Chapter Eight The Pinch
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE PINCH
Apparently, Caelan Halcyon was not as immortal as he seemed.
Good, she almost said, but swallowed it just in time. “You don’t look like you’re dying. Can healers not heal themselves or something?”
That question seemed to irritate him more than the affliction itself. “It’s… beyond my skills.”
“Do you know how much time you have left?”
“Less than a year.” He said it so plainly, as if they were talking of the weather and not his imminent expiration.
“Well, I’m sorry to hear that, but I don’t do charity work,” Reya said tartly. “So how exactly do you plan to pay me? If you think I’m going to steal for you in exchange for coin that was already mine, think again.”
He leaned in, forcing her back a step. “You’re running out of options, thief.
And you’re not getting those letters back.
This cure is worth more than one hundred thousand golds.
All I need is a drop—then you can use the rest to pay your debt to Raulin.
When you deliver, I’ll return everything I stole from you.
I get to live. You get your freedom. And your employer gets to go on being the worst sort of human scum. ”
What type of cure could be worth that much? It sounded like a honeyed lie, but it didn’t feel like one. “And if I say no?”
He dared another step, and her grip tightened on her dagger.
“Dread Wolves travel in packs. By my count, there were only two in that alley. There are likely more of them. You’re powerful, but you have no control, no experience, no training.
You can handle a blade, but that trick dagger of yours barely tickled it.
If I hadn’t been there, you wouldn’t be breathing.
” Reya grimaced at the memory. “I’ve killed far worse than Dread Wolves.
I will keep you alive while you get what I need. ”
Reya bristled at the notion.
She’d spent her most formative years in taverns and dice halls and had learned to bluff her way through just about anything. But every once in a while, a gambler had to be holding all the cards. Caelan Halcyon had stacked the deck.
The Crimson Dagger had made countless enemies over the years—many of whom would pay good coin for her corpse, or worse, tied up and still breathing.
While she didn’t think Caelan would inform the Silver Guard that she was magic-born, he probably wasn’t above letting it slip to someone in the Heap that the Crimson Dagger was a certain redhead with green eyes, if only to make her more desperate for his help.
Lennox’s reputation might protect her for a time, but when she left his employment, the bounty on Reya Connery’s head would be so obnoxiously high, no city could hide her.
Decades would pass before she stopped running, and Reya had no interest in living out her retirement as an unassuming brunette in some forgotten corner of the world.
Always looking over her shoulder. Never truly resting.
“Why not steal it yourself?” Reya asked. “You’re powerful enough. Why come to a lowly thief for help?”
He inhaled sharply though his nose, barely muffling the grinding of his molars. “We all have different resources. I know the cure exists, I just can’t find it.”
Reya could feel the winds of power shifting in her direction. He needed more than just her compliance. He needed her cooperation. Her connections. “And I’m just supposed to trust you?”
He shook his head. “Trust plays no part in this. This is an exchange of services.”
Caelan Halcyon was right. So she did what any sensible card player would do when they had a terrible hand and no coin left to call. “Tell me about this cure.” When he didn’t reply, she crossed her arms. “I can’t steal it if you don’t tell me what it is.”
“I need the blood of a Kraken.”
Reya blinked. Twice. Then shook her head as one might shake off a bad dream, trying to clear the illusion. “Hold on, I’m certain I just hallucinated. Please repeat.” When he just stared at her, she ran her fingers through her hair as she began to pace.
“I can see you need a moment,” he said dryly.
She muttered with her back to him, “Of course you’re delusional, why wouldn’t you be?”
“I assure you, I’m not.”
Reya scrubbed at her face. “That is exactly what a delusional person would say.”
She had, of course, heard the myths about Kraken blood.
It was said to cure the incurable. But the stories were exactly that.
Stories. No wonder Lennox had told Caelan to get lost. No one in their right mind would take this job.
“When you said you needed a cure, I thought you meant some rare tincture or herb, like a normal sick person. What exactly is killing you?”
He gave no reply, and she sighed. “You’re going to have to do better than that, fire fingers. You’re asking me to gamble my freedom on something that I have no guarantee exists.”
“I’ve been around a lot longer than you. I have seen things you cannot imagine.”
Caelan Halcyon hadn’t once lied to her. But that didn’t mean what he said was true, merely that he believed it. Nor did it mean he was telling her everything she needed to know.
“Try again.” She stepped as close to him as she dared. “Give me something I can use, or I walk away right now, and you can keep what you stole from me. It’s not worth it otherwise.”
