Chapter 5
Jesamin
Despite the trap he’d fallen for so easily, the bastard walked ahead of me with a swagger in his step.
I set my jaw, silently fuming, glaring at his broad shoulders and that ridiculously lush mane.
Vampires. I offered to help him of my own free will, ready to risk my life, and he thought to bargain servitude from me in exchange?
I should’ve known better. They were selfish to the core. Nothing good ever came from them without first selling away your blood, or worse, your life.
But I was willing to admit that my request was also selfish. In the Argent Collegium, the Master Artificers possessed a grand total of five pieces of Fae Artifice.
They had been disarmed ages past—whatever injurious intent they once possessed, they were now no more than inert lumps of metal. Being allowed to examine them was less an instruction in how the Fae created their machina than a simple exercise in recognizing chthonium.
But clearly, destructive Fae Artifice still existed, and someone currently had access to it.
To go Below surrounded by a crew of vampires was my best chance—no, my only chance—to retrieve more chthonium devices for the Collegium. If we had more pieces to study, to deconstruct, one day we might be able to use the same principles and engineering as the ancient Artificers of the Fae.
Not only would I retrieve the devices, but I would do everything in my power to find the people of Lonmire, and see the Artificer responsible for this brought down.
And then…spend a year in Lord Wroth’s odious company.
Assuming I survived.
He tossed his head, a jaunty tilt to his spiraling black horns, and laughed at something Bram said before spitting out another scarlet gob. Amazing he could laugh at all, given the enormous quantity of blood that had poured from his nose and throat not an hour ago.
The device planted in the mound had been of human make; whoever had hidden it had known a vampire would come sniffing around, and had loaded the tiny canister with a fine powder of stinging nettles, sumac, and whatever proprietary ingredients the alchemist preferred, a combination potent enough to render even a fiend blind to scent for a few days.
Worse, his knights found that the same powder had been dusted far and wide across the fields, rendering them all nose-blind, though they hadn’t taken the full brunt of it as Lord Wroth had. The trail could have gone anywhere from there.
“Is this wise, Jesamin?” Mathis drew closer, squinting at the fiend.
He had caught up to us before we left for Lonmire; Lionel was being kept in Owlhorn under the supervision of several knights and Talos.
Both of our horses, borrowed courtesy of Lord Wroth, were covered in bloodied stamina sigils, painted on by the sanguimancer.
I had to admit Bram was quite useful, and not nearly as teeth-grindingly frustrating to speak to as his liege. He had examined the powder residue in a world-weary sort of way, but hadn’t taken out his temper on me as I slowly and carefully deconstructed the device for him to access it.
“A year of servitude?” I sighed, studying Wroth’s mane.
The texture seemed to be somewhere between human hair and long silky fur.
Strangely, it didn’t look out of place against the dark blue coat he wore.
It was only when my eyes moved downward, to where his breeches ended and his bestial legs bent backwards to terminate in long paw-padded feet, that I remembered I wasn’t staring at another nobleman, albeit an unusually large one.
“One way or another, it has to happen. That Artifice isn’t only valuable knowledge, it’s dangerous as hell in the wrong hands.
I was asking myself if…if whoever set off that device knew what it would do, or if this was all a terrible accident.
But the sumac powder aimed at Lord Wroth makes it quite clear it was deliberate, and any Artificer who plans such a thing must be apprehended and judged by the Collegium. ”
Mathis cleared his throat. “What I mean is, why must it be you?” My man-at-arms met my eyes squarely. “Must you travel Below?”
I turned my gaze back to Wroth’s horns. “Yes. He’ll need a Master Artificer for a certainty.”
“There are others.”
“Old men.” I shrugged. “Tired men, over a week away by carriage, and that’s allowing for good weather.
I’m here now, I’m willing, and we all know it’s not just my ego speaking when I claim I’m good.
I certainly wouldn’t choose to hand over the reins to that damned snob lai Orros.
He receives quite enough hero worship already. ”
The silence that fell between us was fraught, and I flinched when Mathis broke it again.
“Oksana’s death almost killed your father,” he said quietly. “You were the only thing in this world that kept him going when the healer told him his legs were lost. What do you think will happen if you die down there, and he doesn’t even have a body to bury?”
I swallowed the lump that tried to lodge in my throat, staring out at the horizon. To break my father’s heart like that... “I’m trying to look on the bright side, Math. To do some good here.”
