Chapter 25
FOUNDATIONS
KINGFISHER
SCREAMS RANG OUT in the darkness.
Like a contagion, chaos was spreading throughout the city.
“Quickly! This way!”
Carrion led the charge. It had been the work of a second to give him the Sight so that he could guide us through my shadows. He was now one of only four people in existence who boasted that capability—a number I hadn’t planned on increasing today, but necessity had required it.
Around us, crowds of people swarmed out of buildings, their panicked shouts filling the air as they stumbled around, searching for familiarity.
Next to me, Hayden tripped on a lip in the cobbled street.
I barely had time to catch him before he hit the ground face-first. Grabbing a fistful of his shirt, I wrenched him to the left.
“Just keep running, Hayden. I’ve got you. ”
“This way!” Carrion was a head and a half taller than anyone else on the street now. At some point during the assault in the square, I’d relinquished my hold on the glamor that had been hiding our true Fae nature. My canines were sharp in my mouth again. It felt good to be back in my own skin.
Like wraiths, we darted through the streets, careening around people as they stumbled blindly, calling out for their loved ones.
“Take this right,” Carrion hissed. “Here!”
Up ahead, a phalanx of guardians was proceeding down the tight street, keeping close formation.
The pale green glow of the even-light torches they carried barely cut through the shadows.
They shouldn’t have even had evenlight here.
The burning heat rose up within me again—the same heat that had all but suffocated me back in the square, until I couldn’t fucking breathe around it.
I wanted to kill the bastards for what they’d done to my mate.
For what they’d done to her mother. For what they were still doing to this ward.
My vengeance was incomplete. A heavy debt was still owed by the men who carried out Madra’s orders.
It wouldn’t be settled until the streets of this city were piled high with their corpses and a mountain of golden armor blotted out the suns.
But vengeance was going to have to wait.
We swung right, turning mere seconds before the guardians reached us.
“There. Up ahead. That wide building with the heavy wooden door! Go, go, go!” Carrion whispered.
I shoved Hayden toward the door first. He found the handle and turned it—but the door didn’t open.
“Gods alive. Move out of the way.” I would kick the fucking thing down if I had to.
“No, no. Wait!” Hayden held out a hand behind him, urging me back. “It sticks is all.” Leaning his shoulder against the wood, Saeris’s brother gave the door a firm nudge. “You just need to . . . finesse . . .” The door swung open.
He couldn’t see, but he knew where he was? There wasn’t time to process that piece of information. Exhaustion sank its claws into me. My shadows were dissipating. As I looked back over my shoulder, I saw that the air was clearing, swaths of black silk disintegrating right before my eyes.
Inside. Inside! the quicksilver urged. It was louder than it had been since Gillethrye.
Carrion’s eyes met mine, his worry matching my own. “After you.” He gestured for me to head inside. Hayden had already crossed the threshold and disappeared. Cursing under my breath, I slipped through the doorway. My shadows had already vanished here. The room was sweltering, a fire raging in a—
“Fuck!” Pain exploded between my shoulder blades.
My head spun, my vision seesawing. I’d been struck with something hard.
Something really fucking heavy. The air rushed out of my lungs, but I kept my feet beneath me.
Just. “What in the fifth circle of hell?” I wheeled to face my attacker, ready to tear them limb from limb, but there was Carrion, blocking my path, standing in front of a grizzled old man brandishing a fire iron.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” Carrion held his hands up. “Don’t do anything rash. It was only a pat on the back.”
“I was aiming for his head,” the old man seethed. “I wasn’t expecting the bastard to be so tall.”
A pat on the back? A pat on the back didn’t leave a fucking bruise. I stepped forward, ready to forcibly remove Carrion if I had to, but the smuggler grabbed me by the shoulders. “Don’t hurt him, Fisher. For the love of the gods—”
“He tried to cave my skull in, Carrion.”
The human shoved Swift aside himself, pushing him out of the way.
His hair had once been dark brown but most of it was salt-and-pepper now.
Lines marked the man’s face. He was strong and broad, like a bull.
