20 A smile is worth a thousand teeth
Hunting an aedari wasn’t as exciting as Fi hoped.
She spent that first week trailing a pack of daeyari as they combed the Summer Plane forest, sniffing through ashes, searching for tidbits of scent. Fi could only watch. At one point, Antal held a suspicious stick up to her nose, asking what she smelled.
It smelled like a fucking stick.
Avroz, she never took her eyes off. He’d agreed to Antal’s compromise—but something was off in his demeanor toward her.
Fi keyed to the daeyari like a fox skirting a wolf, itching at the subtle shift in him, a reluctant tolerance for her presence that kept her on edge.
He’d carved open Antal’s last human lover. Why play nice this time?
Will you be more useful to me than the last one?
he’d asked when they were alone in his study, claws slicing her scalp.
Fi catalogued every glance, every slip of fang, searching for his angle.
Did he think letting her join the hunt would make Antal more malleable?
Or was Avroz trying to turn them against each other?
This was a cunning creature. It might be both.
The other two daeyari, Avroz’s kezri, Fi struggled to get a read on. All Syvr did was smirk at her, a lot. Ixli kept her distance, all cold glances and twitching tail. A truce for now, but still man-eaters, still loyal to Avroz. Fi never let her sword out of reach.
When the daeyari split up to search more ground, Fi and her useless human nose stayed with Antal. Even her horse was a better tracker. She brought Aisinay to each of the burn sites. A couple times, they followed a scent to the closest road before the trail vanished.
“Aedari can teleport?” Fi asked. “Like daeyari?”
Antal crouched beside the road, massaging dirt between his fingers. He sniffed the soil. Scowled. At his side, Aisinay huffed in equal frustration.
“The mechanism is different,” he said. “Aedari don’t dip into the Void to teleport. They dematerialize. A faster process, instantaneous, but they can only move within their line of sight.”
Fi surveyed the dirt road, dappled in forest sunlight. Not a major thoroughfare. Only locals would use it, and probably rarely.
“Avroz said the aedari is looking for something?” Fi asked.
“Information.” Antal rose. “A scout, searching for the route to the Twilit Plane, interrogating humans. This is why daeyari keep the knowledge closely guarded.”
“All because of some distant war in the Planeverse?”
“Not a war. Not large-scale battle. The daeyari govern our section of the Shattered Planes. The aedari rule theirs. The Contested Planes lay in between.”
Antal recited the answer like a grade school lecture. Maybe it was. Fi had never considered what daeyari history lessons must look like—or what other immortal species and pseudo-wars had been left out of hers.
“The aedari slaughter first-form daeyari wherever they can,” Antal said. “But in the Contested Planes, most of what they encounter are our derived kin. A stalemate. The aedari slowed wholesale culling of the beasts when they realized how we reincarnate.”
“Slowed… but didn’t stop?”
“They’ll kill a derived daeyari without qualm, if one confronts them. But the aedari’s larger goal is finding the Twilit Plane. Derived daeyari don’t reproduce. If they could snuff the first-form daeyari at our source, only the beasts would remain, easier to control.”
Pricks. Like most of the immortals Fi had met.
“So when we find this scout,” she said, “how do we kill it?”
Antal studied the sunbeams through the leaves. He sniffed, the breeze sweet with loam and meadow grass and who knew what else to his predator-honed senses.
“We’ll deal with that when we must, Fionamara.”
The same answer. Every time she’d asked. As if Antal still hoped, despite his agreement, he wouldn’t have to fight this aedari himself.
Without a doubt, he didn’t want Fi to fight it.
He circled back into the trees without her, retracing the trail for the dozenth time, their quarry no closer. Fi kept her chin up, fists clenched.
That seemed like all she could do.
A day off from the search meant a day back in Thomaskweld.
Not to rest, of course. That would be absurd.
Fi was a little annoyed at Antal for being gifted with senses she couldn’t fathom.
She was a lot annoyed at him trying to coddle her through a hunt for a deadly immortal.
She was a new level of annoyed when he woke early, insisting they get a head start on repairs requested by one of the city’s energy factories.
That annoyance lost some of its edge, when the energy foreman met them with a smile warmer than the Summer Plane.
“Lord Daeyari! Miss Kolbeck! Welcome back, so good to see you! Now get your asses in here and fix my conduits, before the whole east sector freezes.”
Antal grinned at the welcome—which was, she’d said a hundred times, not fair when Fi was trying to be mad at him.
The foreman led them inside. When they’d begun these errands a year ago—Antal personally inspecting the conduits Verne had sabotaged, cataloguing upgrades to modernize the city—Fi had never strayed more than two feet from his back.
