Chapter 12
Two more corners up Bycross’s road—and a dizzying series of turns back into the cliff’s interior—brought Fern, Astryx, and Zyll to the Oathmaiden’s preferred restaurant.
When they arrived, Fern drew up short. She’d expected something more . . . plain. Honestly, she wouldn’t have been surprised to discover that Astryx’s favorite haunt was a wagon that sold dried jerky out the back.
Nothing could have been further from the truth.
The restaurant was a stone-fey establishment with its own private balcony, featuring a narrow wedge of the unobstructed sky outside.
Inside, a sharp contrast of intricate shadow and firelight.
Long, tasseled cushions served as seats, and tiny candles twinkled everywhere in tin cups perforated with delicate patterns.
The carpeting of Tareben’s bookshop was decisively outdone here by extravagant floor coverings and soft ceiling draperies that hid the bare stone Bycross was hewn from.
The cuisine was one Fern had never had occasion to try in the sleepy coastal town of Murk.
Vast, shallow pans heaped with fragrantly spiced rice, peppers, cured meats, and mushrooms passed steaming before them to low tables of diners scattered around the place.
Charred flatbreads arrived alongside them folded into padded mitts.
To their right, in the open kitchen, a cookfire blazed within a huge, white brick stove capped with iron cooking grates sizzling with kebabs and roasting capsicum.
The whole place had the feel of a desert prince’s opulent pavilion in an ancient tale of the Westlands across the sea.
Fern’s face flushed with the delicious sense of slipping into a story that you know welcomes you.
The staff recognized Astryx at once and ushered them to a table set back from the window and in heavy shadow stippled with candleglow.
With surprisingly gentle attention, the elf flipped Zyll’s hood back and made sure she was seated comfortably. For her part, the goblin bounced on the cushion and grinned. After a thoughtful moment and a significant look, Astryx slipped her hands inside the cloak and unbound the goblin’s wrists.
Fern barely marked Astryx ordering for them all, instead gazing around at the murmuring figures, listening to the frizzle of platters, the clink of dishware, the rustle of silk. She felt dreamily, profoundly outside of herself.
“So, Varine the Pale’s sad end.” The Oathmaiden recaptured Fern’s attention, gesturing toward the satchel in the bookseller’s lap. The elf didn’t smile much, but one definitely threatened now.
“Oh!” The rattkin blinked. “Well, this was twenty years ago now, in Murk. You know it?”
“Few places in the Territory I don’t these days,” replied Astryx genially.
“Yeah . . . I guess that would make sense,” said Fern. “Anyway, it all started when my friend Viv stepped into my shop for the first time. Stumbled is more like it, really.”
“The same Viv you’ve been writing apologies to?”
“That’s the one. You’d like her. Big girl, fond of swords. She saved my life in more ways than one.”
Their food arrived, hissing in the pan and interrupting the telling.
Between hot mouthfuls of delicious food wrapped in flatbread and swallows of dry white wine, Fern warmed to her story.
She felt present. Clearheaded. Sharp-witted.
She felt like herself.
“And then Satchel lunges up out of the page”—Fern demonstrated with both paws, clutching at an imaginary necromancer’s throat—“grabs Varine by the arm, and starts dragging her down, into the book, hand over hand.”
Caught up in her narration, she spared a glance for Astryx, startled to find the elf hunched forward, elbows on her knees, expression rapt.
She looked so much younger. So present.
But after a life immersed in stories, Fern knew what a mistimed pause could do to the best of them, so she plunged onward.
“Viv seizes the opportunity and draws her sword, hauling back—”
“Blackblood,” Astryx corrected softly.
“Blackblood, yes, but even as she’s about to put an end to Varine while she’s still struggling, the White Lady is already casting something nasty with her free hand.”
“Luffing shunks,” whispered Zyll through a mouthful of flatbread, spewing crumbs all over the table.
“Then Potroast comes sailing in”—Fern arced a hand through the air—“and digs his beak into her other arm, and Varine screams. While she’s off-balance, Satchel keeps pulling her in, down, down into the book, up to the shoulder, and then her head vanishes into the black . . . and the scream goes silent.”
Fern thrummed with the retelling to the tips of her tail and whiskers. She felt the silence of the room as a physical thing, a weird impression of power in abeyance.
“It doesn’t make any sense to look at as Satchel drags her inside. Even now, I can’t picture it properly because the dimensions don’t match, though she’s still disappearing inch by inch into the book. But Potroast won’t let go and then he’s dragged in, too.”
Tears quivered at the corners of Fern’s eyes as she relived that agonizing moment when she thought she’d lost her little man forever—magnified now by the distance between them.
She planted both paws on the table and stood, leaning forward, glancing between the faces of her spellbound audience, dimly aware that neighboring tables were listening in as well.
Into the hush, she resumed. “Viv doesn’t hesitate. She tosses Blackblood aside and lunges for the book, and she jams her arm in up to the shoulder. And the longest ten seconds of my life begin.”
She released a shuddering breath.
“But after what seems like forever, when Viv’s arm emerges, she’s got Potroast by the scruff of the neck, hooting and gasping, and they tumble back to the floor together.
She wastes no time, though, scrambling to her feet, grabbing the book, and slamming it shut, putting all her weight on it.
The book bangs, almost knocking her off.
Varine is not going to go quietly. She’s doing her absolute best to smash her way out, desperate to live, or whatever it is she calls her existence. ”
She surprised herself with the savageness of her own voice, hammering a paw onto the table to punctuate every escape attempt.
Even Astryx jumped a little at the first impact.
“Again. And again. And again. But weaker each time, until finally . . . finally there’s nothing. And still, Viv waits.”
“But what about—” began Astryx, but Fern talked over her interruption, heedless and consumed with the power of the recollection.
“And suddenly, all the bones in the room—the lectern, the ones caging Gallina and me—drop at once in a cloud of bone dust. Viv yells, ‘I have to get him out!’ and tears through the pages of the book until she finds the one Varine vanished into and sits there on her knees staring into the black of it. Will the necromancer emerge? Will Satchel? Will anything?”
Zyll’s mouth hung open, full of teeth and half-chewed food.
Astryx’s hands were clutched into bloodless fists.
“Then bony fingers crawl up from the page, and Satchel drags himself into the world again. Viv grabs the book, slams it onto a table, seizes Blackblood, and rams it through the cover and the table both until the steel hits the floor.” Fern gathered her hands together and plunged them downward in a final, decisive thrust.
“A terrible wail pours out of the dying book. I can feel it in my tail to this day. And that,” she finished, “was the end of Varine.”
She stood there in the ensuing silence, candlelight feathering her fur, hands clasped on the hilt of an imaginary blade.
Then the energy rushed out of her all at once, and she slumped back onto her cushion.
“Fuck me. I don’t think I’ve ever told the story that way before.”
It was as though the telling had knocked all the rust off her memories, and she’d lived them again. She leaned back on her paws, panting, eyes locked on Astryx, who stared back just as intensely.
There was a glimmer in the elf’s face. Of recognition? Or longing? Maybe both?
Then the Oathmaiden’s eyes shifted, the lines of her body came alive, and the spell was broken.
“Zyll.”
Fern followed her gaze to the cushion upon which the cloaked goblin had sat slack-jawed only moments before.
Empty of all but crumbs.
Also, all the silverware on the table appeared to be missing.