“Then we should discuss safeguards,” he said carefully. “Once we leave civilization—”
“I know,” she broke in tiredly. “I’ll be away from so many other mortals, and we’ll be traveling through isolated places where the Fay might try to seek me out.”
At that, Shade raised her head, rumbling softly into Wynn’s face.
This was going to be harder than Chane thought. Before Wynn or Shade could start in about the Fay, Chane cut them off.
“Whenever possible on the road, I need to keep my ring off.”
Chane wore a brass ring that he called his ring of nothing, which had been created by his old undead companion Welstiel Massing—who was now truly dead. The ring protected Chane against anyone sensing his nature as an undead. But it also dulled his own heightened senses, including his awareness of the living and the undead.
Wynn blinked at his reference to the ring. It had nothing to do with the Fay hunting her because she was the only mortal who could hear them, spy upon them whenever and wherever they manifested near enough. And then realization of what he truly meant finally spread across her oval face.
“Oh, Chane,” she said. “Sau’ilahk is gone. I burned him to nothing down in the sea tunnel.”
“You burned him once before in the streets of Calm Seatt,” he countered. “And yet—”
“This time was different,” Wynn insisted. “I destroyed him, and that’s the fact.”
Perhaps ... but this was the point of contention. It was not a fact, as there was no proof of it.
In the underworld of the dwarves, Wynn had used her only weapon against the undead—her sun crystal staff—to vanquish the wraith. It was true that this time she had had powerful help. Cinder-Shard, the craggy-faced master of the dwarven Stonewalkers, those who guarded the remains and spirits of the dwarven honored dead, had somehow been able to seize Sau’ilahk’s incorporeal form with his massive bare hands. And that sardonic elf called Chuillyon, dressed in white robes like a false sage, had held the wraith at bay with little more than serene, smiling whispers.
Those two, along with the other Stonewalkers, had hindered and bound Sau’ilahk. They had given Wynn time to burn the wraith with her staff, its crystal emitting light akin to the sun.
She was convinced the wraith was gone.
Chane was not.
“Compared to the wraith, I am a common vampire,” he countered.
He could hear himself shifting from his normal, voiceless hiss to something more raspy, grating, and heated. He tried to sound calmer, more rational. “Yet you watched as Magiere severed my head from my body.”
This was also how his voice had been permanently maimed.
Wynn fell silent, glancing away.
“Yet here I am,” he finished quietly.
He hated feeling forced to bring this up. Watching him die his second death had been more than difficult for her. He still had no understanding of how he had later managed to come back. All he remembered was waking up soaked in blood and covered in freshly killed bodies in a shallow-earth hollow. He was whole again—and Welstiel had been looking down at him, as if waiting.
“I traveled with Magiere, Leesil, and Chap for a long time,” Wynn finally answered. “They—we—destroyed vampires who did not come back.” She gestured toward her desk, at the stacks of journals piled there. “I’ve recorded it all, regardless that my superiors have no interest in the truth.”
Chane glanced at the journals. Another notion resurfaced, one that he had mulled over in recent nights. He had never even seen those journals until Wynn managed to steal them back.
But she had written everything in them about her travels with Leesil and Magiere, about her experiences with the undead and the an’Cróan, the elves of the Farlands. If he could read them, he might better understand her ... comprehend her true drives, goals, hopes, and fears. Even if she had not recorded events literally, he knew her well enough to read between the lines of her script.
His one task was to protect Wynn, including from herself. This gave him purpose, and to do so, he needed to understand everything she had been through.
“May I read them?” he asked, nodding at the stack.
Wynn turned pale.
“I wrote them in the Begaine syllabary,” she blurted out. “You won’t be able to.”
“I read a little of your guild symbols.” He stepped closer. “And you can help me. Studying your works will teach me to follow the script.”
Wynn started to say something more but it never came out.
Chane did not understand her reluctance. He had already strained her patience by pushing his point about Sau’ilahk, but now that he had made the request, he would not stop.
“The information in those journals could help me—us—in the journey to come.”
This reasoning was sound. If they were to travel to another guild branch in search of more answers, how else would he know what to look for? She viewed him as part of her purpose now. He should be allowed to know everything.
Wynn was still silent.
Chane understood her well enough. Everything she had brought to the guild had been taken from her. Now that she had regained some of her prized possessions, perhaps she was reluctant to relinquish them again, even to him.
“As you said,” he went on, “we must pass time constructively until the council decides. I will need to purchase the supplies for our trip if you are confined. Otherwise, I must better understand what has brought you this far.”
And still she hesitated.
“Were they not written to recount your experiences, share your knowledge?”
Wynn looked up at him.
“Of course, yes.” She stood up, stepping to her little desk table. “I recopied this one while on the ship from the Farlands. This recounts my journey to Droevinka with Magiere, Leesil, and Chap. You can start here.”
Her sudden acquiescence was a relief, but something in her eyes troubled Chane. Even as she held up that first journal, her small fingers were white from clutching it too tightly.
What was she hiding?
Chapter 2
Seven nights later, Wynn knelt on the floor of her small room, feeding Shade bits of dried fish. All was quiet except for the dog’s clacking teeth and smacking jowls. She glanced at the door again, wondering why Chane still hadn’t arrived, and then looked around at her simple room: the bed, desk, small table, and one narrow window with a view of the keep’s inner courtyard.
Once she’d felt safe here, in what was now her prison. The council had maintained a deafening silence, and she had begun to wonder if they’d ever decide her fate. She and Chane had pressed ahead, anyway, itemizing supplies for him to acquire and making preparations for a journey. He stopped by her room each night before heading into the city to either tell her what he’d acquired or to see if anything new had been put on the list—or to return a journal and pick up another.
Wynn clenched all over every time he did the latter.
It wasn’t that she minded him reading her journals. They were a scholar’s records, after all. But a fair portion of their content dealt with the undead, with hunting and eliminating them. Chane often grew sullen or even bitter whenever she mentioned her old companions, Magiere, Leesil, and Chap. She could only imagine his state while reading so much about them.
Wynn’s relationship to those three was ... complex.
Magiere was a fierce, dark-haired rogue and the only dhampir Wynn had ever even heard of. Leesil was half-elven, raised in his youth to be an assassin enslaved to a warlord, a life he had escaped. Chap was a majay-hì like no other, a true Fay who’d chosen to be born into a pup of the Fay-and-wolf descendants of the elven lands.