doesn’t wear glasses, does he?
“Ah, my errant mechanic.” He unties the cloak over his shoulders and lays it over the back of a chair before sitting down across from me. “Going off on his little adventures.”
I screw up my lips. How much does he know? How deep is the shit I’m in? I swallow roughly.
“What did you find out?” the boss says, leaning forward and propping his elbows on his knees. “I know you’re investigating some map that Kugara found—and erroneously gave to you instead of giving it to me.”
Fuck. She told him, just like I thought. Death could very well be in the cards for me now.
At least he hasn’t come across the bag of magic I’ve hidden among my old parts. But there’s no point in lying to Gusak about what I found, not after he already suspects me. He’ll see right through it, and then my punishment will be even greater.
“I’m sorry,” I begin, but Gusak waves a hand at me dismissively.
“You know I detest a liar in my ranks, bookworm.”
I shrivel in my seat. I remember how furious he was when Lo’zar double-crossed him by stealing the human woman, Rimi. Gusak was ready to kill anyone who was involved, and I barely scraped by. If he finds out I helped them, he might tear my limbs off one by one while I’m still alive to serve as a warning to others.
Then what would happen to Vienne? Have we bonded deeply enough that it would take her life, too?
“But I’m giving you a slim, slim pass this time,” Gusak continues. “Because I am very interested in what you’ve discovered—and what it means for the clan.”
“What I’ve discovered...?” I wonder if he knows just how much I’ve hidden from him.
Gusak snickers. “Agna told me about your suspicious little pendant. And that whole mountain you brought down with you.” He stoops and fishes in my shirt for the pendant, then withdraws it. “I know you’re after something, something you’ve been keeping secret, and I wonder why.”
I shudder. “Because it’s dangerous. It could do an incredible amount of damage in the wrong hands, as you saw.”
Gusak arches a brow as he studies the glowing vial. “And you don’t trust me with it, I assume.”
I bite my lip, unsure of how to answer. I only managed to scrape by the skin of my teeth when Gusak questioned me about Lo’zar escaping onto a ship with his stolen human.
“You’re right, I don’t,” I say at last. “But it’s not about you!” I add hastily. “I... I don’t trust anyone not to do something terrible with it.”
“Hmm.” Gusak studies me. “But you are the exception?”
I suppose I have used magic for my own selfish ends. Multiple times. I almost blush remembering it.
“So what’s inside the necklace?” Gusak prompts when I don’t answer. “Do I have to dangle you over the alligator pit?”
I shudder. He’ll do whatever he has to do to get the truth out of me, and I know that if he tried to tear off my fingernails or break my limbs, I wouldn’t last.
Swallowing hard, I close my eyes as I say the words. “It’s magic.”
The room is silent, and when I finally dare to look up at Gusak again, his face is colored with genuine surprise.
“Magic? Real magic? The kind in old fairy tales?”
I bite my lip and nod. Perhaps I am a mite grateful that Vienne destroyed that pool of magic we found, because that’s one less chance for Gusak to retrace my steps and uncover it for himself.
The boss hums and scratches his chin. “Magic. I’d say you’re trying to pull the wool over my eyes, but that would be stupid of you, wouldn’t it? And you’re not stupid, bookworm.”
“I try not to be.”
The boss drops forward so we’re closer to eye level. “What else can it do?” he asks.
I lick my lips, wishing I didn’t have to answer this. But if I get dropped into a pit full of alligators, who knows what would happen to Vienne?
“It can do anything you want.” I feel sick as I say it, as I reveal this dangerous information to an orc like Gusak. “I still haven’t found a limit, though I am suspicious of trying certain things. I once summoned Izzy from a great distance, and he hasn’t been the same since.” My lizard is still a little rattled by it, acting confused and wandering into objects in his way—but he’s getting better. “And it has a time limit. What you create with it doesn’t last forever.”
“I understand. You think you are doing the world a service by keeping it secret.”
Uncertainly, I nod.
“You would even lie to me,” Gusak goes on, “believing it’s the right thing to do, and put yourself at extreme risk.”
My anxiety is thrumming, my blood rushing too fast as I contemplate my punishment.
“Who else knows about this?” Gusak asks me.
I know how my boss feels about humans. He locked one in a cage and sold her like an exotic animal. If I tell him about Vienne, who knows what he’ll do to me?
“Don’t lie,” Gusak warns. “You’re terrible at hiding it, and you need all your fingers if you want to keep turning wrenches.”
I shut my eyes. I hope Vienne got far away. I hope she’s hidden deep in human territory again, where she’s safe.
“The only other one who knows is... a human.” I don’t know what she plans to do with the magic she gathered in her water skin, but it’s not outside the realm of possibility that she’ll do exactly what I feared and hand it over to the human king. “She was with me. She’s seen what it can do.”
Gusak’s eyes narrow as he leans farther forward. “You shared this secret with a human, but not with me?”
“Nothing like that. She discovered it on her own. And... she destroyed it. One of the locations we found, anyway.”
It looks like I’ve actually taken my boss by surprise. “She’s the one who blew up the mountain?”
Great. I’m going to have to reveal much more than I’d hoped if I want to keep all my body parts attached to me.
“It’s a long story.”
* * *
Vienne
The city is bustling, as always, but this time I’m separate from them, no longer a part of the mass of swirling bodies. I’ve seen the dark insides of the world, and I’ve done things I can never take back.
I’ll never be able to undo what Graz and I discovered in that cavern, or what I did after it.
The first thing I do is wander back to my own apartment, then fall face-first onto my bed. It feels like I don’t get back up for eons. I know I need to move quickly to get to the last location, but I would almost rather that the earth swallow me up.
After bathing, eating, sleeping, and wallowing for a while longer, I know what I have to do.
