Chapter 25 #2
A loud crash shook the air outside, followed by a piercing scream.
Elroy stared at me, the lines around his eyes tightening a fraction.
I met his scrutiny, unflinching. The old man looked away.
“No. I don’t suppose I will.” Resignation colored his words.
“But the boy should have a say in the matter, don’t you think?
You say that you’ve made a promise to bring him home .
. . but this is the only home he’s ever known. ”
Murder. Starvation. Oppression. Hate.
These were the foundations Zilvaren was built upon. It was no wonder the footings of this city were incapable of holding itself up. This place was no home. It was a cage. A death sentence. But the old man was right. It should be the boy’s choice.
Reluctantly, I dipped my head.
Three pairs of eyes turned to Hayden Fane.
Gods, he was nothing like her. Nothing like her at all. But when he met our gazes and I saw the resolution in his eyes, the way his jaw set, I saw the fleeting shadow of her there. A part of her I recognized. Something I could get behind. “It’s okay, Elroy,” he said. “I want to go.”
Carrion explained everything.
I sat at the window, watching the people of Zilvaren slowly disperse back to their homes.
Hours passed, and I listened to Carrion’s story take shape.
Every once in a while, a unit of guardians marched past the forge, armor clanking loudly, feet striking the sand with purpose.
It was rare that the guardians patrolled the Third in these numbers.
Saeris had explained that many of them believed the lie Madra perpetuated—that the Third was a plague ward.
Infected. It helped her cause if her own soldiers were afraid of the people here.
An army wasn’t as effective if it didn’t hate its enemy.
Elroy paced the forge as he listened to Carrion speak.
Occasionally, he worked the bellows, feeding oxygen to the fire that burned in the hearth.
I saw Saeris’s movements in him. The way he held his tools.
The way he simply moved around the space.
But they were his movements, I knew. He had been the one to teach Saeris how to work a forge, after all.
He said nothing to interrupt Carrion. Not when he explained about the Fae.
His transformation. The portals that enabled transport between this world and Yvelia.
Hayden interrupted plenty, rapt, eyes the size of saucers.
But not the old man. He took it all in stride.
When Carrion was finished, Elroy sat down heavily on a rickety stool that looked older than he was. The weight of the entire realm seemed to be pressing down on his shoulders. I left the window and faced him, arms folded across my chest.
“How do you know all about this?” I demanded.
The clues were all there.
He’d called me a Fae warrior.
He’d known they were my shadows, blotting out the suns.
He hadn’t even blinked when Carrion had stormed into his forge, much taller than he’d been before, sporting pointed ears and the kind of teeth that could do some serious damage.
He had known.
Elroy looked up at me, the truth right there in his eyes. I was right. “Plenty of people still tell stories about before. When your kind still visited Zilvaren,” he said.
I shot him a disappointed look. “No. That’s not it. Try again.”
Wearily, he shrugged, shaking his head. “Fine. You’re right. I’ve known about the Fae my whole life.” He nodded at Carrion. “I’ve always known about him, too.”
“I’m sorry, what?” Carrion’s voice was three octaves higher than normal.
“You’ve always known about me? Always known about—” He threw his hands in the air, staring up at the ceiling.
“Don’t you think you should have mentioned that?
Y’know, during any of the hundreds of interactions we’ve had over the years? ”
“Why?” Elroy looked genuinely confused. “It wouldn’t have changed anything. You would have still been an annoying, loud-mouthed smuggler with a penchant for stealing my glassware.”
“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe it would have been nice for me to talk to someone who knew who I really was? Maybe it would have been nice to—to—Oh, never mind. Forget it. You’re right. It wouldn’t have changed anything. You’d still have been a miserable git with no sense of humor!”
Elroy leaned his elbows on his thighs, hands clasped together. “You had Gracia.” He sounded exhausted.
“I did.” Carrion nodded. “And she was enough. But one person out of millions? It would have been nice if that number had been two.”
“Look, I’m sorry, okay. But I wasn’t supposed to tell you I knew, anyway. There were rules I was supposed to keep, and—”
“What rules?” My body felt strange. Too hot. It could have been the fact that I was standing in a forge, in a realm that was already unreasonably fucking hot, but this felt different. I could feel my heart beating all over my body.