Massive by human standards. A fire burned in his eyes as he squared up to me and snapped, “And what else should I have done, then? You’re the one who broke into my forge! ”
Saeris had made Elroy sound pleasant to be around. She’d spoken of him fondly, but my first impressions of him were not particularly favorable. My back was throbbing, and I was developing a tension headache—an ailment that wasn’t being eased by the glassmaker’s whisper-shouting.
“He cannot be here!” The old man hadn’t moved away from the door since we’d arrived. He really wanted us gone. “You can stay. Hayden can stay. But he has to go.”
Carrion wasn’t proving to be a great negotiator. “Calm down, Elroy. It’s going to be fine. We just need a place to lay low for a couple of hours until it all calms down out there.”
“I won’t say it again. I know who he is. I know what kind of trouble he has chasing on his heels.”
Hayden had been lurking by an array of heavy, well-used tools hanging on the wall. He stepped forward and spoke, reminding us all that he was in the room. “He says Saeris is alive, Elroy.”
“I don’t doubt it.” The old man narrowed his eyes at me accusingly. “She’s Saeris. Of course she’s alive. But it looks like she’s jumped out of the frying pan and straight into the fire with this one, doesn’t it?”
Carrion slipped behind me, pressing his back to the door so that Elroy couldn’t open it. “He isn’t a rebel, El.”
“I can see that plain as day. He’s a Fae warrior, and he’s about as subtle as a sledgehammer.” He shoved the end of the poker he was holding into my face. “Those shadows you just cast across the whole city? That could have gotten us all killed. How would that have helped your cause?”
Gotten them all killed? Gods alive, the dramatics. “It would have helped immensely actually. If everyone in Zilvaren was dead, I’d be able to just go home,” I growled.
“He doesn’t mean that! He doesn’t mean that. Okay, whew, everybody just take a deep breath.” Carrion dragged his hands through his hair as he paced in front of the door. “You’re going to have to forgive my friend here. He hails from cooler climes. The heat makes him irritable.”
“Don’t apologize for me!” I was going to open-palm slap him. “If he wanted cordiality, he shouldn’t have struck me, should he?”
Shouting from the street cut off whatever angry retort Elroy had been about to fire back at me.
The ground rumbled with the thunder of many boots.
The forge boasted one small, shuttered window; Hayden had cracked the wooden shutters open an inch and stared morosely out of the gap like he was watching the end of the world unfold.
“We can’t go back out there,” he said. “Not yet.”
“You aren’t going anywhere,” Elroy stated. “Saeris would string me up if she knew I let you leave with him.”
I bared my teeth. “Who do you think sent me here to fetch him, old man?”
“All right. We’re done with this!” Carrion had found a hammer.
Not a difficult thing to do, considering where we were.
He held it up like a gavel, a very serious look on his face.
“Normally, I’m all for a solid argument in the name of fun, but over the past few days I’ve been stung by a million scorpions, been chased repeatedly, and had to kill a ravening lunatic, and I just watched a woman who cared for me and protected me go up in flames.
So now . . . we are fucking done.” His voice cracked.
He shrugged, laughing that roguish, devil-may-care laugh of his, but I’d heard the break in his voice.
Elroy had, too. I watched, amazed, as the fight visibly drained out of the old man.
“I was heartsore to hear about Gracia, Carrion. I really was.”
Carrion lowered the hammer. “She was old.” He said this with no emotion at all.
As if he’d said this to himself a million times over the past few hours, and the words were the only things holding him together.
“I just wish I’d been here to say goodbye.
She was . . . the last of her line. There won’t be any more Swifts. ”
I felt the gravity of that in my bones. The Swift women had cared for Carrion and explained away his existence over the course of centuries.
As far as the outside world had known, they had been his sisters.
His mothers. His aunts. His grandmothers.
But they had been his friends. His protectors.
And now they were all gone. Carrion had lived in Zilvaren a long, long time, but he had never been without a Swift.
For the hurt the smuggler was enduring right now, I set aside my irritation and took a calming breath. “Tell me, Elroy. How many promises have you made to Saeris and then broken?”
The human’s eyelids shuttered. “None.”
“Me either. And I plan on keeping it that way. Make no mistake. I will burn worlds to keep my word to her, old man. There isn’t a single person in this realm or any other that I wouldn’t sacrifice to make sure I don’t let her down.
I promised her that I’d bring her brother home. Will you test my resolve in this?”