“How about this,” he said with wicked glee, “I will chase him down for you, and I will watch asyouskewer him with my sword.”
Heat welled in my chest, a flicker of rage. A thirst for foul, golden blood at the tip of my blade. Oh, to sink it deep, deep, deep into his rotten flesh, to draw from him a final plea, a final gasp.
“That look of murder suits you,” murmured Adrik.
He was staring at me with bright interest, with that alive gaze that had scared me so in the beginning. I did not look away as our eyes tangled and I lingered just a moment longer than I needed. The fire crackled with renewed mirth, almost as if to laugh. The spirit in the hearth must have had a meddlesomehand in bringing Adrik to me. It seemed a strange coincidence that all the stoves in the house had gone out at once.
Adrik still watched me, arms folded, but his face had darkened and his jaw clenched as it did when he was in consideration. He shivered despite his heavy fur cloak. In the absence of good-humor, he looked sharp and almost a little cruel.
"I must confess that there was a kernel of truth to your claim," he said roughly. “I, too, am not exempt from hiding what I’d rather forget.” He swept so swiftly across the room, I caught his movement only by the stir of the air—a breeze of snow and sweet wood. He sat in the chair, rigid and tense.
“May I tell you a tale?”
That afternoon, while the skies brightened for the first time in a week, Adrik told me the tale of the prince of bargains, of the tidekissed warrior.
It may seem like I’ve lived my whole life in Wildemire, and I often wonder if I have—if the life I lived before was only a nightmare. This life is so different from the other. In truth, only five winters have passed since the wind brought me here—back then, I followed its breath wherever it blew, for I was restless and desperate.
I grew up near Kresting; behind the far cliffs, where the sea is always angry and the rock whispers only of war. I grew up half-human in faerie lands and half-faerie in human lands, and I was lonely. My mother is the bargain-queen of the Broken Shores—the wicked, cunning, cutthroat profiteer of human greed and despair. She is a fickle queen and she ruled with great temper over her court, over me. I was never to be her heir, but I was her henchman in seeking the desperate and the greedy, in luring them to her.
Later, when my powers had grown, she built me a throne beside hers and made me steal years from those who sought me out for lesser bargains. To ensure that the half-human blood in my veins did not spoil me too soon. I believe that she loved me, in her own misled ways. That she was scared to watch me wither while she remained forever young.
The bargains changed me. I was, after all, only half of a faerie and such magic weighs heavily on the human soul. I became strange, like a wolf gone feral from a slowly rotting wound. I was young, just nineteen, when a faerie prince of the north came to our court, and I was strong and I had much to prove. I sought to impress him, and impress him I did. He took me under his wing, for it turned out I had a talent for the sword and a penchant for bloodshed.
For three winters, I lent him my strength, and I slayed without thought any and all who dared to challenge him. For three winters, I paused never long enough to allow for a breath, for I knew… I knew deep, deep within that I’d see a monster if I looked.
Then…
Then came the war.
I shuddered. I knew little about the winter-wars in the north except that the snow had fallen crimson and that all four sides had lost more than they’d gained.
Adrik said nothing of that war. He said only, “After the war, I wandered without aim through the land until I ended up in Wildemire—much like you. This town… It finds the right people at the right time.”
A sheen veiled his gaze, as if he’d gone to another place, another time. A place of cracked cliffs and a court amid rocks and waves. Or a place far north, where the winds still carried the stench of blood seven winters after the war had ended. Such guiltshadowed him that my own chest burned with it. I grazed—with a cautious, trembling finger—the white-knuckled fist he’d made on his thigh. I did not know how else to ease his grief.
He flinched. I withdrew my hand, cheeks ablaze with shame, but he captured it and held me fast. “Please,” he breathed, “A little while longer.”
I relented with a sharp breath and I cradled his hand as one might hold a precious, broken thing. I looked, for the first time, at his good humor and saw it for what it was: An act of defiance. To look grief in the eye and smile just to spite it. This, I understood. Had I not, for a long time, lived just to spite death?
I said ruefully, “I have, in the face of hardship, grown bitter and callous. I did not think someone who had suffered could remain soft and kind, and so I assumed you had not suffered. I envied you for that. I think I envy you even more now that I know you choose kindness despite suffering.”
Adrik did not answer for a long while; so long I feared I’d insulted him, or that I'd not made my meaning clear. “You are rather articulate for someone who’s unused to being around people.”
“I have plenty of time to read books,” I replied drily.
“Ah, right. You are a bookseller,” he said with a twinkle that told me this was another lie of mine he had never quite believed. He sobered quickly. “You speak harshly of yourself. I’ve seen you bitter only from fear and never from malice. I wonder who or what made you believe such things about yourself.”
Perhaps, the lonely child in me recognized the lonely child in him, and longed to let him know that he was not alone. Perhaps the little girl who’d chased her own shadow through the forest longed more than anything to be seen.
It was she who said in a broken, fearful whisper, “I was lonely too.”
The part of me that still echoed with cruel whispers, the part that thought it recognized in every glance the glint of scorn, reeled in panic.
As strange as a hag and twice as mad.
He would know. He would see the stain of madness I carried. I cast these voices aside and rasped from my too-tight throat, “My mother heard the spirits. The villagers pronounced her mad. We lived too far in the forest to often go into town; when we did, the children avoided me. They knew of the madness.”
“Mad?” Adrik scrunched his face in anger. “Small-minded, they are. More afraid of believing in the unseen than they are of the unseen itself; though they should be. The spirits do not take kindly to being forgotten.” He must have caught the terror on my face, for he softened. “She must have been a wise woman, your mother.”
