24. Room and Board
Ciarán was gone in the morning along with whatever remained of my “detachment from reality and mercurial sense of whimsy”. He wasn’t far. I could still feel him in the back of my head, though he was taking effort to keep me at a mental distance.
Good. Hopefully it meant he couldn’t sense me replaying our conversation from the night be over in my head. I understood he wished he could be Liam. I’d struggled with those feelings before regarding my own Nightmare form. But then calling me out for my own feelings regarding Liam?
That had been humiliating.
Thoughts of the conversation followed me into the tavern where I used a bit of the coin Ciarán had left in my backpack to buy a breakfast of eggs and tomato.
“Wren!” A body slammed into mine so hard that my fork flew from my hand and skittered across the wooden floor. Orla wrapped her arms around my shoulders and squeezed. “We were all so worried. Are you feeling okay?”
“I’m fine,” I promised her, and she fell into the seat next to mine. The shadows under her eyes indicated a late night. “But what about you? Ferrin…”
I trailed off. We’d killed her uncle. Maybe. If we were lucky.
“If he’s dead, it’s for the better. And I won't have to worry anymore about what I might do if I face him.” She looked at the wood grain of the table rather than meet my eye, but then jerked her head up to force a smile.
“Really, Wren. It’s hard to worry about him when I’m so relieved to see you up and well. ”
I nodded, hoping she couldn’t read the guilt I was sure was splashed across my face. I still didn’t know how Orla would react if she found out we’d lured him to the canyon on purpose.
Iseult was having no qualms about the situation, I remembered. Heat rose in my face. The shadows under Orla’s eyes suddenly made more sense.
I shoveled eggs into my mouth with my fingers to hide my blush, my fork still on the floor a table away.
“We’ve been asking around about the library since we got in, but so far no one seems to know what we’re talking about,” Orla said. “I spent the whole day walking around the citadel with Iseult yesterday, and—Oh! She’s awake!”
She shot to her feet as Iseult, Tiernan, and Fana entered the tavern from the back hall. Orla rushed to greet Iseult, and Fana hurried to hug me.
“You aren’t dead!” she said, taking Orla’s abandoned seat after letting me go. “Tiernan said you were dying.”
“I did not.” Tiernan limped to take the seat next to Fana’s. “I said we were lucky she didn’t die.”
“Right, because she was dying. You were dying, weren’t you, Wren? But you didn’t.” Fana beamed. “Because Tiernan doesn’t know anything, including about libraries, because he said there was one here, but so far we haven’t found any libraries run by Lyrians.”
“I did say it was just a rumor.” Tiernan pushed a twisted lock back from his face and frowned at me. “Hello, Wren. Glad to see you’re not dead.”
“Don’t make me blush, Tiernan.” I picked at my eggs with my fingers, and an inn worker set a plate of pastries down at our table. “I didn’t order this.”
The woman winked as she brushed her hands off on her apron. “A guard came by this morning. He was asking about you and your friends.”
I froze and counted the exits, already formulating an escape plan in my head.
“Why?” Tiernan demanded.
“Something about an assault in an alleyway. A high ranking captain was found with all his fingers broken and covered in rashes.”
I stared at the woman so that I wouldn’t have to look at the others, but I saw both Fana and Tiernan whip in their seats to look at me.
“Wren?” Tiernan growled. “What did the Grimguard do?”
“Only what I told him to,” I hissed back through gritted teeth.
“Don’t worry.” The woman chuckled and stooped to pick up my abandoned fork. “Anyone who is an enemy of the Barony is a friend to Willow’s Grove. Besides, your brooding friend with the tattered cloak and dark hair pays well.”
She patted her apron pocket, her rings thunking against glass through the fabric. Ciarán had slipped her a bottle of Skal.
“But aren’t we in the Barony?” I asked stupidly.
Tiernan made a warning sound, but the woman waved him off.
“She’s fine, love.” The woman scoffed. “We were a free city-state of the Skalterran Highlands until the Baron decided otherwise.”
“She forced you into the Barony?” I asked.
“He. It was nearly fifteen years ago now, and the Baron at the time was the current Baron’s father. He was a vicious man who loved his Skal, and Willow’s Grave was too tempting of a prize.”
“But I thought you didn’t have any Skal springs here,” I said. The woman flashed me her ring, and I recognized opal as the center stone.
“No springs, just trees of Skal-made gemstones. He wanted to mine the Great Willow.”
I twisted towards the window, as if the massive willow standing resolute at the center of the citadel might have disappeared. It was still there, however, un-mined and whole.
“But he didn’t.”
