Saris ran her fingers over her discolored skin, hiding her bruise with glamour.
“Does Broen know?”
“There’s no need, at the moment, to worry him.” Saris gave a bittersweet smile, though her eyes glittered with unshed tears.
Radre. “Why did Radre hit you?”
“He… he wanted to know where the baby is.”
The baby. “How does he know about the baby? You told him Nyanda’s baby died.”
“If you’ll recall, he didn’t believe me. Now Nyanda’s followers are gathering. Radre must know her child didn’t die all those seasons ago.” Saris raised troubled eyes to Wycke. “The child lives?”
Wycke let out a slow breath. No easy way to impart his message. “Yes, he’s alive. But he’s no longer a child, Saris.” Chynne did have his uses, like opening portals at will and timing their arrival pretty close to when they’d left. Also, helping Wycke see that the bartender he’d slept with and the missing son of Lady Nyanda Gimitri were one and the same—though he struggled to wrap his head around having accidentally fulfilled his sister’s wishes. “I think he’s unaware of who he is.”
Damned spells!
“What of Sir Lyvianne?” Saris sat forward, hands clasped together on the desk.
Wycke hated snuffing out the hope on Saris’s face. “I believe he sacrificed himself.”
“Oh.” Saris remained still for a moment. A lone tear trailed down her cheek. Then another. And another. At last, she moved, dabbing her eyes with a delicate handkerchief. “Poor man. I should have tried harder to find them. I should have…”
Wycke grasped her hand. “You couldn’t have known. For all we knew, only a few human months passed in their realm.” One realm he’d heard of operated in the future, with time running backward from their own realm.
“Still—”
“Shh… Because of you, the baby lived to grow into a man.” For which Wycke was grateful. He’d fulfilled his promise.
One side of Saris’s mouth lifted, then fell. “A man. Baby Pieravor is a man now.”
Somehow, Radre knew, or at least suspected, Piers still lived. How? “Did he have anything of his mother’s? Anything that might make him easy to trace?” Though now, with his magic awakened, hiding Piers might prove impossible. His power would draw other magical beings like fairies to, well, magic.
At the moment, Piers should be at work, surrounded by magicals and non-magicals alike. Probably the safest place for him until Wycke came up with a better idea. Would bringing him to the magical realm be better or worse?
“Sir Lyvianne took a bag with them—packed by Lady Nyanda, I thought. Her maid found some of her jewelry missing, which we believed an enemy soldier took, and her…” Saris’s face drained of color. “Her spellbook. Oh, Wycke. If he has her spellbook, you need to get back there. If Radre is looking for him…”
What should Wycke tell her? “Do you remember the sorceress having a familiar?”
“Chynne? I saw him in the form of a raven on several occasions and as a cat. What about him? No one has seen him since her death.”
A raven. A form Chynne had yet to show. “He came with me to the human realm, looking for the child too.” Uncertainty ran chill fingers along Wycke’s spine. He’d trusted the familiar far too quickly. Had Wycke been ensorcelled? His insides squirmed with the sudden compulsion to find Piers. Protect him. For Saris’s sake? Yeah. A workable excuse.
“He what? Oh, Wycke, you can’t let Chynne find the child, no telling what he’ll do…”
“He says he belongs to Piers… Pieravor. I don’t think he’d hurt him.” Plenty of opportunities to kill Piers if Chynne wanted.
“I’ll trust you, but please keep an eye on anything to do with that woman.” Saris shuddered. “But there’s more. There’s been movement through the portals. A lot of movement.” Saris resumed crumpling the ball of parchment.
A lot of movement? As with fairies, certain other beings shifted from one realm to the next with ease: hellhounds, the best trackers ever created. A word from the human realm erupted from Wycke’s tongue. “Fuck.”
“You’ve seen the child. I mean, the man. You know he has no power. What do they want with him?”
A long history of secrecy had Wycke scanning his surroundings. No overlooking even innocent-seeming pixies again. “He’s not without power. He’s more powerful than the two of us combined.”
“What? How can that be possible? His mother made the dampening spell you wear but didn’t use the band on Pieravor. I thought maybe he didn’t need protection. She said he didn’t have any magic.”
“Didn’t you say you wouldn’t trust a word from her mouth? How did he get into the human realm?”