The troll wasn’t the only ancient creature in the elven dales to have woken to our presence today.
“He was speaking,” said the elf lord disdainfully, “of the mischief-makers who’ve brought this storm down on all of our heads with their thoughtlessness.” He arched one narrow, bluish-white eyebrow as he surveyed me. “But I do look forward to watching you keep your binding promise to my pet by dealing with them for him...now, if you please.”
4
Without so much as a word or a look exchanged between us, Wrexham and I were suddenly side by side, the thick sleeves of our greatcoats brushing against each other as we jointly faced my accuser. The massive troll loomed behind us, and my head still ached with the grinding echoes of its roar, but there was no question of which danger was more urgent.
Neither of us would dare turn our back on the troll’s master.
I wished now that I hadn’t released my lantern, shattered though its glass sides might be. Flung in his icily carven face, the iron frame might have won us a moment’s grace just when we most needed it to escape. But it lay useless in the snow ten feet away...and picking it up again now, in the elf lord’s presence, could be construed as nothing but an intention to attack.
He smiled unpleasantly as he looked us up and down. “Well? Not so quick to make any promises now, are you? I believe you’ll find your earlier promise binding, though, under the terms of our nations’ treaty. And those who rashly break their bargains with the elves—”
“No one has broken anything,” said Wrexham. His voice was calm, but a thread of steel ran through it. “I am an officer of the Boudiccate, and if a crime has been committed here—”
“If?” The elf lord gestured sweepingly, and the snowflakes scurried to get out of his arm’s way. “This storm is no act of nature. Someone has been meddling with the land’s own magic, and we will all feel the damage soon enough.”
“And you simply assume it was a human who did it?” I demanded. The injustice of that, at least, was enough to break the eerie spell of his presence. “How do you know it wasn’t one of your own people?”
His upper lip curled. “The laws in our kingdom utterly prohibit any such atrocity of nature, which torments our pets and endangers our hunts to the damage of all. It is our kingdom, not your nation, which is most harmed by this unnatural storm. Any observer with a shred of logic would tell you that one of your own mages—always so prone to risks and wild experimentation—must be the ones directing all of it. Your current mishmash of various tribes may claim to restrict their experiments, but when you leave a squabbling group of human women in control...” His eyes narrowed with sudden, dangerous interest, and his voice dropped as he stepped closer to me.
An icy chill pierced the bubble of my spellcast warmth, making me shiver.
“Take yourself as an example, woman,” he murmured, his white eyes fixed on mine. “There’s the scent of magic running through your bones, though your people claim to restrict its use to men. How...very...interesting. You, too, have been meddling where you don’t belong, haven’t you?”
I stiffened, fury simmering in my blood, but Wrexham spoke first. “Careful,” he said softly. “Your king may choose to treat his own nation’s ladies with disdain, but ours has been governed well by them for centuries. You would not wish to offend the Boudiccate.”
“Indeed, I can see just how frightening a force they must be, when their rules can be broken with such impunity.” The elf lord laughed, a jingle of broken bells. “And those who call themselves men but choose to submit themselves to such rulers...but then, I’m not looking at a born lord, am I?” He flicked Wrexham with a dismissive glance. “You’re one of the Boudiccate’s vagabond upstarts, aren’t you? Promoted far beyond your station, with no real understanding of your betters...”
If he couldn’t see Wrexham’s strength, he was a fool, and there was no point in taking offense at any of his jibes. I drew a deep breath and spoke with forced composure, drawing on the memory of my mother’s old political negotiations. I’d been forced to observe them only too often as her unwilling apprentice in the years before she’d finally given up on me. “Our weather wizards can barely predict whether it will snow or rain with any accuracy,” I told him, refusing to lower my gaze as I spoke the humiliating truth. “You must know we haven’t any magicians who could manage the weather itself and summon a storm like this one.”
The elf lord’s smile could have cut through frost. “Oh, I don’t believe for an instant that any of you could ever manage it. No, I think you were—as usual—playing with forces you couldn’t possibly hope to control.”
The accusation struck hard and close to home. My throat clenched. For a moment I couldn’t speak.
“You should have known you could never manage it...”
Wrexham’s shouted words from months ago hung in the air like frozen breath.
I did not turn to meet his gaze when I felt him glance at me. I couldn’t—not if I wished to control my expression in front of our common enemy.
But I felt a core of unbreakable ice building up inside me, shoving aside the softer, warmer—weaker—feelings that had been creeping furtively back into their old familiar places in the last half hour of forced proximity.
I would not make myself so vulnerable again.
“If it was a human,” I told the elf lord, ice coating my words, “then we will find him. You may depend upon it.”
Wrexham stirred beside me. “Harwood—”
“Fine,” I snapped, without sparing him a glance. “I’ll find him myself, then. I was the one to make the binding promise. I should be the one to fulfill it.”
“Indeed you must,” said the elf lord, “or pay the price. And the promise that you made, as I recall, was hardly so narrow-minded as only to protect my pet if the malefactor happened to be human.”
I frowned. “But—”
“You can’t be serious!” Wrexham’s voice was a near-snarl, his shoulders hunching as if he were having to force himself to stay in place. “You know none of us are allowed into your private halls. How can you possibly expect her to hunt for a criminal there?”
“Oh, I certainly don’t.” The elf-lord laughed. “But then, I never forced her to make that foolish promise, did I?”
In that moment, he was every man who had ever laughed out loud in disbelief when he’d heard that I wished to learn magic and every woman who had ever raised her eyebrows in pity...or whispered afterward, when she’d thought I couldn’t hear, that she’d always known this would come of it in the end. The blood was thundering in my ears as I glared at him, and the snow swirled wildly around us, as if it could sense the raw disorder in my chest, where every one of my scabbed wounds had been torn wide open and exposed to the pitiless cold air.
“I will keep my promise,” I told him, enunciating every word with precision.