27. Chapter 27
Chapter 27
N o one wanting to waste any time, we have Dryden do a couple more check-ups on Nimueh as we let Alaric take us somewhere more suitable for a meeting.
It’s this grand hall he takes us to, a large table with dozens of chairs dominating the space.
“Did you ever spend any time here?” I hear Raven ask as we take our seats.
He raises his eyebrows. “In this room?” he asks, sounding a little deflective. “Not really.”
“I meant in the home in general.”
He clears his throat in discomfort and looks around. “Should we bring out some more food?” he asks, directing the question to no one in particular. “The old lady seems to have a pretty healthy appetite.”
It’s at that very moment that Dryden joins us with Nimueh.
“Why don’t we have the meeting first?” Nuala suggests when she spots them.
She’s impatient. So am I. And so is everyone else.
“So, everyone,” she starts as soon as they take their seats as well, “it seems we have an entirely new objective — to have Nimueh here help us find the sword Anna used to kill Baldur the last time he waged war.”
Nimueh lets out a clear, joyful chuckle. “You won’t be able to find it, no.”
“What do you mean?” Jaeger demands, her eyebrows pulling down.
“Freya did manage to use it to dismember Baldur, but she destroyed it in the process.”
“Is that correct?” Nuala turns to ask me, everyone else’s eyes fixing on me as well.
I think for a second. “I believe it is.”
“There’s no doubt about it,” Nimueh says. “Trust me. I was the one who forged it. I feel its absence in my very bones.”
“So what do we do then?” Dryden asks, frowning. “Was this for nothing after all?”
“It would be,” Nimueh says with a shrug, “if it weren’t for the fact I can forge you a new one.”
De Groot throws her a flat glare. “You couldn’t have led with that?”
“Do you think you can do it here ?” Nuala asks.
Nimueh shakes her head. “It doesn’t matter where I am.”
“There’s a forge within the castle,” Alaric chimes in. “I think we still have iron and all the tools in there.”
Nimueh shakes her head again, but she sounds a little mischievous when she says, “I can assure you, young vampire, you may have all the tools , but you don’t have any of the materials .”
I register everyone around me getting impatient, so I throw her a look. “Nimueh,” I warn gently.
She raises her eyebrows at me. “Apologies,” she then says with a chuckle. “Spending hundreds of years in that place seems to have rendered me a little insufferable.” She glances around the table. “But it’s just such a joy, being part of a conversation again.” She looks up and away, that spark in her eyes again. “I’ve always wondered why it is that we were made to have to connect with each other in such a way that resulted in the evolution of language.”
She looks down to meet our eyes again. I sense everyone getting even more impatient, but I don’t have the heart to interrupt her. “Don’t you find it odd,” she continues excitedly, “that we have organs we use to blow air out of our mouths and produce images in our minds?”
Silence. Her eyebrows shooting up, she throws us a toothy grin. “No one?”
“Right now,” de Groot drawls, “all I want is for you to use them to tell us about those materials we’ll be needing so we can forge the sword and be done with it.”
Nimueh’s smile turns a little more serious. “You might not be able to make such swift work of it.”
“Let us take care of that,” Nuala suggests.
Nodding, Nimueh turns dead serious, for the first time since we found her truly looking like the woman I once knew — a focused, driven badass. “Alright,” she clips out. “You want the sword? The metal is at the Academy. Go get it.”
There’s a murmur around the table.
“Where at the Academy?” Jaeger lends to ask. “How do we identify it?”
“It’s Aesir iron. It’s the only kind of metal out there that can kill a god. Out of all of us here, only I can identify it, by feeling. So there’s not much I can tell you except… it looks, smells and feels like iron.”
“Of course that’s all you can tell us,” Lorcan quips with a scoff.
Nimueh ignores him. “As for the exact location, I wouldn’t know. I had someone I knew hide the rest of it there, the Academy being such a heavily protected place. But the person who hid it is long dead by now.”
Taking a deep breath first, I say, “We’ll find it.”
I look around, finding Lorcan staring at me. “Really? You’ll find some nondescript scrap of metal in a place as enormous, complex and magical as the Academy, all while being under siege by the most dangerous man alive?” He lets out a dragged-out sigh. “This is turning out not to be the most efficient course of action to pursue, Anna. I’d like you all to forget about the cuckoo quest and focus on the options that are already available to us.”
“Would you?” Nuala demands with a bite to her words.
“Yes, I would, Emberlord,” he tells her, “unless you’d like to chip in and actually lead this the way it’s supposed to be led?”
There’s a moment of shocked silence before Nuala squeezes a single word out of her mouth. “Out.”
Lorcan frowns. “You can’t be serious.”
“I want you out of here, Lorcan, right now.”
He remains seated for a moment, looking around in search of support. When he doesn’t find it, he grits his teeth, gets up and storms out of the hall.
“Now,” Nuala says as soon as he’s gone, “do we all agree that going on this quest is our best course of action right now?”
“It’s been thirty five years,” Jaeger says, “and this is the first we’re hearing of something that could actually kill him.”
Everyone seems to agree.
“Then let’s do it,” Nuala concludes. Then, with butthurt hesitation, she adds, “It’s just that, Lorcan does have a point.”
And that couldn’t be more correct, but… “I might have a plan that would both take care of Cain and buy us enough time,” I say.