Alric had been more than his share of annoying lately, but I was disturbed at how easily he’d been taken over. And knocked out twice. I wasn’t sure if he should be opening anything from anyone at this point. Of course, before I could try and talk some logic into his hard elven head, he’d ripped open the note. Then flipped it over, said a few soft swear words, and flipped it back.
“It’s from Cirocco all right, but it just says ‘run’. And even that didn’t appear at first.”
Lorcan leaned over but pulled back when Alric went to hand the paper to him. “Better you keep a hand on it, my boy. It’s spelled, and a lot of power went into it. Do you have another one of the faery bags?”
“One left.” Alric shook his head and didn’t make a move for his pocket. “But do we need to save it? I think I can remember this message.” His hand shook as a jolt arced from the paper to his skin. “Damn it, it’s changing. ‘You stupid elf, get yourself and your people out of here.’ Seriously? It even sounds like Cirocco in my head.”
I looked down at the body. I’d done jobs for Cirocco, Alric being one of them, but never liked the man. That might change if he actually died trying to help us. It was debatable that was what was going on, but I had hope.
“I hate to agree with such a vile person,” Amara said. “But I do think you should leave sooner than later.”
Padraig nodded. “And I think we can safely assume that whoever replaced Largen is aware that we know she was replaced and she was involved with killing Cirocco. We need to get horses and leave by nightfall.”
“Couldn’t we leave before dark?” I wasn’t a huge fan of horseback travel, nor traveling at night.
Alric pulled out his last faery bag, folded the note into it with a few spell words of blocking, and then put it back in his cloak pocket. “The darkness will help. The syclarions function about as well as humans do in the dark, which will be an advantage for us.” He grinned at me. “I promise not to let you get lost. We’ll get a clearthin glow working for you.”
I folded my arms and shot him a scowl, but it was good to hear him being a smartass again.
Padraig nodded to Lorcan. “Do you want to, or me?” He held one hand over Cirocco’s body.
“Go ahead, my boy. Just make sure all trace is gone.”
Padraig nodded and Cirocco’s body vanished. As well as a good foot of ground underneath it. “Got it all.” He and Lorcan turned back toward the hedge.
Once we were back on the Beccian side of the hedge, Amara closed the corridor up tight. The greenery also grew a foot taller and was either moving further into the village or had gotten thicker.
She saw me looking at it. “I don’t like them targeting my hedge. I will keep it up as long as needed. Some might follow you once they know you are on the road, but I fear the rest might not until they realize what they are after is with you. This is my town now.”
Alric and Padraig broke off down a side street as soon as we hit the road with the pub on it. They would get horses for the trip.
“I’m going to swing by my house and grab extra supplies,” Covey said. “Do you want to come with?”
I looked to the others who were continuing on to the pub. There really wasn’t much I needed to do there; my pack wasn’t big enough to take much time getting together. Besides, maybe I could borrow some items from Covey. I might have some stuff I could use back at my house, but that last visit had left me not feeling like I wanted to go back any time soon.
“Yeah.” The route to her house made me think of Harlan. “I wonder if the rest of them are okay?” We’d separated to try and gather as much support for whatever was going to happen with these relics as possible. Harlan and his newest ladylove, Orenda, had gone up to the land of her isolated people. He’d had some faeries assigned to him, and none had come back that I knew of. But there were some nasty things loose in the world.
Not to mention, I wasn’t sure how a bunch of extremely xenophobic and isolated elves were going to react to him—or what he and Orenda were going to tell them.
“I was thinking of the old cat as well,” Covey said. She didn’t agree with some of his tactics, and they often argued about interpretations of finds, but they were mostly friends. “We could check and see if the direction we’re heading is close to where Orenda’s enclave is.”
I grinned. “My thoughts completely.” Harlan and Covey were my two oldest friends, aside from the faeries. He drove me crazy a lot of the time, but it would be good to at least check in on him.
