A trail of sweat ran down my forehead, and it immediately turned cold.
Griff glanced at me then back down at the table.
“Yes. And the Smith boatmen.”
“Hmm.” Jagger narrowed his gaze and stroked the obsidian knife hanging from his neck. “Justice. How do you kill a conjurer?”
Justice dropped the soggy towel to the wooden table. He bit his bottom lip and narrowed his eyes, thinking. “It depends on the conjurer. Surprise works best. You have to be fast. Don’t give them time to conjure. Bullets are no good. Neither is fire. You have . . . about a half-second. Sometimes less. Depends on how strong they are. The trouble is, you kill one, there’s always another.”
“Exactly. They’re a hydra. Cut off the head and another grows. It isn’t the conjurer—it’s the power that passes between them.” Jagger slid his finger against his knife, and a line of blood swelled. He tsked and stared down at his gray finger and the small pool of blood.
I held back a gasp. The tip of my right pointer finger burned. When I looked down, a drop of blood was smeared on my mug.
I glanced at Justice. He had his right hand held in a tight fist, revealing nothing.
Jagger caught my stunned reaction and sent me a gloating smile. What had he always said? If I hurt, you hurt. If I die, you die. No wonder I felt the instinctual need to protect him.
“Roumelade,” he said, and when she turned from the stove, he held out his hand.
“Perfect. That’ll do nicely.” She bustled over and scraped the blood from his finger with her wooden spoon, then she went back to the stove and stirred it into her pot.
“I’ve been considering this peculiar problem for centuries,” Jagger said, turning back to us. “I would’ve liked to possess the crown. It would’ve made this easier.”
I tilted my head. “If I hadn’t died, I would’ve retrieved it for you.”
Griff stiffened and gave me a quick warning glance. Of the three of us, he was always the most scared of pushing Jagger.
Jagger’s wooden chair squeaked as he leaned forward and slowly folded his hands together. “Don’t test me, Mari. I have more ways of hurting you than you could ever imagine.”
He waited, his folded gray skin and flat gray eyes conveying precisely how little compassion and empathy he held. None. He was as compassionate as a granite boulder crushing an infant.
I nodded. He smiled. It was a smile that often made people shiver, because it was only a stretching of skin and a flattening of lips. It was a smile that inevitably led to cruelty.
“While we don’t have the crown,” he said, staring at the steam rising from Rou’s pot, “neither does anyone else.”
“The Smiths?” Griff asked, finally looking up from the gouge he’d been tracing in the wood.
Jagger shook his head. “My source tells me the crown is not the Smiths’. Better yet, they tell me the Clarks are claiming the crown. The Bards and the Clarks are united against the Smiths. The Wards . . .” He let out a slow rumble. “I hear the Smiths dropped the Ward’s body through the Clark’s solarium. And now Jacob Ward and the Smiths are fighting with earthquakes and tsunamis.” He rubbed his hands together and reached for the pint of beer Roumelade had left in front of him. “Mari? How do you defeat a hydra?”
I frowned. Hydras were tricky. They were mythical creatures who grew two heads for every one cut off. In Gloucester, Massachusetts, in 1817, Fidelus Bard and his wife Gloria had an argument, while sailing in the bay, concerning his liaison with their washerwoman. In a rage at the (correct) accusation, Fidelus conjured a hydra to scare his wife and clear him of her charges (I don’t understand his reasoning. But this is the story). That hydra was spotted by sailors and fisherman and became known as the Great American Sea Serpent. All sorts of sea monsters spawned from that hydra: there was a rash of sightings all over the Atlantic in the 1800s. But how did the Bards finally rid the water of the hydra?
“You have it attack itself,” I said. “You make it devour its own heads.”
“Precisely.” Jagger lifted the pint in a toast. “You make them attack themselves.”
While Jagger tilted back his beer, swallowing the whole pint in one long draw, Justice gave me a searching look.
Attack themselves?
I nodded.
Griff looked between us.
“It’s ready,” Rou said, banging the wooden spoon against the edge of her pot.
Outside, the wind ripped at the window’s casement, still groaning.
Jagger set his empty pint glass down. “Do you still think this is about the crown?”