The woman gave me a wry smile and pulled a clean fork from her apron to set down next to my plate of eggs.
“You must have traveled here from very far away if you don’t already know this story,” she said.
Fana giggled in confirmation. “He tried to mine the Willow. He came to oversee the first day of drilling into the tree himself. Even built a steamtrail into the citadel to get here. Not even an hour into the mining process, a large chunk of rock broke off the Great Willow and fell. The only pity is that they say he died instantly. I would prefer it if the tree had made him at least suffer a little while.”
“And Tamora hasn’t tried to mine to the Willow since taking her father’s place?” I asked.
“No. She doesn’t think about us much. I imagine her father’s death plays a role in that.
Instead she sends her worst guards here, usually as a punishment.
Rotsbane attacks have left the steamtrail into Willow’s Grave unusable, so there’s no oversight from the capital at Vanderfall.
The guards run the citadel. They pretend to be our protectors, but we all know they’re our captors.
” The woman nodded at the pastries on our table.
“And you left one of them unconscious in an alleyway, apparently.”
“That doesn’t solve your problem.”
“No, but I don’t see how it’s your problem to fix.
” The woman laughed. “Besides, rumor says the Rift is open and the Frozen God is freed. If Tamora manages to get past him and into Keldori, we’ll be the least of her concerns with all that Skal.
Perhaps she’ll withdraw all her guards from Willow’s Grave and take them to Keldori with her.
All her greed and all that Skal, my coin is on her and her guards turning rotsbane the moment they cross the Rift. ”
I nodded, and my stomach twisted at the thought of rotsbane flooding my home.
“All that to say, stay as long as you and your friends need. Food and drink is on us. You’re safe here.” The woman turned away to tend to the other tables.
I wasn’t sure “safe” was the best word to describe an enclosed city run by Tamora’s most corrupt guards. Tiernan’s alarmed scowl told me he didn’t feel so confident either.
“You attacked a guard?” he hissed.
“It was the guard that took our Skal at the gate. He deserved it!”
“We’re trying to not draw attention to ourselves!”
“And if you had heard what he’d been saying—”
“I don’t care,” Tiernan seethed, leaning over the table so we wouldn’t be overheard. “We have too much going on for you to be running around playing the hero where you don’t need to.”
“Oh?” I sat back in my chair and crossed my arms, grinning. “So I should’ve left you in your prison cell instead of playing the hero?”
His cheeks darkened, and he fell back in his seat.
“Be nice to Wren,” Fana whispered. “She almost died.”
“She’s fine.” Tiernan grabbed a small tower of pastries from our plate and stood. “Come on, Fana. We’ll be safer in the room.”
Fana’s shoulders fell, but then she grabbed a cheese danish and held it up to me. “Can cats eat cheese?”
“I’m sure Jonquil would love some cheese,” I assured her. Her face brightened, and she chased Tiernan back to the rooms.
At least Orla and Iseult seemed to be enjoying their stay so far. Orla slipped an arm around Iseult’s waist where they stood together at the tavern counter, and I quickly averted my eyes before she noticed me watching.
“They aren’t subtle.” Ciarán fell into Tiernan’s abandoned seat, and I jumped at his sudden presence.
“Look who came back.” I rolled my eyes. “Didn’t feel like telling anyone where you went this morning? Isn’t that dangerous?”
“Were you worried about me, my Lady?” He smirked.
“You wish. I was more annoyed than worried. Where were you?”
“I was returning the pendant we took off that guard last night,” Ciarán said, still not looking at me.
“You found the owner? How?”
He shrugged. “Asked around about travelers. Found a young couple with family in the city. They got in yesterday, just in time to deliver their baby.”
“He took the pendant from a pregnant woman?” I had half a mind to hunt the guard down again and set Ciarán loose on his toes next.
“A pregnant woman in labor. It was an heirloom.”
“We should’ve broken more than that guard’s fingers.”
“We should’ve killed him. They’re already looking for us.”
“Is that what we are now? Killers?” I asked. “Just because we killed Ferrin—”
Ciarán cut me off with a finger to his lips and a sideways glance at Orla.
“We survived that flood. There’s a chance Ferrin did too,” he said. “And just because Ferrin deserves to die, that doesn’t absolve us if we’re the ones to kill him.”
I’d thought of killing Ferrin as more of a public service rather than a murder, but Ciarán’s words sat heavy in my heart. Intrepid guilt started to rise in my stomach, but then I remembered Linsey’s face splitting open and the rotsbane bursting forth.
I closed my eyes, trying to erase the image from memory.
“You make it sound like we’re just as bad as he is,” I said. “We’re not.”