As far as I knew, Covey hadn’t been back home since the night we’d joined Locksead and his crew to go look for relics outside of Kenithworth.
I was pretty sure she hadn’t left the door open.
Covey saw it the same time I did, but her reaction was far faster. I was still pulling out my sword, useless if the house had been broken into months ago, and she was already at the front door.
Covey was inside yelling and kicking furniture. On closer examination, she wasn’t kicking furniture but small, red-capped beings who were lounging on her furniture. The house looked far neater than mine usually did, and there were lace doilies covering every even remotely flat service.
Every space that didn’t have a brownie on it at any rate.
I understood her annoyance, having your house broken into and doilied within an inch of its structural life would be hard for anyone. Not to mention that the brownies we’d run into before had been working for the bad guys—or at least trying to. As a species they had decided to try and help the rakasa regain power. That many of them were eaten by said rakasa hadn’t slowed them down.
These weren’t moving. The ones Covey kicked flew in the air briefly, then crashed to the ground and stayed still. The ones she hadn’t booted yet were equally still. “Are they dead?” Fifty or so dead brownies in a house was grounds for saving what you could and burning the house to the ground in my book.
“What?” Covey stopped her rampage of kicking the small squatters and looked around. “I didn’t kill them—these things are almost as indestructible as faeries.” She picked one off her doily encrusted sofa by the arm and shook it.
The little creature opened one eye, shook his head, and then closed the eye. “Not time, woman.”
Yes, Covey was a woman. But no woman, especially a trellian academic, would enjoy being disregarded in that manner. She threw him against the wall.
“All of you, get out of my house now, and take your doilies with you!”
I personally would want to know why in the hell they’d taken over her house and why they appeared to be hibernating. I couldn’t blame her for just wanting them out though.
She stalked through the kitchen and into the two bedrooms and bathroom. “They are everywhere. My house looks fine, but these…things…are all over.”
I knew that look; she was going to make me help her remove the brownies and doilies. If there were about fifty in this room alone, I shuddered at the estimated full body count. I sheathed my sword and rubbed my hands together. “I have a plan.”
She’d been standing in the kitchen, but she was in my face and grabbing my hands in half a second. “No magic.”
“My magic isn’t that bad, you know.” I scowled at her. “I was actually thinking that some faeries might get them moving.” I said faeries loud enough that if they had been faking they would have reacted. Faeries and brownies really didn’t like each other. And that was before Garbage kidnapped and harassed one when she thought they’d been involved in taking Leaf and Crusty.
None of the brownies moved, even the one who’d taken a full face-plant into the wall. Covey looked around. I was sure she was weighing the damage the faeries could bring against the annoyance of these brownies. Not to mention, who knew what they’d been doing in her house while she was gone.
“Fine, call your little hellions. But they are only to remove the brownies and their weird doilies, nothing else.”
I smiled and sent a mental call for the girls. Normally I’d add
mental bottles of ale to get them to respond. Even though they knew I probably didn’t have any on hand, they couldn’t take that chance and usually responded. This time, I just used the image of Covey’s front room filled with passed out brownies.
Our mental communication only worked one way, so I was never sure if they received my call until they showed up.
Luckily we still had the front door open as the faeries came in fast and with war feathers on. The door would not have fared well.
“We take!” Garbage’s yell could have woken the dead, and it worked on the brownies. Being kicked around did nothing; a war cry from the faeries got all of the brownies to their feet in seconds.
“This our place! Leader took it!” A slightly larger brownie yelled from atop a doily on the table next to Covey’s favorite chair.
Garbage was in his face in a second, waving her war stick under his nose. “This place protected by us. Your leader cried here. I make him cry. I make YOU cry.”
The brownies had recovered quickly from their hibernation, or long nap, or whatever they had been doing. Maybe a little too quickly. When Garbage yelled her last line, all of the faeries—far more than my twenty-three again—yelled and charged the brownies.