I wander deep into the city, toward the archive. The door is locked, as always, and I have to wait quite a while for Mom to come and answer it.
She squints in the sunlight, then urges me to enter.
“What did you find?” she asks, before anything else. It’s easy to see where I get it from.
“I did it.” I exhale a breath I’ve been holding for the last two weeks of traveling. “We found—I mean, I found the ruin in the Stoneteeth. Right where you thought it would be.”
She doesn’t appear surprised by this. “What did you do with it?”
“The magic? I took some and destroyed the rest.”
“Ah.” Mom nods in understanding. “Good.”
She gives me an approving smile, like that’s another matter resolved. It helps that she agrees with my decision, but I still feel a sinking sensation in my belly when I think about turning all that magic black.
“The whole mountain came down with it, though.”
Mom squints at me. “Explain.”
When we’ve settled at her desk, I tell her about finding the cavern, leaving out that Graz met me there and pretending I did it alone. I wish I’d drawn the carvings we found to show it to her, but I do my best to describe it, scribbling out what I remember onto a piece of paper.
“Hmm.” She rises from her chair and, without a word, heads down into one of the darkened shelves. A few minutes later, she returns with a book I’ve seen before—back when I was a little girl.
“What’s that?”
Returning to her chair, she opens the book to one of the many notes stuck inside the pages.
“A story. A legend. A children’s tale.” She flips to an illustration, and sets it out in front of me.
It’s a simple watercolor painting of a human woman with long, flowing hair, and a blue trollkin with rings in his ears and a stripe of mane. He holds her around the waist with one arm while she has both hands raised in the air. A beam of bright light emanates from her palms, aimed across the page.
On the other side, below the peak where the two stand together, is a monstrosity.
“It’s one of the worms!” I peer closer at the illustration. “Just like in the carving we saw. One of the ancient worms from the desert.”
Mom arches a brow at me, then continues patiently. “They lived all over the world.” The beam of light is aimed right at the beast, which towers above the two small mortals many times over. “Their caves still run through many hills and mountains. And this worm in particular...”—she taps the page—“is Riggamora, the greatest of them all, and the most destructive.”
I squint at it. “This is a fairy tale, Mom.”
“Yes, one that originates on the other continent. They still believe in magic there, you know.” She gives me a look like I should be aware of all this already. “The evidence exists that Riggamora was, in fact, real. When your father was headed there across the ocean...”
This is an ugly memory for both of us, but she continues on valiantly.
“...it was because he had heard of places where great battles were fought, places where this Riggamora had eaten the very earth, intent on destroying us.”
I stare at her. “Dad was after this ?”
Mom nods slowly, saying nothing.
I’d always known he was pursuing the truth of ancient secrets, that the past had called him across the ocean and the ocean had seen fit to take his life. But I didn’t know he was merely chasing myths when he died.
Unable to contain my curiosity, I flip the page in the book. The next illustration shows Riggamora, now a corpse, with humans and trollkin assembled around it.
“Once upon a time, we defeated him,” Mom says, caressing the edge of the page with a faraway look in her eyes. She’s not thinking about the here and now so much as my father. “What you found may have been a record of that battle. A battle that required one human and one trollkin to protect all of us.”
Could those carvings we found have truly depicted a real event?
“And you said you were there by yourself?” Mom asks, doubt in her voice. “The door was simply open?”
I should know by now that I can’t hide things from my own mother. She’s too smart to believe it was just sitting there waiting to be found.
Collapsing in the chair across from her, I suddenly feel so tired.
“He was there. The orc from before, from the swamp.” I clutch my pack close, gripping onto it like a lifeline as I cut the wound open again. “He was... he was sick. Really sick.”
I don’t know how else to explain what I found. Mom listens silently, nodding her head for me to continue.
“His eyes were purple, and it was like he’d been asleep there for days.” I shudder, remembering how his belongings had been scattered everywhere by animals. “We don’t know how long.”
“We?” Mom echoes.
I rub my cheek surreptitiously. “I woke him up, but I’m not sure how. He was almost delusional.” Then I decide I should tell her the whole truth so that perhaps, she can help me decode it. “I was sick, too.”
She cocks her head. “The same thing?”
“I felt woozy. Strange. Everything was tinted purple, almost like the magic was taking over my body.”
Mom sits back abruptly in her chair, brows creased with worry.
“I felt better almost immediately after I found Graz,” I tell her. “It just... went away. And then we found a door. When we both touched it, it opened.”
She hums thoughtfully. “Again, it required both of you.”
“There’s more, though.” I can’t believe I’m about to tell my own mother what I did. No one was supposed to ever find out, but I want to make sense of it, too. I want to know what happened. I want to share my burden with someone, and if anyone will listen to me and understand me... it’s her.
Mom leans forward on her desk. “I’m listening.”
* * *
When I finish my story, which was utterly humiliating to recount, she’s deep in thought. I don’t interrupt her. She rises after a time and meanders into the stacks, and I wait patiently until she returns with a rather small, ragged book. She sets it down on the desk between us.
I lean forward to read the title: Trollkin and Their Strange Habits . My face heats.
“I read about this phenomenon some years ago,” Mom says, tapping her fingers on the desk. “How trollkin can mate for life, imprinting on one another so deeply that it can sometimes have painful, even deadly, side effects.”
“What? Side effects?” Squinting at the little book, I pick it up.
“Go home, Vienne. Take it with you.”
She’s letting me remove a book from the archives? It’s so unlike her to let anything this old out of her sight that I’m immediately suspicious.
“I think you have some things to learn.” She waves me off with a hand.
There’s something comforting in my mother giving me orders, so I agree without complaint, tucking the book into my bag as I hurry out the door.