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No.
The rider tilts his head slightly, almost as if he can hardly believe what he heard. “A favor? From one of the Blessed Ones?”
“Yes. I offer you a geas if you’ll give me your mount until I no longer need it.”
“To accept the bargain, I would need something for you to imprint on. Something I can use to call on you.”
Rys thinks about it for a moment. He purses his lips, then pulls out the feather I gave him earlier. “What about this?”
The rider straightens in his seat. “Where did you get that from?”
“Will this seal the geas?”
“Answer me first, fae.”
The way he says fae makes me think that he isn’t. So what is he? I thought he might be Unseelie, since we’re in the Winter Court and he called Rys a Blessed One, the fancy name for a Seelie. But to so dismissively say ‘fae’, the same way the fae sneer ‘human’... what are we dealing with here?
Whatever the rider is, Rys doesn’t seem to be fazed by him. “I need the use of one of your mounts,” he repeats. “If you don’t want to accept my bargain, then I’ll call on another rider.”
That… might’ve been the wrong thing to say.
The horse rears back suddenly, snorting loudly as it kicks up its hooves almost over my freaking head. I swallow my shriek, jumping right behind Rys. He doesn’t even flinch, staring straight at the rider, daring him to refuse his offer.
From beneath his hood, the rider never once took his eyes off of Rys. He has such total control of that monstrous horse, I’ve got no doubt in my mind that he did that on purpose, trying to spook Rys.
It, uh, didn’t work.
“Perhaps someone else would like this,” Rys drawls, twirling the black feather between his long, slender fingers.
“I rule these woods,” the rider growls. “You make a deal with me, or you make it with no one.”
I clutch the back of Rys’s cloak. I know he’s doing all of this because he wants to save Jim for me, but there’s something about this rider that has the hairs on the back of my neck standing up.
We don’t need him. Riley said the prison wasn’t so far, right? We can go as a group, cutting through the Shadow Realm the same way that Riley walked through the actual shadows, and then Rys could figure out how to get inside. We don’t need this rider. Not when I’m almost positive that, if he does accept Rys’s offer, it’ll cost even more in the long run.
I want to save Jim, but not at the expense of Rys.
This is a bad idea. There’s gotta be another way to get to Jim.
Before I can change my mind, I start to say, “You don’t have to do this.” I only get about three words out, though, when Rys steps away from me, holding the feather up high.
“So. Do we have a deal?”
For one terrible moment, I expect the rider to take off. He holds all the cards. If having Rys in his debt isn’t enough to interest him, he could just refuse the deal and we would’ve wasted all of this time for nothing.
And that’s when he shoves his cloak back, shooting his arm out toward Rys, yanking the feather of his grip before Rys can take it back.
“One day I’ll call your debt in,” promises the rider, his voice gone even lower than before. “Make no mistake, though. You will tell me how you got this feather, and only then will I consider your geas met. Do we have an accord?”
“You have my word.”
“It is done.” The rider disappears the raven’s feather inside of his cloak. He pats his horse’s neck, then easily dismounts. “Herla is yours until you send him back to me.”
Rys nods. “I’ll treat him like the king he is.”
The rider’s glowing green eyes seem to grow impossibly brighter. “Make sure that you do.”
He leans in, whispering something softly to the horse. The horse tosses his head again, almost as if he’s answering the rider, but when the cloaked figure steps away from Herla, I can see that he’s calmed down a whole lot.
