Chapter 17
“So, you just absconded in the night, huh?”
“I was drunk. It was an accident, Breadlee.” Fern’s paw clenched tight around the knife’s handle, which she supposed was sort of his neck. It was weird talking to sentient cutlery.
“Bradlee,” he corrected absently. “Seems like this is a pretty long-running accident though, if you don’t mind me saying.”
After explaining that no, she’d never stabbed anyone—not even once—Fern had felt compelled to justify her existence with a brief recounting of her life thus far.
In the retelling, somehow it seemed to peak early with Viv, Varine the Necromancer, and a townful of skeletons, and she’d been on a steady downward slope ever since.
“But you were ‘accidentally’ a murder weapon?” She held him up and stared at a point halfway up his blade, which Fern had decided was where his eyes ought to be. Then again, maybe she was staring him in the ass. “I think it’s time for you to tell your fucking life story.”
“You got a real tart mouth, huh? Might interest you to know that the murderess was a rattkin like you. Name of Azula. Good kid. Bad judgment. Oh hey, that sounds familiar!”
Fern regarded him shrewdly. “I guess it’s just that I assumed you were too important to be sidelined from the action, being an Elder Blade and all. I would have figured you had to be instrumental.”
A shocked silence followed, during which the knife apparently had to reorganize his thoughts.
“I mean . . . I suppose it’s fair to say that I was very key in the . . . let’s say, ‘events’ both prior and after. Which may or may not have had a bearing on the result. Obviously, because of the weight of my—”
“—significance, yes, I know,” finished Fern. “Significance to the murdering.”
Another silence.
“Let’s talk about something else. Like the fact that the goblin kid is gone.”
“What?” Fern almost dropped him as she scrambled to her feet from the grassy spot she’d been occupying in the shade of the cart.
There wasn’t a lot to investigate—only the three water-watchers, grass and stone in all directions, and Bucket staring over his shoulder at her in horsey reproach.
She even checked underneath the tarpaulin at the crowded wagon bed.
Breadlee was right. Zyll was nowhere to be seen.
“Fuck!”
“Wow, how do you lose somebody in a coat that ugly on a totally unobstructed clifftop?”
“I was distracted and talking to you.”
“Oh, is this an accident, too?”
“I am going to accidentally throw you into the fucking canyon.”
“See, now we’re getting to the bottom of what you would consider an accident.”
Fern ignored him.
“Think,” she muttered to herself. “Where would she go? She can’t be far. Besides, she knows Astryx has that bracelet thing. She’s not stupid.” She was sure of that anyway, although she wished that she were the one wearing the other bracelet.
She glanced at Bucket, who was still regarding her with what she was positive was severe disappointment.
“You know who else isn’t stupid?” breathed Fern.
“Is this a rhetorical question, or are you actually asking me? The list is shockingly short,” replied Breadlee.
“Shush.”
The knife harrumphed as Fern approached Bucket, standing on tiptoe to scratch his cheek under the bridle.
“Hey,” she murmured. “You saw where she went, didn’t you?”
“You’re asking the horse?”
Paying him no heed, Fern unstaked Bucket and stared as meaningfully into his eyes as she could manage. “You’re a smart boy. I see how she trusts you. And I think you know exactly where our little friend went. Can you show me?”
Bucket regarded Fern for a long moment, during which she felt increasingly moronic.
Then he shook out his mane, snorted, and began slowly clopping his way through the grass, in exactly the direction Astryx had gone.
She hoped like hells Bucket wasn’t just following his mistress.
Keeping a tight hold on both his lead and that hope fluttering in her chest, Fern trotted beside him, leaving the cart behind.
She glanced back once and, squinting over the distance, Fern thought she saw a tall figure rummaging through the back of the wagon. It was obviously the tarpaulin flapping free, though. She must not have tied it back down.
Bucket was a smart horse.
It took a remarkably short time to find Zyll. As Fern had suspected, the biggest obstacle to locating her was the direction, not the distance.
The goblin was sitting with her hands in her lap atop the biggest in a whole jumble of stones. They crowded into the clifftop’s edge like bad teeth into a jawbone. She was staring out over the river valley, where the fog pinked with late afternoon sun. The cloud cover had mostly disintegrated.
“There you are!” shouted Fern, still keeping up with Bucket as he picked his way stolidly up the rise.
Zyll glanced back at them, and then returned her attention to the valley below.
“Godsdammit,” muttered the rattkin to herself. Then, louder, “You can’t just run off like that! I don’t need any help from you convincing Astryx to think less of me.”
