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“I’m not the one planning to consolidate power and use it to destroy them! You will never obtain peace this way—none of us will!” he told the trolls. “Don’t be foolish!”
But it was too late. The troll leaders had made their decision. They were gambling on the power and wealth Efridis and her ally had promised. And without them, we had no friends in the room.
“I thought you said you’d never follow another fey king?” I reminded them desperately.
“She no king,” Gravel Face rumbled, and I contemplated banging my head into the ground.
Efridis glanced at Louis-Cesare. “Finish this.”
I looked at Caedmon, who looked back at me. And for the first time, I saw something other than perfect self-assurance in those green eyes. For the first time, I saw something that looked a lot like panic.
And then shock, as another voice rang out across the room.
It was as loud as someone using a megaphone, and so startling that I jumped, and sliced open my back on the sword. While Louis-Cesare stopped his run, halfway across the huge space, staring around in confusion. But not for long.
“Alfhild!”
Louis-Cesare’s face abruptly turned gleeful. “Mircea! Come to watch your daughter die?”
And then, out of the side of my eye, I saw a hazy version of Mircea shimmer into existence. I could see right through him, out to the snowy mountains beyond. He looked like a ghost, so much so that I wasn’t sure what I was seeing.
Until I realized: he was in our heads.
“Your head,” he told me. “I am transmitting this through my link with you.”
So I was Wi-Fi now? I took a look at the twelve-inch-long dagger in Louis-Cesare’s hand, and decided I didn’t mind so much.
“I came to bargain,” Mircea said, and Alfhild laughed.
“There is nothing you have that I want!”
“Isn’t there?” He held something up.
Something familiar.
“Keep it,” she snapped, looking at the little ivory casket that had once held a potent magical shield. “Consider it a souvenir of your failure!”
“Oh, it’s already a souvenir,” Mircea said mildly. “One the consul took the night she visited your palazzo, all those years ago. I thought it in poor taste at the time, but I’ve since learned that she has excellent . . . instincts. As soon as I heard who we were dealing with, I took a ley line to Paris, in order to retrieve it.”
Louis-Cesare’s eyes narrowed. “What are you talking about? If you think—”
“What I think is that you’ve never asked yourself an obvious question: what happened to your bones, Alfhild?”
There was a sudden silence. For a moment, all I could hear was my heartbeat and the wind whistling through the cave mouth. And then—
“You’re bluffing!”
Mircea’s ghostly form opened the little casket and snapped something. And Louis-Cesare jerked, as if he’d been stabbed. A dark eyebrow rose.
“Believe me now?”
Alfhild snarled. “If you had what you say, why not destroy me?”
“I told you; I’m here to bargain.” He looked down at the contents of the box. “And to make a solemn vow, to return your bones to Faerie where you can be reborn among your own kind. A peaceful sleep, and then a new life. Your exile undone, your past forgotten. Or . . .”
“Or what?”
Mircea’s voice changed. “Or you might want to recall that we have portals, too. And a new alliance with the demon lords. I’m thinking of a very nasty hell region, where little creatures play among the acid pools. Creatures that other demon kind come to that world to feed upon. Think of it, Alfhild: an eternity of living in a hellscape, only to reincarnate, over and over, because you can’t die. An eternity of being born to live a short, terrified existence, until you become prey for some stronger being. An eternity of never knowing who you are, who you were, anything but pain and fear and death, and all of it on endless repeat—”
