Chapter Two A Better Liar than Anyone #3
“So this theft is more just than going through the established channels?” Lorzok asked.
“Terrible, but there it is,” Jubilee muttered. “Who’d she steal it from?”
“Purchased,” Briona corrected as Jubilee popped the bit of cheese into her mouth.
Eating. Kell remembered enough of Saeldian’s explanations on how people’s actions held more meaning than their words.
Jubilee had already decided this was retrieval, not theft.
Kell rubbed his forehead. “Are you suggesting that Lady Tarm was unaware the item had been stolen, let alone where it had been stolen from?”
“Correct. We’d traced the item, but we arrived too late. Now we’re on to the next attempt to retrieve it for our client.”
“Where was the spell gem stolen from?” Jubilee asked, and Briona’s smirk shifted in approval for someone asking the right question.
“A small domain of the Feywild.”
The front legs of Kell’s chair thumped as he leaned forward. “There it is.”
His hands trembled. He squeezed his knees and tried to smell burnt sugar and smoked tea, the soot of the cheery fireplace, waxed wood. But the memory of warm, sweet almost-honey, almost-pear starflowers was too vivid to be banished.
Damn it to the Hells. Briona knew too much about all of them.
Lorzok gasped. “The Feywild! We’ve been trying to find a way there for ten years. Longer for Kell, actually, he—”
Kell raised a quelling hand. “No.”
“No?” Lorzok twisted in his chair to face Kell. “This is what you always wanted! How can you—”
He had to stop this. Damn it! A chance to return to the Feywild, to go home after all these years, and he had to say no. Worse, he had to tell Lorzok no. “The owner of the stone’s probably powerful. I’d bet they are the archfey of that domain,” Kell said.
Lorzok looked puzzled. “Yes, that makes sense—oh. Oh, I see.”
“What?” Jubilee asked. “What are you oh-ing about?”
Saeldian opened their mouth, but Kell spoke over them. “Think of all the stories you’ve ever heard about the fey folk. How much do they like being deceived?”
Jubilee pursed her lips. “They don’t.”
“Right!” Lorzok exclaimed. “If the archfey discovers the deception, we’re part of the blame. We’ll be made into donkeys! Or toads! Or sent on a terrible quest. Or…”
“We’re bound to this bargain, but how are we supposed to pull it off?
” Jubilee’s voice rose to an anxious pitch.
Smart. This wasn’t going to be as simple as pocketing a shiny and going for a walk to drop it off.
The Feywild had been Kell’s home, but only a piece of it, and that piece was gone now, eaten.
He nodded to Jubilee, approving. “Jubilee’s question is the same as my own.”
“How is an engineering question. I didn’t hire you to follow a preplanned heist-by-numbers like any dull-witted henchman. You are resourceful,” Briona said, addressing Jubilee and Saeldian, then she turned to look at Lorzok to say, “And clever. And fey-touched,” she added, an afterthought for Kell.
Mariel spoke up, all gravel and diction. “You aren’t new meat, and Briona is paying you all to figure it out.”
Jubilee eyed Kell, looking for something that made his time in the Feywild noticeable, like goat ears or movements that left sparkles in their wake. “You’re fey-touched? You’ve been to the Feywild?”
“I am, and I was a child there,” Kell said, “but I don’t know how they know that.”
Briona shrugged. “It wasn’t hard to hear your story, Kell. Most of the urchins you knew in Baldur’s Gate still live there, even if they’re not urchins anymore.”
“Who sold me out?”
Briona scoffed. “Oh, cheer up. If you play it right, you’ll not only have a chance to see your childhood home again, but you could stay there. Isn’t that a good bargain?”
“Why did you involve them?” Kell flung his hand in Saeldian’s direction.
“Because I need you both,” Briona said. “Saeldian, you must be present when the gem is returned. I have been told that the mounting has illusion magic on it, and illusions are a specialty of yours. You will need to place it where it belongs and then make sure the magic looks like it was never disturbed.”
“No one else can do it?”
“You’re uniquely suited to this task.”
“And we’re bound to do it, so I guess we’re bickering for no reason,” Saeldian said.
“Well, then. If that’s settled,” Briona said to everyone at the table. “Any more questions or complaints before we get on with it?”
“I have terms of my own,” Kell said, glowering at Saeldian and Jubilee.
Saeldian sighed and rubbed their temples with long, elegant fingers. “Let’s hear it.”
“This job is over when I say it is, and not one moment earlier. Until that moment, we are a team. You will not betray us, desert us, deceive us, or harm us until I say it’s over.”
“Neatly put!” Saeldian would have used that tone to praise a puppy learning to sit. Jubilee looked stormy and folded her arms while Saeldian gave Kell a You’re a good boy look that made him itch for an honest fight. “Anything else?”