Once again, the quiet went on so long she was sure he wasn’t going to answer. Then finally he spoke. “Do you know where the oldest library in the world is?”
“It’s in Delthia.” Nestled in the heart of Evalis, the City of Knowledge.
“Wrong. It’s in the Riverlands.”
Reya stared at him in stunned silence. The Fae had sealed the border to the Riverlands centuries ago, and now none who crossed into their domain ever returned. They were the only magic-born who had managed to completely escape Rhiterran conquest.
“The Fae were the first to drink from the Pool of Life,” Caelan explained.
“They walked this earth before any of us. Their libraries hold the oldest texts in existence, secrets unknown even to the Sages—which they love to lord over us. The Fae are vain. Cruel. Easily offended and easily flattered.” The air between them burned with a sudden, silent rage.
It was the most emotion he’d shown since they’d met.
She could see it in the flare of his irises and feel it in the heat radiating off him.
“But they cannot lie. That is why the All-Gods entrusted them with such knowledge. So it could not be manipulated.”
He lowered his voice to near inaudible. “The day I learned I would die, I was standing in the Fae Queen’s throne room.
And all around her was carved the history of our world.
Their most sacred lore—a piece of the library itself, in plain sight.
On those walls, I saw the Kraken. Clear as I see you standing before me. That is how I know it exists.”
For a moment, Reya let herself imagine it. Let herself believe it wasn’t too preposterous—too terrifying—to be true. There was more he wasn’t telling her, that much was plain. But the part about the library and what it showed was true.
“And you need me to find out if someone’s been able to bottle its blood,” she said plainly.
Caelan’s voice was tight. “I’m wasting time I don’t have chasing stories.”
Reya’s mind raced to cover every eventuality, weigh every risk, and play through all the ways it could blow up in her face.
If she could get her hands on something so rare, so priceless, she wouldn’t just wipe her debt to Lennox.
She would have security for the rest of her life.
She could buy land and build her forge, hire help even.
She could still refuse, take the loss of her coin, and leave Edris tonight.
But what if she couldn’t find another lead as good as this?
By the time she learned whether or not Port Talluah was a dead end, Caelan Halcyon could have taken her life savings with him to the grave, and she would have lost it for nothing.
Maybe fate truly had been trying to reach out a hand, and she simply hadn’t understood the how or why of it.
“I have conditions.” When those golden eyes glowed with victory, she hastily added, “If the blood cannot be obtained by Lumus Day, you will return what you stole from me regardless.”
The weight of his stare pressed down on her. “Why would I agree to that?”
“Because like you, I’m on a deadline, except I don’t have a year, and I have no guarantee that what you’re hiring me to steal can even be obtained. I’m gambling on your word, and if that turns out to be bullshit, you’ll be dead, my coin will be lost, and I will still have a debt to pay.”
Caelan didn’t wince.
She could feel her spine straightening. “You will also return ten percent of my trove to me tonight as a gesture of good faith. A deposit is standard for all of my clients, and I suppose I will have to accept my own property as such.” She didn’t add that she also wanted proof of how much he had found and stolen from her.
He gave her an arch look. “I wouldn’t exactly call it your property.”
She replied with a mocking smile, “It’s more mine than it is yours. Now what will it be?”
When he finally acquiesced with a tight dip of his chin, she extended her arm. “Then you’ve got yourself a deal, fire fingers.”
Caelan took her forearm with deliberate slowness. The moment his fingers wrapped around her vambrace, she curved in her own, nails digging into the black leather, marking him.
“And if you’ve somehow managed to lie to me, know this: When whatever is eating away at your immortality finally takes the light from your eyes, my face will be the last thing you see.
And when you’ve gone to the stars, I will strip you of everything you own in recompense and leave you for the crows. ”
Taking his silent glare as acceptance of terms, she let go, but before she could sidestep him, he herded her until her back hit the wall behind her.
“You should also know this, thief,” he said, caging her with his body, overpowering her without ever touching her or raising his voice.
Her heartbeat tripped over itself, and she knew he could hear it.
The Sage before her was exactly what the legends of his people had claimed.
Rothmire was right to fear them. “I was cutting men down centuries before you were born. Go back on your word, and I will find you—in this world or the next.”
Truth.
“If you’ve quite finished…” Trying for casual, she slid her hands into her pockets, swallowing the taste of copper and hoping he didn’t notice the white glow that appeared in response to his threat.
“Let’s get moving. There’s only one person in this city who will know where to find Kraken blood. And he doesn’t come cheap.”