“I’m not supposed to leave my post,” he said hesitantly even as he took the bowl.
“Oh, I know, and I hate to ask you to do something like this since your duty is so important.” She stared at him earnestly. Perhaps it was unfair—Amma had been on the other end of manipulation like this before, but duty was too powerful a thing to let go to waste. “However, if you think about it, Artie, you’re serving Marquis Caldor directly if you do this for his future wife, who he loves and cherishes so much, and the gods since cleanliness is next to godliness.” She repeated the popular aphorism knowing full well it wasn’t meant to be taken so literally.
Arthur began to nod, but didn’t seem entirely convinced.
Amma grinned, eyes darting to the door. Wooden. Of course. “And don’t worry, I understand that obviously you will lock me inside when you go, for my safety, because that’s your duty, Artie, and you would only ever be totally loyal to Brineberth and to the crown.”
“I would,” said Arthur, and the corner of his mouth hitched up. “I will.”
The door shut and clicked, and Amma listened hard for Arthur’s footsteps to fall away, difficult to hear over the thumping of her heart in her ears, but when it was silent, she pressed both hands to the door, and asked it nicely to unlock. To her utter delight, it did.
Swung open, the winding staircase stood before her, dark and narrow. There was nowhere to go if she ran into someone on it, but Amma had braved a similar structure in the Grand Athenaeum, and she could do it again. Amma bolted from the room and took each step with quick but careful silence. She hugged the inner wall and then slipped through the arch at its foot onto a landing.
Straight ahead lay a walkway, open to the floor below at one side and a wide staircase in its middle down to the dining hall. She crept to the edge of the banister to peek downward, just catching a set of men entering the hall, their gruff voices shouting at one another and making her duck back into the dark. She would be completely exposed if she took the stairs, but behind her was another hall, and perhaps an additional way downward.
Shadowed, the space beyond was simple with only four doors off of it. The barracks for the soldiers was elsewhere in the keep, but if these were private chambers, they were likely reserved for those who ranked much higher. Amma’s memory sparked with Damien’s request via raven to Laurel. He’d wanted the paperwork out of Cedric’s office, but it had already been removed.
With no way to tell which room was which, she pressed a hand to the closest door and tried it. Locked. Biting her lip, she wrapped one hand around the knob and placed the other flat against the door, and let out a long breath.Open, she thought, and there was a click.
Inside, the trappings were nicer than in her little tower quarters, but typical: a bed, a wardrobe, a desk, a wash basin, but there was a set of dress armor for a Brineberth soldier in the corner for someone massive. She took a few steps toward the desk, peering down at the figures spread out over it, some atop horses, some with swords, others with hands out to cast. Amma had seen things like this before, used to strategize battles, but the way they were set up here was…different.
The figures were lined up in rows, almost like a battalion, but there was an aisle down the middle and at the front was a single figure topple over and one of the arms-raised figurines standing behind it, facing all the others. When she tipped her head to look at the parchment below the scene, she could see it was once an old map, the entire realm of Eiren laid out, but had since been scribbled on.
In terribly poor Key, something like a eulogy was written out for a Sir Bran the Brawniest decrying his past triumphs in battles including beheading a dragon in one, fell swoop and rescuing a cartload of puppies before it tumbled off a cliff. Amma groaned: this was definitely Roman’s room, and the likelihood of it holding any kind of inditing secrets was low. Gods help the people if Cedric ever turned over any part of Brineberth to him officially.
But then a much neater key, the one of the original map beneath the scene Roman had drawn, caught her attention. “Krepmar Keep,” she whispered to herself, finger sliding over the name written in the forgotten southern corner of Brineberth she knew she had to be in. There were three other places marked in the same way, one in the southeast nestled into The Wilds, and another marked in the heart of the Kvesari Wood, northeast of the realm with an additional note ofBriymari’s Tunnel. The elf they’d met in the Gloomweald, the one concerned about chaos and end times, had spoken of trouble in the Kvesari Wood. There was a fourth location on the opposite, northern coast whereThe Temple of the Voidwas written, and beneath that,Catacombs.
Much too big and covered in things to take, she committed the map to memory and crept back to the door, pulled it shut as she slipped into the hall, and willed it to lock behind her. There were no voices when she listened, so she scurried across the landing and tried another door. This one would not budge, her own magic coming up against something strange that actually pushed against her senses, but she did smell incense and burning metal when she pressed her shoulder against it, so she doubted it led to more stairs.
Frustrated, she clicked her tongue and considered venturing to the wide staircase again, but as she approached, she heard more voices, men piling in and complaining about breakfast being late. Amma backtracked down the hall and pressed her palm hard into another door.Please unlock, please unlock, please—the knob gave way, and she slipped inside.
CHAPTER 32
THE SPOILS OF SERVITUDE
Damien pulled his mount to a violent stop, kicking up dirt in the darkness of an open field. The arcana against his hip was all in a panic, and he dug into his satchel to find the source of the disturbance. There, at the bottom of his bag, lay a feather.
“Amma, you bloody wonderful genius, you remembered,” he rasped, lifting the magicked feather to his face, feeling the arcana thrum through it like a beacon. Wind whipped around him as if it were already pulling him toward his target, face breaking into a smile, and his dagger slid down into his other hand.
The raven feather was an older magic, made years ago with Xander’s assistance, of all the bloody bastards in the realm, but it was well before the skill he had apparently gained now. To use this magic, he would need a source of power that wasn’t just his blood. That was how it was designed—it needed a life.
Damien dismounted, gazing up at the horse, spent from galloping. It was a powerful beast, but it was no knoggelvi, not arcane in the least. His focus shifted then to the ground and the little figure that had just scrambled down its back. With claws folded over one another, the imp blinked big, watery eyes up at him.
“Kaz,” he said, the name heavy in his throat. “Ever-loyal, never-relenting, minion of darkness. My most faithful servant.”
The imp’s eyes widened, chin lifting, terrible, little grin growing with all its plucky, ill-pointed fangs. His batwing ears twitched, and his actual wings fluttered at the shower of compliments. “Master?”
“I am soverysorry,” Damien said, and, in the strangest turn of events, he actually meant it.
Kaz’s tail came around him and he gripped its end, worrying the triangular point.
“I need your help, little one.” Damien knelt, feather in one hand, dagger in the other. “For Amma.”
Kaz predictably pulled a face at the mention of the woman. It wasn’t truly up to the imp, Damien wasn’t going to give him a choice either way, especially if he took much longer than a moment to relent, but there was a voice in him, one that sounded curiously like Amma’s, that told him to do this right, to try and be…kind. Or as kind as one can be, he supposed, when carving the heart out of something.
“I need your life, Kaz.” He spun the dagger in his hand and shrugged. “Is that…is it all right?”
The imp’s forehead crumpled, eyes on the blade as it caught the moonlight. “For her?”
