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Tared vanished outside without a reply. Only then did Creon meet my eyes, an alarming flicker in the dark of his irises that was in no way mellowed by his joyless smile.
Still coming?
What in hell did that mean – that he’d follow Tared anyway, with or without me? What kind of madness was that? The two of them had been at each other’s throats all day; wouldn’teverythingbe preferable to a forest walk in the company of an alf who apparently couldn’t go two minutes without insulting him today?
What had I missed?
‘I think,’ I said with all the calm I could gather, ‘that it might be wiser if we just stay here, don’t you think?’
Creon shrugged and stalked outside, with the clipped, tense stride of a male who has business to finish.
‘Oh,idiots,’ Naxi muttered, sliding down in her chair with a pained groan.
Even she was alarmed? That was bad. That was very bad. I took stock of the situation in a single faltering heartbeat, weighing my options – Beyla was still nowhere to be seen. Naxi needed to keep up the demon shield in the direct vicinity of the temple, at least as long as we weren’t sure where Beyla had gone. Sending Lyn into a disagreement between Creon and Tared sounded about as helpful as throwing a bottle of oil into a raging fire, even if she was not the root of the problem this time.
Which left me.
And in all fairness, I was the one who had started this entire endeavour.
‘I’ll see what I can do,’ I said and dashed out of the kitchen before either of them could stop me and change my mind with wiser arguments. Wiser arguments wouldn’t calm anyone down, and the sound of Tared’s sharp voice outside told me we’d need a lot of calming down before I could get to the more sensitive topic of my exact relationship with the target of his wrath.
It took an effort not to curse. So much for my diplomatic strategies.
They were already halfway across the courtyard by the time I flew out the door, striding in the direction Edored had gone. Sprinting after them, I was just in time to hear Tared snap something about a history of causing trouble and how he was not making the same mistake twice.
Creon’s reply came in curt, meticulous signs.Like the mistake of kicking down the people you need to win a war?
Gods damn them both. I jumped over a last tangled flowerbed to catch up and shoved myself between the two of them with a few whole-hearted elbows into ribs – enough of an interruption to shut down the exchange of low blows for a moment. ‘So.’ It came out as brisk as I felt. ‘Where do you two idiots think we should start looking?’
There was no amusement to Tared’s half-snorted laugh, but at least he didn’t resume his string of insults. ‘You were the one who came up with this idea.’
An annoyingly good point, and probably not the moment to tell him I had come up with the plan only in an attempt to get five minutes alone with Creon. I nodded at the wall of grey-white trees rising from the hillslope with as much conviction as I could muster and said, ‘Well, he was looking for a place to take a bath, wasn’t he? So it stands to reason he’d have aimed for some brook or creek.’
There’s a decent-sized pool behind the north tower, Creon signed, all uncaring boredom again. As if he’d barely noticed Tared’s jabs. As if he truly didn’t care.Could take a look there.
We walked on in icy silence, the air heavy with everything they might have told each other if not for my presence – words that must have festered for months, but why in the world were they coming to the surfacenow, when I needed their cooperation more than ever before? Did Creon truly not realise how every war he started dug us deeper into our secrets?
He had to realise that, hadn't he?
The pool emerged misty and glittery in the thick of the forest, the water so eerily still I might have believed it was a mirror embedded in the mossy earth. Nothing moved around us as we came to a standstill at the edge of the small clearing and threw a cautious look around. No dangers to be seen, no perfect explanations for Edored’s near-fatal moment of inattention.
Just a bit of a dum-dum, then.
I sucked in a breath to tell them, with more relief than I wanted to admit, that clearly I’d been overly suspicious and it was time to return to our temporary home. At least Lyn and Naxi would be around to help me tear the two of them apart if needed. There would be other opportunities to tell Creon he was being spectacularly unhelpful, and—
‘Are those footprints?’ Tared said sharply.
I jolted from my premature haze of relief. ‘Where?’
He strode around the small body of water without an answer. Only as I hurried after him did I see what his alf eyes had noticed – the paw-shaped dents pressed into the mud on the other side of the pool, shallow but too sharp to be more than a day old.
They were enormous.
The nearest footprint was twice as long as my foot and five times as broad – a paw with three fingers at the front and one at the back, all with long enough nails to leave visible furrows in the earth. Not a bird’s foot – there was an impression of pads and toes. But it couldn’t be any other animal I knew either, not with that fourth toe growing back.
Oh, gods.
‘Tared,’ I whispered. ‘Did you say … did you say he kept gabbling aboutdragons?’
