The gate swung open, revealing a pleasantly surprised Lear. “Wolves! And Fife! And the Plaguebreaker! And…” His eyes tracked from familiar faces to unfamiliar ones. “… friends?”
“We do have those, shockingly enough.” Eammon stepped forward, he and Lear grasping elbows and clapping backs. “This is Raffe and Kayu.” He didn’t offer titles.
“Welcome.” Lear dipped his head, satisfied with the bare-bones introduction. If the Wolves trusted someone, the Edge did, too. And though Red still wasn’t sure how far that trust went in Kayu’s case, it was clear they’d have to deal with it in order to find Neve. “Valdrek is in the tavern, since I assume that’s who you’re looking for.”
“Imagine that.” Red grinned. “How’s Loreth? Congratulations, by the way. Marriage looks good on you.”
The other man smiled back, running a hand over his hair. The thin line of a tattooed ring snaked around his finger. “Thank you kindly, Lady Wolf. She’s wonderful.”
“Has she come around to the idea of leaving?” Fife asked quietly.
Lear sighed. He wanted to go beyond the Wilderwood, to reenter the world after centuries of his ancestors being locked away from it. Loreth wanted to stay.
“She still isn’t decided,” Lear answered. “But we have time, it appears.” His face twisted, realizing what he’d said. “Not that it’s a good thing, what with your sister… I mean…”
“It’s fine, Lear.” Red kept up her smile, but the edges of it dimmed.
She didn’t bear ill will, but it still took the shine out of the conversation. Lear waved the rest of them in without another word, inclining his head as he pulled the gate shut behind them. Eammon gripped Red’s hand, ran his thumb over her knuckles.
“A tavern, he said?” Kayu perked up. “I could go for a drink.”
“As long as you don’t mind it watered,” Lyra muttered.
They wound through the main thoroughfare of the Edge, nodding at passersby. Behind them, Fife and Lyra fielded questions from Raffe and Kayu, similar ones to what Red remembered asking when Eammon first brought her—what this city was, why there were so many people here, why they were dressed so out of fashion. Kayu seemed to take the answers in stride, but Raffe was slightly shocked, and when Red glanced back at him, his eyes were wide as saucers.
It was impossible to know all the corners of the world. There was always some wrinkle left unironed, something tripping you up in your understanding of how things went and your place in them. That was something she’d been learning ever since her twentieth birthday, and she still went back and forth on whether it was terrible or comforting.
They reached the tavern, made their way through the dancers to the back of the room, where Valdrek was predictably playing cards for outdated modes of currency. The man across the table from him looked slightly familiar, but the way he held his cards obscured most of his face. Red didn’t have time to try to place him before Valdrek noticed them.
“Welcome to the Wolves!” Valdrek raised his tankard—clearly not his first. “And their entourage. Lyra, darling, it’s been too long. You’ve somehow grown even more beautiful. I’ll have to write you a song.”
Lyra cocked a brow. “You say that to all the girls.”
“Only my favorites.” He turned to Eammon, clapping him on the shoulder. “What can I do you for, Eammon? Did any of those books help you at all?”
“Unfortunately not.” Even in the din of a rowdy bar, Eammon’s quiet, leaf-laced voice cut through the noise without him raising it. “But I do have a question I think you can help with.”
He explained it in quick, broad strokes—the key, the sentinel shards in the Shrine, Red’s odd dream and how Raffe’s mirrored it.
“So the question,” he said, “is if there’s any mention of something called the Heart Tree on the wall. Or anything that looks like a grove of keys? I remember seeing something similar, somewhere.”
To Valdrek’s credit, he kept his face mostly nonchalant, other than the steady widening of his eyes. “Quite a tale,” he murmured, draining the last of his beer. His tankard made a hollow noise when he put it back on the table, and he kept his eyes on it as he spoke, as if he could read it as easily as the wall. “The carvings are enigmatic,” he said finally. “Up for interpretation. My father taught me how to read them, after his father taught him. But it’s not a recorded language, only passed down orally, by knowledge of our history. Not exactly foolproof.”
“No.” Raffe’s voice was hard and with no trace of nervousness, despite the fact that he’d only just learned this place existed. “Trusting history is never foolproof.”
Valdrek only inclined his head, an acquiescence. “There are pieces of the wall that we never quite knew the meaning of, and were told not to try,” he said. “Our ancestors… they were desperate, there at the beginning. The Kings had only just disappeared when they arrived, the Wilderwood closing to trap them here. Some of them tried unsavory things to attempt an escape.”
“Like bargaining?” Red asked.
“Not quite that simple.” A sigh as Valdrek sank a hip onto the table and crossed his arms, settling in for a tale. “They were wayfaring people. Always on the sea. And they worshipped the god of it, worshipped it in the way the Old Ones liked to be worshipped, with blood and with suffering.”
“The Leviathan.” Eammon nearly spit the title.
The other man nodded, silver rings glinting in his beard. “They bled into the sea to secure safe passage. And once they were here, bound to the shores by all that infernal fog that kept them from navigating back to the world, those offerings became more… involved. Full sacrifices. Bodies bled into the ocean and sunk with stones.”
Red shifted uncomfortably on her feet. She’d known the worship of the monstrous old gods was violent, back before the Kings banished them, but the books she’d read on them in the Valleydan library kept it vague.
Fife sat down in the chair Valdrek had vacated and wearily signaled the barmaid for a drink. Kayu did the same, holding up two fingers when the maid looked her way. The somehow familiar man at the table had laid down his cards, but kept staring at them, fair hair falling forward to obscure his eyes. Red only glanced at him, too taken with Valdrek’s story to try to puzzle out where she’d seen him before.
“The worship didn’t give them a way out,” Valdrek continued. “Not once the Leviathan was locked away with the rest, the lines of communication blurred and broken by the Shadowlands. But it did give them odd knowledge. Pieces of things that came in dreams, seemingly unconnected. They recorded them, anyway, carved them into the wall alongside everything else.”
Red thought of those spiked, runic carvings alongside the fluid lines on the wall. Violent marks that didn’t seem to fit.