I felt the mattress sink in under his weight, and then he was beside me, warm and solid. He slid his arm under my head, gathering me to him with the other around my waist.
It was all I ever wanted—to feel that unyielding body behind me. I didn't care about anything else in all the world.
I reached out in the darkness and found his hand—at the end of the strong arm under my head. He curled his long fingers around mine, and I fell asleep.
The dream came, the press of fingers from some unknown assailant, the heat and fire building low in my belly, but then Io curled his arm around me tighter, pressing me into the solid wall of his body, and I was awake. He was there, and the dream did not feel like so much.
I fell back asleep in moments and did not dream again.
Twenty-Five
Everyone in Cosdam was talking about a stag that had been killed the day before by a hunter out in the godsgrass.
The hunter felled the deer with a single well-placed shot in the head, but when he tracked it through the grass and found the carcass, he nearly ran away in fright.
"I heard from Tomas himself," we overheard a man say as we ate breakfast in the taproom. "The deer weren't right, he said. Its fur were black as pitch. It had a mouth full of sharp teeth and a tail, long and spiky like a lizard, it were."
I almost dismissed it as some kind of tall tale until I heard thelizard tailpart. When he said it smelled like rot and lay in a circle of slimy, blackened godsgrass, I knew it had to be more of the falciferum.
Io paid the man an entire gold coin to take us to the hunter. Before long, we stood in front of a little white stone cottage set atop a rise on the other side of the Long Fork River.
The hunter, Tomas, pulled back the edge of a stiff canvas tarp stretched over a wooden hand cart. The falciferum's huge, oversized mouth was revealed, purple tongue hanging from the side of its jaws.
It looked like a normal deer in every respect except for that terrible big mouth, the dark color of its fur, and the sharp-looking, long, black tail.
"Do you know what it is, sir?" Tomas asked Io hopefully as we stared in silent dread at the carcass.
"Demon," Io said simply, reaching down to shift its head by grasping one of the antlers. The points looked needle sharp, and parts of them were covered by a sickly green-brown velvet. It made it look as though it had been lying somewhere moldering for a long while.
Tomas made the sign to ward off evil over his heart and shook his head gravely. "I hope you are wrong, sir. For all our sakes and by the will of the blessed Golden Queen upon the throne."
His words stunned me. I wondered if that was what they were calling me—after the events in the throne room. The way he said it, though, like a benediction—as though he was invoking some deity—made me extremely uncomfortable.
I felt an unexpected pressure in my chest. I was no deity. I was barely even a Queen, having been exiled from my own city.
“Burn the body,” Io said, ignoring the fact that Tomas and I shared almost identical looks of horror on our faces. “And don’t hunt alone for a while.”
Tomas nodded rapidly, his hand still fisted against his chest.
As we crossed back over the bridge that spanned the river, I glanced behind us to the cottage perched on its hill. Tomas stood, hand still on his chest, at the corner of his neat little house, staring warily out at the godsgrass plains.
Aben and Britaxia were in the sky, flying around the city in larger and larger circles looking for signs of ruined godsgrass. I could see the faint silhouette of their dragons against a bank of low-lying clouds in the distance.
Late season storms had been marching across the plains all morning. A streak of lightning could sometimes be seen under their bases, and I heard thunder faintly rumble a time or two, but the rain never managed to reach Cosdam.
Io and I spent the rest of the day shopping or strolling companionably along the streets of the dingy city, occasionally inquiring after anyone named Castille.
In the end, we learned that the only person named Castille anyone we asked had ever heard of, was a steamboat captain named Rizer Castille. He did a monthly trip between Cosdam and the western shores on the Thyella Sea. Once every six months, he took his boat up the river to Darrow, where he currently was. He wasn’t expected back for another two weeks.
Rizer Castille was a likely match for the infamous people-smuggler of Windemere. His trips to the Thyella lined up perfectly with him meeting a ship from Nightfall, and his trip to Darrow made sense in terms of his other lucrative trade. Castille was also known as one of the best sources for Mellitrium out of the Vildsphers.
A name was better than nothing, even if there was little we could do about it while he was away on his steamboat trip. I knew Io would eventually return to Cosdam, though. Some bloodthirsty part of me hoped I might somehow be there when he extracted the information he needed from Rizer Castille.
When we returned to the inn, we found that Aben and Britaxia were still out flying over the godsgrass.
The sun was edging toward the horizon, so Io left me in my room to bathe and change.
When he re-entered, looking refreshed and gorgeous with his wet hair pushed back across his head, he found me standing in the middle of the room, admiring my new sword. It was a lovely blade with a finely worked silver crosspiece.
