“Even though you are not speaking to me,” he said, pushing a bowl closer to her, “you should at least use your mouth to eat.”
Amma remained focused on the wood grain, hands clasped in her lap. “I thought you preferred things this way,” she said miserably. “No conversing.”
Kaz snickered from the floor where he curled up before the fireplace.
Damien picked up his spoon. “Going back on your promise?” She still refused to look at him, mouth snapping shut, and all the fun was wrung out of his prodding at her. “Do not make me make you eat, Amma.”
She took a long look at the bowl, then gently picked up her spoon. Amma’s eyes searched the small tavern room as they sat, feeding herself slowly. Damien watched her, having already taken note of the drunken man in the corner, passed out, the rest of the place empty. He thought to ask her what she was looking for, but if she was going to be silent, then so was he.
When the keep came back downstairs, she stopped at their table like she’d just had a thought. “You two aren’t coming from Elderpass, are ya?”
Damien shook his head.
“Then you must be headed there. You ought to be careful.” She looked Damien over. “Well, I suppose you might be fine, but there’s some mighty strange goings on in that place. People been going crazy down there, hacking one another up, even their own kin, telling all sorts of fanciful stories about what’s made them do it. Say it’s demons.”
Amma sat back, casting a wary glance at Damien, but he continued to stare at the keep, the woman’s dark eyes, flanked by wrinkles, narrowing on him.
“You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?” She pursed her lips.
“Demons?” he repeated, never letting his gaze leave hers. Another rumble of thunder sounded, closer this time. “Not a thing.”
“Well,” she finally said, features shifting into a smile that was clearly only for customers, “your rooms are all ready, just up the stairs, the two on the left, can’t miss ‘em.”
When the bowls had been emptied, they took the narrow, creaking flight upward to a short hall with a block of four rooms. Damien peeked into the two beside one another they’d been given, biding Amma follow him into the second. She was quick to look at him with a tight frown and expectant eyes from the threshold. “Don’t hurt me or you or anybody else, and don’t leave the room. I know, I know,” she said then trudged inside.
Damien much preferred her goading him on or even being irrationally incensed to this sullen, hurt act she was putting on. She stood there, staring at the floor, arms crossed, and rain began to pelt at the roof, filling up the quiet between them. He nearly stalked from the room then before realizing he had almost believed that she would choose to follow his orders rather than be bound by the Chthonic words of the talisman.
She winced under the spell, then walked dreamily over to the cot and sat herself down, all pouty melancholy. Damien almost ordered the dejection right off her face until he decided, if she intended to be miserable, then he would just let her, and it didn’t matter if it, for whatever unfathomable reason, made him miserable too—he was meant to be that way, after all, so what was the difference?
CHAPTER 15
UNHOLY OFFERINGS
Damien rose the next morning to the twittering of a whole flock of tiny-beaked, chubby-bodied, incessantly-annoying sparrows that had made the tree outside his window their home as if they knew exactly what they were doing. The rain had cleared, and the morning was foggy and wet, but there were still nagging words at the back of his mind that refused to be washed away. So, he stood, donned his armor, and ordered Kaz to pop back into his dog form and follow him downstairs.
It was nearly impossible to reach the common room without the staircase creaking, but Damien did his best, glancing back at Amma’s door to ensure it remained shut. When he made it down to the innkeeper, he purchased the last, day-old pastry she had, then gave it and instructions to an incredulous Kaz. The imp would be cranky again, and not just because he’d be stuck all day looking like a dog, but Damien could better deal with Kaz’s ire than the agitation in himself.
He returned upstairs to watch through the branches of the maddening birds’ roost as the imp begrudgingly trotted along the street out front and came upon the wretched child from the evening before. He didn’t look malnourished or even forlorn anymore, but when Kaz put his tiny paws on the boy’s knee and dropped the food into his lap, the pastry was gobbled up in seconds. Disgusting, surely, but done, thank the basest beasts.
Then he rapped on Amma’s door, calling through it to meet him downstairs, but it swung open before he could march off. Dressed and beaming up at him, she fluttered long lashes and chirped, “Good morning!”
Damien stepped back from the doorway she had somehow completely filled though her body was small. “Is it?”
She gave him a nod, bouncing on her toes. He wanted to be further vexed at the sourceless change in her attitude, but found himself only confused, grumbling as he walked away. Kaz waited at the foot of the stairs, a little ball of anger himself, growling at everything that passed including Damien until he gave hima look. Together, the three fetched the masked knoggelvi from a cloud of noxious shadows in the lean-to and set off for the day, the haze in the roadway parting and the sun rising into a cloudless sky.
Damien returned to his reading, but Amma was talkative again, pointing out what she deemed “pretty,” “cute,” “pretty cute,” and perhaps too often than the sights deserved, “beautiful.” It was distracting, but a welcome one from Kaz’s quiet brooding. As they were now passing others on the road, he had to remain under his illusion, and the knoggelvi seemed restless as well, but Amma evened the complaints out with a diatribe no one asked for about how walnut and sumac trees were often confused but distinctly different.
They slept under a clear sky that night and by late afternoon of the following day had made it to the river that ran along the northern border of Elderpass. It was a proper town, falling on the crossroads between the road they traversed running south to Eirengaard and another that ran east and west, both wide and well-traveled, if Damien’s memory served. The bridge over the river into the city was flanked by a gatehouse with a small watchtower, an archer sitting at its top beside a bell for warning if, Damien supposed, a hoard of werewolves made the multi-day journey south for fresh flesh.
A problem could perhaps come, though, from the guard on the ground. His surcoat was white and blue with a symbol Damien had to assume represented devotion to some god or another emblazoned across his chest. There was armor beneath that, a sword strapped to his side, and perhaps arcana lurking inside him as well. Truly divine arcana, the foil to Damien’s infernal, was unlikely, but one could never be too careful.
The knoggelvi and imp gave off minor infernal auras, easy to shield with the enchantments already on Damien, and the blood mage himself was only detectable by someone much stronger who had to know just what they were looking for. But the talisman was altogether different and untested.
Still far enough off to not be heard, he looked to Amma. “Time to prove that virtue of yours.”
Her eyes met his, wide and questioning. “What? Here?”
He gestured with his head to the watchtower, prepared to use the enchanted word, but then stopped himself. It would put a damper on things to make her uncomfortable rendering her mute with it again so soon. “You are aware that if you say anything to this guard about the talisman or our arrangement, it will not go well for you, yes?”