“Is that a thing that’s happening?” asked Breadlee, with concern. “That’s not going to rub off on me, is it? I gotta say, it doesn’t really align with my long-term goals to be associated with mediocrity.”
Fern bit back a sharp retort and panted the last few steps to the base of the cluster of stones. She shaded her eyes with the paw holding Bucket’s lead and glared up at the goblin. “What are you looking at, anyway?” she asked, exasperated. “It’s the same valley we’ve been traveling beside all day.”
The goblin didn’t remove her hands from her lap, or turn around. Her shoulders rose and fell in a shrug, but she remained silent.
“Shitwhiskers.” Fern dropped Bucket’s lead. “Stay here, Bucket. Um, please.” Then she did her best to scamper up the stones to join Zyll. It had been several years since she had scampered, though, and she didn’t remember the last time being so challenging.
When at last she stood beside Zyll, she glowered at her, and tried to think of something to say that would get the goblin off her ass and moving back in the direction of the cart.
Then she followed Zyll’s gaze out over the valley, and all the annoyance leaked right out of her.
The mist churned in slow motion on its way up the channel to the northeast, blushing with conch pinks and delicate oranges. Here and there it tore apart like dough stretched too far, and the river below glittered in sudden sunfire.
Nearer, she could see the road they’d attempted earlier in the day, and at this remove, the water-watchers startled her with their regularity, a seemingly endless line of sentinels guarding the waters beneath.
A flock of starlings looped and bloomed and contracted as it described graceful patterns above the mist, dipping down sometimes to disappear, before reemerging in a plume of vapor.
The rush of the long grass behind them seemed to swell and retreat in time with the movements of the birds.
“Oh,” said Fern.
Then she fell silent.
There atop the bluff, surrounded on all sides by a beautiful distance, Fern was consumed by a sense of remoteness that was not at all lonely.
A safe smallness wherein the horizon was infinite, and as such, judgment, too, must be impossibly distant.
The bookshop had never felt farther away. Thune, Viv, Tandri . . . they might have all been lost in that soft mist.
Or not lost, perhaps, but enfolded. Safely tucked away.
It was . . . relief. Somehow in this place, in this moment, she didn’t have to strain for it. Her mind was quiet. Uncrowded with apologies or anxieties or anticipation.
Gods, to just stay there for a while . . .
“Uh, we should probably get back, huh?” prompted Breadlee. “I wouldn’t want to lose the Oathmaiden’s trust—or, you know, we wouldn’t.”
“Yeah. Sure,” murmured Fern. “In just a second.”
Then she dreamily slipped the knife into a pocket within her cloak and slowly sat down next to Zyll.
And thought about absolutely nothing.
The light was nearly gone when Fern stirred from her reverie. The mist below had thinned to purple threads that continued to wisp away, and the breeze had cooled considerably. The starlings were long gone.
Zyll was no longer beside her.
She staggered to her feet on numb legs, her ass suddenly awake to the fact that it had been parked on a stone for gods knew how long. Whirling, she found no sign of Zyll—again—and more worryingly, no sign of Bucket, either.
But before she had time to conjure up a curse suited to the moment, she noticed a figure crouched in the tall grass with one arm resting on a thigh, watching her.
A one-eared elf with ragged silver hair.
Fern’s stomach, which had been plummeting downward, now jagged sideways.
The Oathmaiden’s expression was unreadable.
“Uh, where are—” Fern began, her voice rusty.
“Back at the cart.”
“And . . . how long have you been there? Watching me?”
Astryx stood, unhurried. “Does it matter?”
Fern couldn’t decide whether the elf was upset or not. Remembering the previous night, she couldn’t stand the idea of another awkward stare-off over unspoken words, and she was unsettled at having been observed without noticing.
So. Fuck that.
“It does if you’re angry with me. Are you?”
“I am not.”
“Oh. Well . . . then everything is fine?”
“I found a route back to the road.” Astryx remained facing her, and Fern felt the weight of that regard. Was it curiosity on her face? Contemplation?
“That’s good then?” she tried.
“It is.”
Fern slithered down from the rock she’d been sitting on and successfully navigated the tumble of stones without twisting an ankle. As she approached the elf, feeling very much like a child being called indoors, Astryx spoke up again, this time with unexpected hesitation in her voice.
“What kept your attention for so long?”
It took a moment for Fern to find the answer, but at last, she did.
“I think for the first time in a long time, I wasn’t looking backward . . . or forward, either. So maybe I was looking at whatever is between those things.”
Astryx thought about that, then nodded, although her face seemed faintly troubled.
And then they strode together through the shivering grass, back toward the wagon.