Chapter 11 Toran
Toran
There was a good chance Nes would run.
Toran hoped she wouldn’t. For Nephele’s sake, he’d given her Loriana’s ring. But he knew he wasn’t enough of a reason to keep her in the city. He could only hope her father was.
The yard surrounding the barracks was far from empty in the late morning.
Rows of picnic tables lined the barracks fence.
Eyes followed him like wolves on a hunt as he chose an empty table far from any others and sat with his bowl of stew.
The last time he’d taken a meal in the barracks, he’d passed out hungover in his cereal bowl and woken up behind the outhouse.
He pressed his spoon against the bottom of his bowl and tried not to think about the empty space against his sternum.
Loriana’s journal sat unopened on the table.
He hadn’t had the courage to read it since that night in the Guard’s Pub, and he wasn’t about to read it now with all the glares directed his way. He huddled down closer to his stew.
Toran was used to being on the outskirts.
He was the Crown. Most guards weren’t comfortable around him.
Which left him with Kohen, Quint, and eventually, Loriana for company.
But now Loriana was gone, and lately the Prince had taken to locking himself in either the monastery library or his own bedchambers.
It was just as well—Toran knew he hadn’t been good company as of late, and he and Kohen had always tolerated more than sought out one another.
Once, as payback for Kohen rubbing the insides of Toran’s uniforms with poison oak, he’d filled Kohen’s bathtub with vanishing eels—slippery things so translucent they often appeared invisible in water, until they sank their teeth into skin and turned blood red.
The sight and sound of a young, and very nude, Kohen running from his room squawking about monsters in his tub was forever etched in Toran’s mind.
He smiled at the memory around a mouthful of stew.
“Is the stew good?”
He nearly choked on the glob in his mouth. He hadn’t noticed Fell slide onto the bench across from him. With a grimace, he managed to swallow. “It’s all right.”
Fell nodded. And waited. As if Toran has been the one to interrupt his meal.
“Was there something you needed?”
“Needed? No.” Fell rubbed at the graying hairs on his chin. “But there is something you owe me.”
“What’s that?”
“An apology,” Fell said, his lip curling. “I don’t appreciate being undermined.”
“You were out of line,” Toran said. “You had no reason to arrest that girl.”
“You’re wrong. That girl is trouble.”
“Trouble does not make her the Witch.”
Fell leaned closer, his bony elbows digging into the wood of the table. “Have you forgotten who I am?”
Toran hadn’t forgotten. Fell was the Witchkiller. Eighteen years ago, he’d hunted down the previous Witch and drowned her before the Aeosch scouts could get there.
“I know better than anyone,” Fell sneered. “And you’d be wise to accept my help.”
Fell was right. Toran would be a fool not to accept the help of the only living Witchkiller. But he’d done far more foolish things over the past year. Besides, the King didn’t want Fell involved.
“No,” Toran said, lowering his voice, “I haven’t forgotten. How could I forget the man who beat me to a pulp because he was angry a seventeen-year-old was promoted to captain and broke his record?”
Fell’s lip curled further. “I was teaching you a lesson that day.”
“What lesson? How to take a hit? Because I learned that from you at a much earlier age.”
Fell acted like he hadn’t spoken. “Pride makes you sloppy, arrogant. And that will get you killed. Your enemies won’t hesitate to attack while you’re raising a toast or digging into a feast or fucking some pretty noble in the gardens.”
“I think you mistake me for the Prince.”
“A promotion does not make you better,” Fell continued. “Only hard work and vigilance will. That is the lesson I was trying to teach you.”
Toran glanced between Fell and his half-full bowl of unsatisfactory stew. Anger tightened his stomach. When he spoke, his voice was hard. “In case you’ve forgotten, Captain Fell, I am no longer your responsibility. I haven’t been. Not for a long time.”
“Haven’t you gotten it through your thick head yet?
” Fell spat. “You will always be my responsibility. Anything you do reflects back on me. Sure, it was the King who made you his heir’s Crown and then a captain, but I’m the one who brought you to this castle.
Your success makes me look good. Any failures and people begin to whisper—what the hell I was thinking, why I chose you.
Never mind I didn’t choose you, Toran. You were just the lost puppy who followed me home. ”
Fell was wrong. Toran didn’t remember much of his life before Gadore—he’d been so young—but he did remember how Fell had been the one to take his hand and lead him away from that mountain village. Not the other way around.
“Are you finished?” he asked. “I have things to do.”
