Page 131 of Fortune's Blade

Something was about to happen, with even the troll rolling over onto his stomach, like a kid on a living room floor watching a show on TV. One that had almost gotten to the good part. Only the good part never came, because the people in the recording were crowding around her now, were draping her with a robe, and were talking to her softly.

I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but it looked like they were making soothing noises as you would to a child. Perhaps because she was one, I thought, staring from her very familiar features to the egg she’d just walked out of. Or been birthed from, I realized, my eyes moving to the rows of alcoves while a strange white noise buzzed in my ears.

It was like the roaring of the ocean, which I couldn’t seem to hear over, causing even the cacophony of the room to fade away. My brain was suddenly full of it, with no room for anything else. Except for a single word.

“Mother,” I whispered, and lurched to my feet.

Chapter Forty-One

It had to be her; it simply had to be. She looked like Dory as she had as a young woman—sweet, vulnerable, dangerous. I had seen that look a thousand times, that glance, those eyes; I simply couldn’t be wrong.

I had crossed the room unthinking and stood in front of her, my hand unconsciously lifting to touch her hair, her cheek, expecting . . . I didn’t know what. That she would look at me? That she would somehow see me over the centuries?

But my hand went right through her, as Marlowe’s had done with the goddess’s image. Vaguely blue light silvered the troll’s fingers for a moment, before I dropped our hand, beaten. And had to content myself with staring at her.

Only I wasn’t content; it wasn’t enough. People kept getting in the way, and even when I could see her, it was hazy, with the picture quality on the gods’ video feed less than ideal. I backed up, almost to where I’d been before, and it helped somewhat, but it still wasn’t clear.

I wanted to drink her in, to examine every pore, every micro expression. But instead, she looked like she had in my dreams sometimes, fuzzy and indistinct. Like a memory of a memory, looked at too often and worn almost to nothing, with just a few frayed threads remaining that I wasn’t even sure were real anymore.

But that was the only time I thought of her, when waking from one of those dreams, her voice still ringing in my ears and a yearning squeezing my heart. I did not think about her when awake, for she was dead. Dead and gone; I had been told that all my life.

Why think about a corpse you never knew? Why torture yourself with someone who wasn’t there and wasn’t going to be, just another ache in a life filled with them? No, I had thought very little about my mother.

But now . . . I could think of nothing else.

Was this where she had been made? Tinkered with by the gods from any number of creatures, hewn from the flesh of a thousand crossings, until they found one that they liked. Until she found it?

She was there now, standing to the side—Fortuna, goddess of fertility, which made a strange kind of sense in the circumstances. Had she run this place, bringing about life in a different way? She seemed to show up in more of the images than anyone else, and appeared very pleased with her latest creation.

But she was watchful, too, standing back from the others, trying to assess her handiwork with my mother barely out of the womb. And looking for what? I thought, my anger rising. And what happened to those who failed her tests? To all the things that had once been in those alcoves, and were now . . . where were they now?

Discarded, having exhausted their usefulness, like the dark fey had been? Or put down as failed experiments too dangerous to keep alive, like the dragons? Or left behind and forgotten about, like the wretched thing in that first alcove?

From what Dory and I had seen, it was all of the above.

And to those who passed her rigorous standards, what had happened to them? From what we’d heard, it wasn’t any better. Just cannon fodder in the gods’ perpetual wars, easily disposable soldiers, casualties that no one cared about.

Like the green fey had made out of the hybrids they created from the human slaves they bought, so that their own soldiers wouldn’t be lost on the battlefield. We’d been told about them in council meetings on the war, yet never paused to wonder where they had learned such behavior. Straight from their godly overlords, it seemed.

Let the mutts handle it, I thought. Let the crossbreeds, the mistakes, the unwanted bleed out while we play our games, while we rake in the rewards, while we toy with their lives and those of others. While we remake their worlds in our image, toddle off and die for us, won’t you?

“What did you do to my mother?”

The furious question echoed around the room, but I received no answer from Fortuna. She winked out of sight as the “video” finished, as most of the others had already done. I didn’t know how long I had stood there, staring mindlessly at my mother’s recording, just that the noisy images had flickered out and the changing light shadows they’d thrown over the room had all but receded.

Until it was just us again, me and my troll, as even Marlowe had gone off somewhere. And the last remaining creature, the only real one behind the ward, finally lost interest. It had been shrieking bloody murder this whole time, adding to the discord, but now it quieted down.

The eye—and there was still only one—looked back and forth for another moment, as if it could no longer see us. Then the scrabbling stopped and it settled back into its alcove, merging with the shadows. Leaving us with the acrid smell of burning flesh in our nose, watery, stinging eyes, and no answers, no answers at all.

But I wasn’t sure that the troll wanted any. My control had slipped to basically nothing at this point, and he was taking advantage. He was heading back to the fissure, gripping his ax hard enough to threaten to break it, and not wasting any time.

Until I came back to myself and turned him around, and we had a little struggle in front of the wall. Back and forth, back and forth, he kept turning toward it and I kept turning him back, whispering reassurances that he couldn’t care less about, especially when the sounds of an altercation came to our ears from further into the cavern. It was so far away that I couldn’t make out words, only that the voices were those of our party.

They had probably been lured back from wherever they’d gone by all the noise, but I suddenly didn’t care about them, any more than the troll did. I wanted to go back across the room. I wanted to play that one particular recording again. I wanted to see if there were any more of her, any with answers, but my ride wasn’t having it.

The best I could do resulted in a stalemate, while I fervently wished that my body was with me. I needed my own limbs, I thought, struggling with the troll’s. And my own senses . . . including my sense of . . . adventure . . . because don’t you want to know . . . what’s going on?

No. No, he did not. And the answer was clearly going to remain no, with him planting his feet and crossing his arms and simply standing there, impervious to any and all persuasion as if he didn’t even hear it.

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