“There is no bright side in the Below.” Wroth’s deep rumble of a voice almost terrified me sideways off the saddle. He was silent as the grave when he wanted to be; I hadn’t even noticed him fall back from the head of the procession, slowing down until he was almost touching my knee as he walked.
The fiend was still almost of a height with me. I hardly had to look down. Those bright blue eyes, limned in stark black, focused on me so intensely that I shifted in the saddle, uncomfortable beneath his gaze.
“It’s a fair question.” Mathis gave Wroth the kind of look that had frozen me in place as a little girl, when I still took my fencing and archery lessons from him—the kind that demanded to know just what idiocy I was thinking.
“Quite fair.” Since Lonmire, Wroth had been in an unaccountably good mood.
Or what passed for one, given that he’d come back across the bridge with a sheet of blood down his front.
“Allow me to swear my own solemn oath, as fel Arron here has sworn one to her vassals: if she dies, I will bring her body back.” He showed his teeth in the smile that was more of a deranged snarl.
“Assuming it’s in one piece, or even in solid form. ”
Mathis turned an unhealthy shade of purple. Never a good sign.
“Have you seen many, ah…non-solid bodies in the Below?” I asked, intending to defuse Mathis before he exploded and got himself torn apart. The arch tone I was aiming for failed miserably, becoming morbid curiosity the moment the words left my mouth.
Wroth stared at the path ahead for a long moment, his eyes distant, and shook his head as though sloughing off memories. His soft, slightly rounded ears folded flat against his mane.
“I saw bodies in every form you could imagine,” he growled softly. “I will not think less of you, fel Arron, if you choose to remain above.”
“But you’ll need an Artificer.” My fingers tightened around the reins. “Especially if there’s more devices like this.”
“I didn’t say we didn’t need you. I said I would not blame you.”
“Then I’m still on the crew, and that’s all there is to it.”
To my surprise, Wroth chuckled, tail whipping about. “You cannot say she doesn’t possess the bravery of five strong men.”
Mathis was not amused. His mouth had twisted down at the corners, and suddenly he looked his age, shadows hiding in the lines in his face. “I wouldn’t call it bravery. I’d call it foolhardy recklessness.”
He spurred his horse, cantering past us. He was likely already composing his argument to my father to have me locked in my shop and the windows boarded over.
“Your man is defensive.” Lord Wroth seemed content to walk near me, and I forced myself to sit upright with lady-like grace. If he deigned to speak politely, I would deign to hold a conversation.
“He practically helped raise me. His defensiveness comes from the heart.” I exhaled slowly, my eyes on Mathis’s receding back.
It was a safer place to stare than at the fiend only an arm’s length away; I could even smell Wroth, a not at all unpleasant scent, like sea salt and pine trees, but the coppery reek of drying blood almost drowned it out.
“Can you describe where we’re going? You seem quite confident in venturing Below. ”
Wroth wrinkled his broad nose. “Liuridar. The forsaken land. The device stank of it.”
I repeated the unfamiliar word, and Wroth nodded. “It is…I suppose you would call it a city. It is a world unto itself. And it’s as close as you can come to standing in hell.”
He was not bolstering my confidence, but it was better to know if I was going to risk breaking my father’s heart.
“That place…” He thought about it. “Do you know how places have feelings? Like a warm home. You walk through the door, and you feel safe and loved? And even when no one is home, you know that comfort, that warmth, has soaked into its walls?”
I nodded, frowning at him.
“Liuridar has a feeling soaked into it as well. It hates.”
Wroth drew my gaze back to him, and there was a stark hollowness in his eyes.
“I pray we will not have to venture into the city itself. There will be areas of safety. Bubbles of relative peace. We will be able to survive, if we’re canny and keep our eyes open.
But you will feel that hate crushing down on you with every second you spend in that place.
It doesn’t want anything so simple as your death. It wants your suffering.”
“How long were you Below?” I whispered.
Something bright and furious flickered to life in his eyes.
“Long enough to promise myself I would never go back.” His lips peeled back from his glittering, pointed teeth. “But of course the noblemen plot, and plan, and whisper treason…and now I must return.”
“Noblemen?” I remembered Anto, and his man with the fancy coat and the big smile…paying him with the chthonium coin.