Like making sure Nes didn’t back out of their deal.
Fell folded his hands in his lap. “Are you going to accept my help?”
“Surely you’re smart enough to know the answer to that.”
Fell’s face was as razor-edged and deadly as a blade. Even the older man’s emerging wrinkles seemed to sharpen the longer he glared at Toran. At last, Fell stood and left the table, hoarding an uncharacteristic silence that made Toran wary.
He thought of what King Harkett had said about how Fell changed after killing the first Witch. He didn’t understand how killing the Witch—saving his entire country—could make Fell what he was today.
“Want me to keep an eye on him, too?”
Toran turned to find Quint at his back. “No, you’ve got your hands full as it is.”
Quint slid into the seat Fell had just vacated. “She’s still here.”
“Didn’t try to leave?”
“She stayed in the Ditch all night,” Quint said. “She has a room above a gambling den called the Siren’s Hair.” Quint pulled a key from his jacket pocket, setting it on the table and sliding it across to Toran. “Now you do, too.”
Toran picked up the key, noting the flourish of a fish tail on the end. “Thanks.”
Quint nodded and waited. Around them, guards continued to eat, their conversations flowing between mouthfuls.
“Do you think I’m making a mistake?” Toran asked at last. “Not accepting Fell’s help?”
“I think you’re wise not to trust that man,” Quint said.
He stirred the remains of his stew around the bottom of the bowl. “Despite the fact that he’s the only person in the world with experience capturing the Witch?”
“He’s the only person with experience killing the Witch. There’s a difference.”
A difference Toran had been trying not to think about. The Witch was indirectly responsible for Loriana’s death. She deserved to die. He wanted to be the one to kill her.
Setting his spoon down, he leaned over the table and lowered his voice. “Even if Nes manages to sniff out the Witch, I have no way of capturing her as the King wants. It’s not like she’ll come quietly.”
Quint’s eyebrows drew together. “Then we find a way.”
“Easier said than done.”
“No one said this was going to be easy, Toran. But the King trusted you with this mission. He expects you to give it your all.”
“I will.” And he meant it. Despite his feelings about the Witch, the last thing he wanted to do was disappoint King Harkett again.
Quint glanced around, eyes pausing on the nearest occupied tables. “You know,” he whispered, “we aren’t the first ones to try to capture the Witch.”
Toran stared at his best friend and found the answer in his eyes.
“Aeos,” they said at the same time.
Quint nodded again.
“They’ve been after the Witch to harvest her power for centuries,” Toran mused aloud. “Surely they’ve found some way to capture or bind her.”
“I’ll look into it,” Quint said. He glanced at his pocket watch. “But you’ve got a meeting soon.”
Toran eyed the time as well. Less than half an hour until he had to meet Nes in the Ditch.
Quint swung his legs over the bench and stood. “I’ll let you know what I find.”
Toran gave his friend a short wave as he left. The rest of the tables cleared as the lunch hour ended. And once again, Toran was alone with his stew. He pushed the bowl away. He’d lost his appetite.
His eyes found Loriana’s journal. Every time he looked at the cover, all he could hear was the King telling him her ship had gone down in a storm, telling him the love of his life was dead. Quint had said he needed to read it. He pressed a hand to the top of the leather but still didn’t open it.
“You know, words don’t bite.”
Toran jumped. He whipped around to find Nes atop the barracks fence, one leg idly swinging back and forth. The other she’d pulled to her chest, her chin propped on her kneecap. She looked like she’d gotten comfortable.
“How did you get up there?”
She raised a brow at him, a light wind ruffling some loose strands of her hair.
It was tied back today, in a gently sloping plait that hugged one side of her neck.
Loriana’s hair had been one color—a black darker than the space behind his eyelids—and so short Toran doubted she could have gathered it in her hands, let alone braid it as Nes had hers. But Nes’s braid looked…nice.
He grabbed Loriana’s journal off the table and tucked it inside his jacket.
“I have my ways,” she said lightly.
Toran ran a hand down his face. “Look, you can’t be in here. The barracks are reserved for guards only.”
She shrugged. “I’m not inside the barracks.”
“That’s not the point. What are you doing here? We were supposed to meet in the Ditch.”
She stared at him, the corners of her blue eyes scrunching. “You were having me watched,” she said. “I figured I’d return the favor. Your friend is cute, by the way. Very chiseled.”
Toran grunted to cover the pang of disappointment in his chest. “Quint won’t be interested in you. And I don’t know what you’re talking about. Quint had errands to run in the Ditch.”