Saeldian would poke until he lost it and then turn it around on him. Not today. “Only one thing. When the job is over, I will give you one minute to get out of my sight. And if I see you again? It will be the last time, I promise you that.”
Saeldian snorted. “Once you’re in the Feywild, you’re never coming back. All right, let’s bargain. What good will Waterdhavian gold do you where you’re going? Maybe you should give us your vault key to split.”
“I was going to do something good with it, so I’d throw that key in the harbor first.”
Angry sparks lit in Saeldian’s night-brown eyes. “Screw you, Kell Redsong.”
“Again?”
Saeldian sprang from their seat, their long, enameled fingernails aimed straight for Kell’s face—and then yelped as Mariel scooped them up in mid-launch.
Kell didn’t even see the blur. Mariel set them back on their feet, delivering a disappointed look at them until Saeldian glared down at the floor.
The bodyguard reached out and lifted their chin. “He baited you, but are you blameless?”
Her accent was from south of here. Elturel? But her voice sounded like wagon wheels on an old road. And that expression had the power of a hundred disappointed mentors.
Saeldian shrugged, uncomfortable. “I’m more blameless than he thinks I am. I never—”
“Saer Charmhand, that is not what I asked.”
Saeldian tilted their face up to the bodyguard and huffed. “No. I’m not blameless.”
They settled in their chair. Jubilee offered them cheese, and after a sulky moment, they accepted.
Lorzok shifted. “You’ll be back in the Feywild, Kell. You’ll be home. If we steal to do it. And if we can trust these two.”
Jubilee leaned closer to Saeldian’s ear. “Home?”
“Long story,” Saeldian muttered.
“I was a firstborn child,” Kell said, not willing to let Saeldian tell his long story. “The classic price of a fey bargain. I don’t know what my parents traded me for.”
Jubilee gasped, dismayed. “They gave you away?”
Everyone reacted like that. Kell gave Jubilee a reassuring smile. “I don’t remember it, if that’s what you’re worried about. I was a baby—”
“Three days old,” Saeldian said, just as he did.
Kell glared at them. “My family chose each other. That’s who I lost.”
Jubilee looked like she didn’t know what to think about that, but she put her hand on Saeldian’s shoulder without breaking her stare at Kell. “Easy promise to make. I accept. We’re a team—and when the job’s done, we’ll be well off seeing the back of you.”
Saeldian sighed. “I accept. We’re a team, and when the job’s done, we are done.”
Briona tilted her head inquisitively and pointed her gaze at Lorzok. “Well?”
Oh Hells. Lorzok.
Kell was so busy being angry that the chance to go home to the Feywild depended on trusting Saeldian that he had forgotten the important thing about fey bargains.
You could get your heart’s desire, but only at a cost. Working with Saeldian was the last thing he wanted, but he’d started bargaining a way to do it without a moment’s hesitation.
But Lorzok didn’t lie, didn’t cheat, didn’t steal, and he’d have to do all of that to help Kell find a way home.
He’d been wrong about the price being trusting Saeldian not to betray him again.
The price was Lorzok compromising his principles to help a friend, and he would never be the same again.
“I’ll take the job,” Kell said. “But leave Lorzok out of it.”
“You’ll need him.”
“I won’t ask him to—”
“I accept,” Lorzok interrupted. “We’re stealing the gem to return it. We’re a team, and when the job is done, enough will be put right to forgive what has been done wrong.”
Outside the dining room, the hum of conversation hushed as Lorzok’s promise rose in the air.
“I can’t let you do it.”
“You can’t let me do anything. I decide what I do. And you need to go home again, and you need to do this…robbery?”
“Heist,” Jubilee murmured.
Kell ignored her. “We can find some other way.”
“Heist,” Lorzok said. He nodded at Jubilee in thanks. “That’s not what I mean. I mean that you need to do this heist.”
“What? Why?”
“Because sometimes, the only way to be free of your past is to return to it.”
Kell didn’t need to return—not to thieving, and not to Saeldian. But Kell could stop a thunderstorm before he could stop Lorzok once he decided on the right thing to do.
Once, Kell had been the price for a heart’s desire. Maybe his mother or father had felt the same weight in their heart when they had set Kell down in the mushroom ring and turned to go back home. When they faced what they had paid for, did they want to take him back?
There was one difference this time. When Kell returned to the Feywild, his friend would be by his side.
He bumped Lorzok’s shoulder with his own. “Thank you.”
He turned to Briona, who watched the whole thing with a smug smile. “I accept. You’ve got yourself a team. When do we hit the first target?”