She hadn’t been confident the skittish factory workers wouldn’t try to bury something sharp in it.
Now, the foreman walked easy at Antal’s side, talking through a list of energy outputs, maintenance logs, recent employee birthdays.
Something in the familiar drift of snow against the high factory windows, the lack of daeyari shooting her death glares, allowed Fi a welcome moment to lower her hackles.
This was the goal of everything, wasn’t it? To see their home safe. Thriving, in spite of every vicious creature battering their door.
The factory floor gleamed with copper conduits and transformers humming with energy. Fi swung by the staffroom to pilfer the largest mug of coffee she could find.
She’d been up late, visiting the Thomaskweld hospital, searching for a meal for Antal.
There was a woman who’d fallen off the roof of her shop while repairing some shingles, had hit her head wrong, nothing the doctors could do.
Fi had spent an hour with the grieving husband, offering tissues and condolences, building up to the request. Eventually, he’d agreed.
Antal had told her she didn’t have to. He’d told her to rest. But merciless Void, Fi had watched Antal crumple when he’d refused another dinner invitation from Avroz, and they all needed their strength to face this aedari, and sometimes this whole thing they were trying to do felt as fragile as dew-strewn cobwebs melting at dawn.
As she sipped her coffee, the foreman unbolted the side of a transformer, exposing a hollow workspace within.
“This regulator, right here!” He pointed at something inside the machinery. “Keeps losing current. Alloy isn’t fit for the voltage.”
Antal leaned inside. “Impossible. We tested it.”
“Look at it, Lord Daeyari!”
At the foreman’s touch, there was a snap of silver energy. A fizzle. Antal’s tail swished.
Fi was amazed to see them standing so close, shoulders nearly brushing in the cramped workspace.
Talking, as if it was possible for human and daeyari to share the same goal.
Around them, the factory hummed. Workers sat at their stations, gripping metal conductors, Shaping energy out of their bodies and into the conduits, power feeding the storage tanks and channeling out to the city.
The heartbeat of Thomaskweld. Warm and alive and—
Oh. What the shit.
Fi did a double take. Down the hall, a figure strode toward them. This was her day off, and she was so tired, and so worn out on immortal drama for the next twelve hours at minimum.
The last thing she wanted to see was another daeyari.
Currently, one of her two least favorite daeyari in all the Shattered Planes.
“Antal,” Fi said.
“A moment.” His voice echoed inside the metal transformer.
“Antal.”
“What—” He pulled his head out. Blinked. A muttered, “Oh. Fuck me…”
“Antal! So wonderful to see you.” Yme swept into the room, claws clacking the floor, tail high and swaying. Her shawl draped midnight and silver from her shoulders. Tiny silver bells adorned her antlers, obnoxiously cheerful.
“Azaevi,” Antal greeted in tired daeyari. “What are you doing here?”
Yme inspected the factory with hands folded, crimson eyes bright, the way people looked at fair exhibits. The workers gawked at her, not least of all the foreman. Antal sighed heavier.
“I heard you were resting from your hunt,” Yme said. “And since you didn’t come for dinner…” Her tail flicked. “I thought I’d visit! Perhaps we could walk along the river? You could show me more of your city?”
Antal glanced at the open energy transformer. At Fi’s eye-roll as she drank her coffee. Then back to his mother. “I’m busy, azaevi.”
Yme cocked her head. “Busy?”
“These energy conduits need repairs.”
“Don’t you have humans to repair them? Isn’t that their job?”
“This is my city. And conduits are daeyari technology.”
“But—”
“Wait over there.” With a tone of defeat, Antal pointed Yme off the main floor, out of the way. “I’ll finish as quickly as I can. Then we can speak.”
Yme did as he asked, inspecting the machinery with a curious head tilt. Her eyes flicked over Fi, less curious, more flinty. As if Fi were a misfit thread in this tapestry.
So they still weren’t happy with each other. Good to know.
Antal rolled up his sleeves, baring the lean muscles of his arms as he worked. No longer smiling. He never smiled around the other daeyari.
“Fionamara?” he called. “I need a replacement current regulator. Can you bring one?”
Fi scrunched her nose. She walked over to a wall of tools and spare equipment, hands on her hips as she surveyed shelves of metal parts. She shrugged, grabbed a box, and stuffed several items into it.
Fi returned to Antal with her haul. When she set the box down on a table, he pulled his head out of the transformer—then frowned.
“What is this?” he asked.
“Replacement parts.”
“I asked you to get a current regulator.”