To a man, the brownies screamed and passed out.
The faeries yelled again, but this time in victory. Garbage turned to lead her flock out, but Covey and I beat them to the door and slammed it shut.
“I wanted you to chase them out, not knock them back out. They are in the same state as when we started. You need to go pick them up and dump them outside, somewhere near The Hill would be good,” I said and then shook my finger. “And no rivers or lakes. Somewhere inside the hedge.” I didn’t really care if the brownies were outside the hedge, I just didn’t want the faeries going back and forth.
Garbage rattled her war stick at me, but the rest of her band stayed back. She finally folded her arms and sighed. “They hibernating. Easy to knock out when deep sleep. Stupid.” She looked over her shoulder at the collapsed brownies. “Easy kill too.”
“No killing. Just take them out, and their weird doilies too.” I had no idea why they had doilies, and I didn’t want to know. I figured Covey was going to lose her temper if they weren’t removed soon though. She was a neat freak, but she was not a doily person.
Garbage looked to Covey, probably hoping that she’d be more inclined for bloody mayhem. Covey shook her head. “All of them please. They are in every room.”
“Is fine.” Garbage turned and yelled to the troop in native faery. Pairs of faeries joined up to each grab half a brownie and a doily.
I opened the door and they started hauling them out.
Covey waited until the brownie-dump operation was under way before she stalked into her kitchen. I knew we would probably have more food than we could carry with Amara stocking us, but she was looking for knives not food. She handed one to me and stepped in close. “There is something other than a brownie in the back bedroom. I just heard some thumps from what must be my closet.”
I knew Covey’s hearing was far better than mine was, but to be able to discern that out here, with the faeries chattering as they worked, was impressive.
“I have a sword, you know.” I patted my sheath…only to find it empty. “Damn it.”
“It vanished as we came in here. It wouldn’t work in a small space anyway; that thing is not only ostentatious, it’s too big. Now, come on.” Armed with kitchen knives, she led the way down the hall. Why anyone would hide in here with a bunch of passed-out brownies was beyond me.
The faeries had removed the brownies and accompanying doilies from her bedroom, but there was a noticeable rattling sound coming from the wardrobe in the back. Covey nodded for me to stand to the side, as she stepped forward to open the door.
I held my knife, seriously thinking maybe two would have been a better idea, and jumped back with a squeak as a body tumbled at my feet. A suspiciously familiar body.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
It was Grimwold, sidekick to the late Cirocco, and a failed master criminal. He was dressed in a deranged version of the brownies’ uniform, down to the red cap and a fake white beard. Well, theirs were real, his was hanging off in shreds.
“Mmmph!”
Covey removed his gag, but made no move toward the bonds tying his hands and feet together.
“They attacked me! I was doing nothing, and they attacked me. I’ve been in here for hours!”
His whining was already annoying me, and I wanted to put the gag back in his mouth.
“You’re in my house, dressed like a giant, insane, brownie,” Covey said as she toyed with the edge of her knife. “And somehow you were doing nothing, and they just grabbed you and shoved you into my closet. Dressed like them.” She leaned lower to be closer to his face. “I’ve never liked you.”
He tried to pull back but there was nowhere to go. “I might have dressed as them in an attempt to gain some solidarity. My magic seems to have stalled for the moment, and I am on the outs with my former employer—”
“Which one? They’re both dead, unless you picked up someone new to latch on to.” I would feel sorry for him, but he was just such a slime that I couldn’t.
“Cirocco and Largen? Both? You two are far more vicious than either of them gave you credit.”
“I’d like to say we had a part, but Largen has been dead for months and Cirocco got killed a few hours ago by unknown persons.”
He forgot he was tied up so his sudden instinct to jump to his feet had comical results. Covey pulled back a bit at the attempt though.
