“Can you close the door behind you?” she asked absently, still staring down at the papers before her.
I did as I was told, and when I came back to stand beside Ridley, I got a better look at what held her attention so raptly. It was a scroll, with a quartz paperweight placed at either end to keep it from rolling up. Still, a portion had flipped just enough for me to see the wax seal at the top—a rabbit pressed in white wax. The symbol of the Kanin.
Trolls weren’t completely prehistoric—they would call or send e-mail, even text. It was so much faster than airmail, even though that scroll had probably been overnighted to a local town by FedEx and retrieved by a Trylle messenger. But we used scrolls for formal business, like invitations, gratitude, proclamations, and declarations of war.
I waited, holding my breath, to find out which one of those it was, although with Mina, I feared I already knew the answer.
THIRTY-NINE
proclamation
That Queen of yours has gone totally mad,” Wendy said finally.
“She’s no Queen of mine,” I replied without thinking, and Bain smiled in approval, causing his blue eyes to light up.
Wendy straightened, but kept her eyes fixed on the scroll. “This just arrived, so it isn’t what I’d invited you here to talk about. I only meant to ask you about your plans in F?rening. But I know about your past relationship with the Skojare, so I’m sure you’d want to know.”
“Know what?” I asked, instantly fearing that something had happened to Linnea Biaelse, or perhaps her husband Mikko or grandmother Lisbet.
The Queen finally looked at us, her dark tawny eyes sad. “The Kanin have declared war on the Skojare.”
“What?” Ridley asked, sounding as shocked as I felt.
“Why would Mina do that?” I asked in disbelief. “She’d aligned herself with them to get their . . .”
And that’s when it hit me. Mina had not been working with the Skojare as a whole—she’d been working with specific people, like the now-dead Kennet Biaelse and the now-exiled head guard Bayle Lundeen.
She had no one to get her the sapphires anymore, so she would have to take them by force.
“It’s all here.” Wendy motioned to the scroll. “Assuming you can make sense of her nonsense.”
Ridley went over to read it for himself, but I sat back in the chair, feeling rather light-headed. Besides, it didn’t really matter what reasoning Mina gave. I knew the truth.
“She’s blaming Evert’s death on Kennet, even though Kennet died before Evert did,” Ridley said, surmising what he’d read. “She says Kennet had ‘empoisoned’ the wine he gifted them before he died, which is said to have killed Evert.”
“Since she’s accused me of killing Kennet, am I exonerated now?” I asked, not that I believed that that would actually happen. Mina would never let me go free.
“No, because you apparently killed Kennet in some sort of lover’s spat, and you’ve been corrupted by the ‘aberrations and unfettered debauchery’ of Storvatten.” Ridley stood up. “She keeps using all these abnormal words like that. I mean, they are words, but not ones that we actually use.”
“Her language is odd, even for a proclamation like this,” Wendy agreed.
“At the end, it says, when the Kanin are through, ‘the ground will be sanguinolent.’ ” Ridley shook his head. “I don’t even know what that means.”
“It means ‘tinged with blood,’ ” Bain supplied. “I looked it up.”
“It’s her British accent all over again.” I rested my elbow on the armrest and propped my head up. “She’s trying so hard to sound smart and important, because she’s really just a spoiled, uneducated princess that got dropped in the middle of nowhere when she was too young to know any better, and nobody taught her how to act or grow up. Everything she pretends to be is just copied from Disney and Julie Andrews.”
“Does that mean that she won’t actually go through with all of this?” Wendy asked hopefully. “That this is all just part of her act?”
“Oh, no, she’s definitely going to attack the Skojare. She’s a monster,” Ridley said, and that hardness had returned to his face, the same hardness that kept me at bay.
“She’s going to slaughter them,” I realized sadly, and looked over at Bain. “You worked in Storvatten. You know. They have no means of protecting themselves.”
He nodded grimly. “Their guard is an absolute joke. The Kanin going after the Skojare will be like shooting fish in a barrel, pardon the pun.”
Wendy’s dark hair was up in a loose bun, but the silver lock fell over her forehead, and she brushed it back, causing her emerald bracelets to jangle. She walked around the desk, so she was closer to Bain, Ridley, and me, and leaned back against it.