“Ifit was a human,” I told the elf lord, ice coating my words, “then we will find him. You may depend uponit.”
Wrexham stirred beside me. “Harwood—”
“Fine,” I snapped, without sparing him a glance. “I’llfind him myself, then. I was the one to make the binding promise. I should be the one to fulfillit.”
“Indeed you must,” said the elf lord, “or pay the price. And the promise that you made, as I recall, was hardly so narrow-minded as only to protect my petifthe malefactor happened to behuman.”
I frowned. “But—”
“You can’t be serious!” Wrexham’s voice was a near-snarl, his shoulders hunching as if he were having to force himself to stay in place. “You know none of us are allowed into your private halls. How can you possibly expect her to hunt for a criminalthere?”
“Oh, I certainly don’t.” The elf-lord laughed. “But then, I never forced her to make that foolish promise, didI?”
In that moment, he was every man who had ever laughed out loud in disbelief when he’d heard that I wished to learn magic and every woman who had ever raised her eyebrows in pity...or whispered afterward, when she’d thought I couldn’t hear, that she’dalways known this would come of it in the end. The blood was thundering in my ears as I glared at him, and the snow swirled wildly around us, as if it could sense the raw disorder in my chest, where every one of my scabbed wounds had been torn wide open and exposed to the pitiless coldair.
“I will keep my promise,” I told him, enunciating every word withprecision.
The elf lord tipped his head to the side, as if preparing another verbalstab.
Wrexham spoke first, though, his voice so steady that anyone who didn’t know him well might have missed the thread of deadly fury running underneath his words. “She has another promise that needs keeping first. We’ve been sent out to search for a lost party of guests. Before any of us can begin anothermission—”
“Oh,them?” The elf lord shook his head sadly. “Poor little lost lambs. You people are careless, aren’t you? Do you know they weren’t even carrying any iron with them on their journey?” His glance shifted and lingered for one, visibly amused moment on the frame of my broken lantern, lying uselessly on the groundnearby.
Sudden panic gripped me as I followed his gaze. Horror stories were still passed down, after all these centuries, about the vicious games that the elves had once loved to play with unprotected humans, before the last, most devastating war had finally bought us the hard-won treaty between our nations. The elves wouldn’t dare break that treaty now, after so long—wouldthey?
But if Miss Fennell’s party had broken one of the treaty’s more obscure rules in some way, withoutrealizing...
I didn’t need to understand the finer details of elven politics to know, without a fraction of a doubt, that the elf lord in front of me would leap at the opportunity forpunishment.
“What have you done to them?” Ibreathed.
Every inch of my body ached to cast a spell that would banish the smugness from his face. But it would be a Pyrrhic victory indeed that left me lying broken in the snow—and at his mercy—afterward.
“I?” The elf lord raised both eyebrows in haughty reproach. “Why, I couldn’t lay a finger onthem, under the terms of our agreement. Our noble king would never hear of such a thing.” His lips twisted into a sneer. “Wasn’t it fortunate, then, that I foundyou,little meddler, as a reward for my goodbehavior?”
I sucked in a breath. Wrexham startedforward.
The elf lord lifted one hand and clicked hisfingers.
The spellcast bubble around me burst, and snow hurled itself against me, flinging wet, choking handfuls of flakes into my face until I had to bend over, gagging and coughing, covering my nose and my mouth with my hands. My ears were half-covered by my hood, but it wasn’t enough as the snow and wind buffeted me. It wasn’t nearly enough. Andthen...
I could just make out the muffled sound of Wrexham’s voice somewhere in the distance, loud and agitated. But in my head, a slithering, unwelcome invasion, I could suddenly hear the elf lord’s own piercingwhisper:
“You have one se’ennight from the completion of your first mission to keep your promise to my pet, little meddler. But when you fail, I’ll be waiting here to exact your payment—and this time, no one from my nation or yours will be able to deny me. Oh, I’ve been waiting such a long time to play my favorite gamesagain.”
The snow and wind abruptly fell away from me. In the sudden, deafening silence inside my own head, my breath came in heavy pants. Every bruise on my body ached. Slowly, painfully, I straightened, blinking the leftover wet, stinging snowflakes out of myeyes.
The elf lord was gone. My spellcast bubble was back. And Wrexham was staring at me from a few feet away, his dark eyes wide with what looked likesurprise.
Or rather...Wait. His gaze was fixed beyond me.At...
I twisted, uncomfortably, to look over my ownshoulder.
“Oh, I say!” The tallest of the four young women who stood clustered behind me in a rather damp-looking but festive group laughed with delight and pointed up at the troll, who stood massive and unmoving against the darkening sky. “He’s quite a big brute, isn’t he? I shouldn’t care to run afoul ofhim!”
I sighed, shoulders sagging, as I took in the elf lord’s parting gift. “Miss Fennell, Ipresume.”
Wrexham had, after all, told the elf lord that I couldn’t begin my next mission before my last one was complete...so the elf lord had completed it forme.