“Largen can’t have been dead that long! I just talked to her a few days ago. She sent me here.” He looked around. “Well, not here, per se. But inside that damn hedge. I was supposed to try and grab Foxmorton’s dryad and get that thing taken down.”
“How did you get inside the hedge?”
“Not saying anything else until you release me.”
I shrugged and nodded to Covey. “Oh, she’ll release you if you don’t talk, but you probably won’t like it. Let me make a guess, you came in through the aqueducts?”
The stillness of his face told me I was right.
“That way’s destroyed now. By your own people, it looks like.” Or the other group that was out there. I wasn’t completely certain there were two groups. At least not anymore. They might have started as two, but I had a bad feeling Nivinal’s mommy was calling the shots out there now.
“They left me? And Cirocco’s really dead?” He deflated for a moment then shook himself out of it. “What is needed to gain my freedom? Obviously, you have me at a disadvantage.”
I had to admit that was a quick recovery, especially for him.
“Tell me why you are in my house, dressed like a brownie, in the middle of a brownie slumber party, for starters. We don’t have much time, but let’s start there.”
His sigh could have woken the dead. He waggled his feet, might have been moving his hands as well, he was lying back on them, so I couldn’t see. “I don’t suppose you could untie me first?”
“No, and you’re stalling.” Covey fussed with her knife some more. I thought about doing the same but, even with my knife training from Orenda, I’d probably end up cutting myself.
“I followed the brownies in. They had a way through the hedge, one I believe is gone now since they couldn’t get back out. I disguised myself as them and they let me follow them in. Like I said, I was told to grab Foxmorton’s mate since he was out of the picture. They don’t know how she’s doing it, but the folks on the other side know the dryad is making that hedge.” He coughed. “Could I at least get some water? I was in there for hours.”
Covey started to shake him off, and then shrugged. “Fine, but that’s it.”
She came back with a glass, poured some water into his mouth, and on him since she wouldn’t get close, and then stood back expectantly.
“Job done!” Garbage and about half of the faeries came zooming into
the room. “What this?” The tone in her voice clearly indicated she felt we’d been holding out on her. The faeries loved torturing Grimwold and had once forced him to run so far into a jungle he was lost for a few days.
“Now, now,” I said, and held up my hands as she looked ready to attack and Grimwold looked ready to pass out. “He’s telling us things we want to know. If he doesn’t tell us what he knows, you and your entire troop of faeries can have him.” Facing Garbage head on meant I could only see Grimwold out of the corner of my eye, but even I noticed his twitching.
Garbage didn’t say anything but darted around me and hovered in front of Grimwold with folded arms and her crazy one-eye-closed stare. “You talk now.”
“You’d better talk fast, I can’t always control them.” That was a laugh, I rarely could control them.
“I told you everything. I come in here, grab the dryad, and take her back. The hedge falls. Cirocco and the others get what they want—a chest, a bunch of scrolls, and a map. Never told me what was in it, but must be a lot of gold, very valuable. Then we blow Beccia up.” He froze; belatedly catching on that maybe admitting to being a part of a plan to blow up an entire town might be an issue with the residents of said town.
I gave him my own glare. “Were the brownies part of the plan?”
“I don’t think so?” His voice went up at the end as he realized things weren’t looking good for him getting out of here. “The mayor knew they were trying to find a way in, something about their leader following someone and finding a new home for them. When I couldn’t get close to the dryad, and then you brought back Foxmorton, I decided to hide with them. Unfortunately, they have a bad bias against beings who drink. I got a bit drunk and they locked me up.” He shivered. “They were planning on sleeping for a week.”
“We have now?” Garbage didn’t look impressed with his story, but I wasn’t sure she had been listening to it.
“No, but we do need to leave him somewhere.” I looked around, but I knew even if we could secure it, Covey wasn’t going to lock him up in her home. “We could take him to Foxy’s. He’d love to take care of him.”
The Diamond Sphinx (The Lost Ancients Book 6) Page 18
