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He crouched down beside me, and I realized that I was still straddling his guy. Should probably do something about that, as soon as I made sure that he wasn’t going to attack me again. And figured out why he had in the first place.
I poked him in the chest. “What’s your deal, again?”
He didn’t say anything.
His face was still too red, his eyes too prominent, and his stare too distant. He looked like he was reevaluating his life choices. Tall Guy didn’t have that problem, and after a moment, he answered.
“There is a series of heroic deeds among our people,” he told me. “Or ‘challenges’ might be a better word. Nine in all that, if performed before witnesses, grant . . .” He frowned. “There is no equivalent in English. One is remembered in song and legend thereafter, counted among the bravest of the brave, and greatly admired by one’s fellow warriors.”
“And that has what to do with me?”
“One of the nine is to defeat a vargr in battle,” he admitted.
Great.
“Well, I’m not one, so jumping me before I have breakfast won’t bring you any renown,” I told Angry Ass, and climbed off him.
He flushed some more, I guess at the implication that he’d tried to take me down when I was at less than my best. But he didn’t say anything. Maybe because I still had his knife.
Dorina had shoved it in my—our—pocket, why I had no idea. To make the point that she didn’t need it to kill him? To keep as a souvenir? To leave me a message?
A spot of blood had run off the blade and stained my sweats. It wasn’t much, and it wasn’t mine, but it showed that, despite my best efforts, she’d gotten a blade in him. I swallowed, feeling sick.
“What do you mean, you’re not vargr?” Coffee Lover asked. “The king said—”
“The king doesn’t know everything,” I rasped.
There was a stunned silence, like I’d blasphemed in church.
“The king doesn’t know everything about me,” I rephrased, shaking my head to clear it.
Tall Guy looked confused. He had a long, somewhat homely face for a fey, with a slightly bulbous tip to the nose, and eyes that were too small and too close together. It made him look like a puzzled greyhound.
I decided I needed a name for him. I didn’t usually bother, since I couldn’t tell them apart anyway, but he seemed to be in charge. Or maybe just older. He had that seen-it-all-didn’t-think-much-of-it world-weariness of an old soldier. He was also something approaching eight feet tall, putting him almost a foot above the rest of the fey, including Caedmon. So I thought I’d remember.
“You have a name?” I asked, expecting the usual speech I got from the fey before I’d learned not to ask that question. They tended to rattle off all the nicknames they’d won over the years, I suppose as a way of telling you something about themselves. But it was annoying.
Except for this time, when I got exactly two syllables.
“Olfun.”
“Okay, Olfun. I’m having kind of a . . . problem . . . lately. Call it a split personality; call it whatever you want. Just don’t fuck with it, okay? ’Cause I’m not always the one in charge.”
The confusion didn’t go away, but he didn’t ask any stupid questions. “All right.”
I handed him back his guy’s knife, because the fey are weird about their weapons, and I didn’t need any more trouble.
“See what I can do about the coffee,” I said, and went downstairs.
* * *
—
Mircea wasn’t answering his phone. He was probably at the consul’s, where the wards played hell with modern tech. I knew that. It didn’t keep me from wanting to punch through the wall, however.
I was on the front porch, because I needed some air and it was getting harder to find any place to be alone around here. I’d called Mircea because I didn’t know who else to call, but I didn’t need him. I needed his daughter, and she wasn’t reachable by phone.
Or any other way I knew.