Nes’s lips stretched into an unamused smile. “We both proved ourselves clever and capable in the Walled Prison. Let’s not start pretending otherwise now.”
“Fine.” He stood from the table and nodded to the flask at her hip. “I assume you restocked?”
“You could say that.”
“Great,” he said, though he felt anything but.
The idea of magic, even diluted, made him anxious.
He’d grown up going to monastery services where the Brotherhood preached about how the Witch stole her magic from the Goddess, Nephele—how it was their duty as Nephele’s followers to set that stolen magic free.
And while the magic scraped off trees was not stolen from the Goddess, using it was still a sin, not to mention illegal.
Magic was good only when used by the Goddess, she the only one capable of taming it.
By allowing Nes to consume magic, he was essentially condoning criminality, and worse, he was letting her taint her soul with its evil.
But she was his best shot at finding the Witch and finding her quickly.
“Then let’s get this over with.”
Nes raised a hand to her forehead. “Yes, sir, Captain, sir.”
He clenched his jaw. Failure and loss rolled like an ocean wave through his tense muscles.
Both hands braced on the top of the fence, Nes hopped down. Her feet barely touched grass before he tugged her out of sight around the other side of a storage shed. “You can’t be in here.”
Nes rolled her eyes so hard he half hoped her head would roll with them. “You said that already.”
“And yet you aren’t listening.”
“I listened,” she said. “I just didn’t obey. I’m not a bloodhound, so don’t treat me like one. Try to leash me”—she showed him her teeth—“and you’ll find, unlike that book you’re so afraid of, I do bite.”
He couldn’t tell if she was serious. “Not a dog,” he said but felt himself crack a bit as the words left his lips. “Noted.”
She narrowed her eyes. From the pocket of her cuffed pants, she pulled Loriana’s ring. She held it up between them like a bargaining chip.
“I’m here to hold up my end of the deal. Nothing more, nothing less. If that doesn’t work for you, then maybe I should bow out now.”
“You can’t do that.”
She huffed a laugh. “I am not beholden to you. I can do whatever I want.”
“Actually, you can’t.” It was his turn to grin. “What’s that game they play in the gambling dens? The popular one with individual termination cards?”
“Blank?”
He nodded. “That’s it. You can’t back out of our deal because I know the one card that can take you out of the game.”
She stared at him, her gaze hard but the edges shaky.
“You want your father out of prison,” he said.
“Should that happen, for any reason, I know exactly who to blame. And if you leave the city, I’ll hunt you both down.
So if you would be so kind as to drink or take or whatever it is you need to do with that stuff in your flask and sniff out the Witch for me, it would be much appreciated. ”
Her fingers sprang shut around his crystal ring. “Fine,” she snapped.
“Fine,” he repeated, matching her tone.
“Ass,” she muttered as she pulled the flask from her belt and took a swig.
He felt his teeth grind a bit more. “What was that?”
She replaced the flask and closed her eyes. “Nothing.”
Nes’s whole face smoothed, as if she’d rested it against the softest of pillows. She raised her hands and wiggled her fingers dramatically.
Though he got the sense this was all for show, he kept his mouth shut. He knew the ability she wielded was real. It was just a matter of getting the wielder to use it.
Nes opened one eye, sneaking a peek at him. A giggle crossed her lips, and he scowled. She promptly shut her eyes again. Seconds passed, and the smile on her face grew in intensity.
At last, he said, “If you aren’t going to take this seriously, then just leave. I need to find the Witch to keep more innocent women from dying, and you’re wasting my time.”
Her eyes flew open. “You think I don’t know that?”
“No,” he spat. “I know you know that. You just don’t care. About me or all the people being drowned.”
She shoved herself into his personal space like an avalanche.
“Don’t you dare say that,” she seethed. “You know nothing about me. I care. Not a day goes by when I don’t think about the women drowned in that Goddess-forsaken well.
” Her breath was hot, the freckles on her face blending better as her skin turned red.
“Being born with magic doesn’t make the Witch easier to find.
Do you know how much magic is in this city?
Of course not. You prefer to pretend Gadore is this urban paradise. Well, it’s not and—”
She cut off. Shock ran into her features for only a second before confusion overtook it.
“And?” he prompted.
“And I…” She hesitated.
He watched her tongue roll around the inside of her cheek.
She inhaled, a frown taking hold as she exhaled. “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I think I found something.”