Elroy huffed, annoyance carved into the lines of his face, but he answered. “Don’t tell anyone about the Fae. Don’t talk to Carrion about the Fae. Don’t tell anyone about any magic users I came across. Things like that.”
“And who made you promise to observe these rules?”
“My father,” he said. “And his father made him promise. I’m a forge master, warrior.
The son of forge masters. The Swift family wasn’t the only bloodline that was charged with a task they handed down through the generations.
Gracia and her lot watched over the boy.
Me and mine were given a different job to do. ”
I could hear it now, pounding in my ears.
Thrum.
Thrum.
Thrum.
I swallowed hard and spoke, my voice just a whisper. “Tell me.”
Elroy grimaced, running his tongue over his teeth. Slapping his palms against his thighs, he got to his feet. “I think it’s probably better if I just show you.”
“I’m not offended, per se. Just a little . . . outraged.”
Carrion hadn’t stopped grousing since the glassmaker had yanked back the rug that covered the wall and revealed a secret door.
The tiniest scrap of magic, cleverly woven, was all that hid the door.
When Elroy had pricked his finger and daubed a small amount of his blood against the wall, the heavy blocks of sandstone had moved back, filling the forge with a grinding sound that had set my teeth on edge.
Elroy had grabbed a torch and descended the stairs first, followed by Hayden. Carrion had followed behind me, which meant that I was the one who had to listen to his string of complaints.
“Centuries. Centuries! There were Fae plans underway here for years, taking place right beneath my nose, and no one thought to tell me, the only member of the Fae in Zilvaren?”
“Your friend says they had their reasons,” I muttered over my shoulder.
“So they must have had their reasons.” I didn’t know if that was true—humans lied all the time, sometimes for no good reason whatsoever.
Elroy could have been making all of this up for all we knew, but he had no discernible reason to lie. None that I could see, anyway.
The stairs went on forever. Down, down, down . . .
The walls weren’t made of sandstone here.
They were granite. Smooth, cool, and hard.
The kind of stone that could withstand the test of time and a shifting sea of sand.
Wherever Elroy was leading us, he did so in silence, the back of his head and his shaggy shoulder-length gray hair the only part of him I could see over Hayden’s shoulder.
I could feel the tension pouring off him, though—felt it strongly enough that I confused it with my own.
“How much farther?” Hayden asked softly. He’d intended the question for Elroy’s ears alone, but the boy didn’t know anything of Fae hearing yet. He sounded nervous.
“Another two hundred steps or so,” Elroy answered.
“How many are there?”
“Twelve hundred and twenty-three.” Elroy’s whisper echoed off the walls.
Eventually, we reached the bottom of the stairs. The space ahead was vast and cloaked in darkness. When I saw what lay before us, I felt like I’d been kicked square in the chest by a horse.
“Gods and sinners . . .” I gaped at the sight.
“What? What is it?” Hayden hissed.
“Our way out of this mess,” Carrion answered breathlessly.
His mouth hung open, his eyes roving over the pillars that held up the arched ceiling, and the stacks of discarded pieces of armor, and the coins, and the chalices, and trunks overflowing with all manner of metal goods.
Finally, his eyes went to the huge, recessed pool at the center of the cavern . . .
A spark of light bloomed on the other side of the cavern.
The flicker was just a small orange-golden glow at first. Soon, there were two sparks of light, then three.
Elroy skirted the perimeter of the space, lighting torches as he went.
I’d been so distracted by the contents of his secret trove that I hadn’t even noticed him leaving us.
By the time he had lit half the torches in their sconces and returned to us, the cavern was suffused with a dim light strong enough to see by.
Hayden was wild-eyed as he stepped toward the giant pool.
It was the first of its kind I had seen: recessed so that its steps led down to the still, solid surface of the pool below.
You came, you came. Came. You came . . . The sound flooded my ears. It was loud again. Many voices. Scores of them, all speaking at once. I hadn’t heard the voices this loud since Iseabail and Te Léna had begun working together to heal me.
Join us. Come, come, come . . .
Hayden cocked his head, squinting at the surface of the mirrored metal that slept at the bottom of the pool. “What is that?” he asked.
Elroy grunted, gruffly clearing his throat. “That, my boy, is a dangerous amount of quicksilver.”