AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“I’ve been tracking my brother for years, rebel,” he replied, glancing down at the papers.
“Can I look?” I asked, even as I was already pulling half the stack toward me across the table.
I flicked through the papers absently, scanning names without thought. There were so many that were so obviously fake—Jack InIrons, Jenny Greenteeth, Gwyn ap Nudd, and so forth—that I had to wonder if Phillipa Blacktongue was running quite as tight a ship as she believed she was. Every so often, though, I would come across something that seemed real.Fionn Stormbow. Bard Inbetwixt, Osin Highwater. Rhiannon Skyeborne.
I was so focused on my thoughts that for a moment, I thought I was hallucinating.
I blinked and looked again, an odd buzzing noise starting low in my ears.
I wasn’t hallucinating at all—there it was, at the bottom of the third page: “Rhiannon Skyeborne,” followed by some numbers that could only be the date, time, and price of whatever had transpired.
I pulled the page out with a swift flourish that nearly tore the edge and stared at it more closely, as if the ink might disappear, then quickly scanned the other pages to make sure there were no other entries.
“What is it, rebel?” Scion asked.
I stiffened, eyes narrowing, and watched his reaction carefully as I held out the page for him to see. Would I recognize genuine shock? Had I played enough fairy games to avoid falling into a web of verbal trickery?
For a moment, it felt as if I were looking at two different versions of him. Like a window through time—Scion sat here, now, watching me with benign concern, and he was also standing with his uncle on the other side of a run-down alley in Cheapside, ordering my mother to be dragged out of the house where we’d been hiding. Which was real? Could it possibly be both versions? Could I reconcile with that?
* * *
“You must understandthat this doesn’t mean your mother was here,” Scion said, his voice echoing back at me all through the long, narrow tunnel out of the guild den:“here, here, here…”
“And why is that?” I asked venomously. “Perhaps because you killed her?”
I heard his sharp intake of breath and knew without having to look that he’d clenched his jaw, his nostrils flaring. “That’s, at best, an exaggeration if not an outright lie. I didn’t kill your mother.”
“But you know what I’m referring to?”
“Yes…” he ground out.
I picked up speed, nearly jogging now to stay ahead of him.
I hadn’t been able to sit at that table for another moment with the buzzing growing louder in my head, my skin too tight, my panic rising.
Logically, I understood that my mother wasn’t—couldn’t be—here. That even if she were in the city, it was preposterous to think she would have visited the Side Saddle at all, let alone at the same time as some unknown rebel sympathizer. Logically, someone else had signed her name for me to see later. Someone who, I could only guess, learned the name from Rosey. So on top of being a cruel trick or some strange attempt at a joke, this was just another layer to the endless mystery.
I knew all that. But logic had no place next to the fresh wave of bitterness that had suddenly crashed over me and now lapped at the insides of my mind, begging to be allowed to flow freely.
“Where are you going?” Scion demanded as I dashed up the stone steps at the end of the long tunnel.
“I need fresh air.”
I flung the door open on the storage room in the basement of the tavern and wove my way through all the barrels and crates toward the second flight of stairs. The tavern, which I now realized was little more than a front for the guild, was nearly empty, and no one noticed as I sped through the bar and out the front door into the sunshine of the busy street beyond.
I inhaled several deep breaths through my nose, crossing my arms tightly over my chest as if I could physically keep the painful memories out.
“I didn’t kill your mother,” Scion said again from somewhere behind me. “You have many reasons to be angry, but at least blame me for things I’ve actually done.”
I whirled around, daggers in my eyes. “But you remember? You came to our house that day.”
He nodded slowly, mouth practically disappearing his lips were so tightly pressed together. “I didn’t want to. I didn’t care at all about your mother; I didn’t know who any of you were. I remember listening to her screaming and wondering what ill fortune had befallen her that we’d been sent after you at all.”
“Is that supposed to make it better? Should I feel comforted by the fact that you didn’t care about us and you still destroyed my family?”
He ran a hand through his hair. We’d never discussed this—not really—but like everything else, it would have to be talked about eventually. All of it would, I realized—and not only with Scion but Bael as well.
“You have to understand,” he said, “that when Grandmother was alive, we did everything by her word. We never questioned an order, no matter how odd it might have seemed at the time. Even now…” He broke off. “Well, let us simply say the family still follows her orders, even from within the Source.”
