Page 71 of Fortune's Blade

And Ray was loyal to me.

It made me feel strangely warm as we threaded our way across the raucous scene. I had never had anyone loyal to me before and still had trouble grasping it at times. But Ray’s hand was steady in mine, and he’d kept his face blank when answering Mircea. And his mind, too, I supposed, as Mircea was an expert mentalist.

And had merely said that that wouldn’t be necessary.

“We’ll go home when you’re ready,” Ray had told me afterwards. “And not before.”

I had blinked at him. “When did you decide that?”

“When I realized that you don’t need to be worried about Faerie. It needs to be worried about you.”

“But you said—”

“Yeah, I said a lot of things, most of them stupid.” He had taken my hand. “Look, I’m out of my depth here. I want you back home; I do. Faerie scares the shit out of me, especially now, and having you here . . .

“But I get it now, why you don’t wanna go back yet.”

“You do?” I wasn’t sure that I entirely understood that myself.

He’d nodded. “You know who you are there, and what you can expect. You have half a life, trying to share one with your sister, only that isn’t really working for either of you, is it?”

I had numbly shaken my head.

“Yeah, I didn’t think so. Nobody should have to live like that, and you’ve done it long enough. The riddle to what you are is here, and only here. You gotta be the one to decide if you want to find it. Not me, not Mircea, not anybody else.”

I had blinked again when he said that, and might have done more if I hadn’t been in too much of a food haze. And not just because it was almost unheard of for anyone to take my side. But because people did not tell Mircea no.

They nodded and bowed and were grateful that he had deigned to notice them. That was especially true for people like Ray, whose rank as a master might be impressive in some areas, but at the senate wouldn’t even get him a servant’s job. And whose own master had cast him off for being troublesome and not powerful enough, leaving him alone until Dory took him in.

Was that why he was so loyal to us? I wondered. And why he had stared his head of house down as far more senior masters would have trembled to do? The thought should have made me happy, even elated, but it did not.

Gratitude wasn’t what I wanted from him.

The thought surprised me, having come out of nowhere, and seemed to surprise him, too. For he stumbled a little and almost connected with the swinging arm of a large troll. He managed to miss it at the last second, only to run straight into another troll coming this way, carrying a dozen huge tankards in each burly fist.

Beer sloshed, the troll cursed, and Ray and I found ourselves snagged on one of the creature’s meaty fingers, which I supposed was all he could spare without dropping the rest of his burden. But one was enough. They truly were amazingly strong, I thought, as we were jerked closer, and had something that neither Ray nor I understood growled in our faces.

The troll looked like a waiter, with a full-length apron now splashed with beer, perhaps having been co-opted by the pixies to help keep up with the needs of tables full of his kind, who could drain the enormous tankards in a few hearty gulps. They were thirsty, it seemed, for we were quickly surrounded, or perhaps they just wanted to witness what the waiter would do to us. The trolls I had met at Claire’s house had liked mayhem only slightly less than food and drink, and now they could have both.

We were backed into a wall of flesh that felt only slightly more yielding than stone, while being peered at by a ring of fascinatingly ugly faces. I didn’t know whether the trolls I had met on Earth were simply more attractive than normal, the movie star version of their kind, or whether these were just particularly ill-favored. But I had never seen faces quite like them on anyone else.

It sent a shiver of excitement up my spine, as it did every time this world showed me something new. There were noses of every size and shape imaginable—cauliflower, bulbous, elephantine, long and beaky, short and piggy, twisted in such a way that made it difficult to imagine how the owner could possibly breathe, and full-on Cyrano de Bergerac. They were matched by tiny, beady eyes ranging in color from mud-brown and bruise-purple to vomit yellow, and hair that was mostly too clumped with mud, forest trash and bird droppings for me to really discern the color. And their skin was every shade from old bronze crusted over by brownish rust to a brilliant green that had been deliberately scarified, with the wounds making elaborate ruddy swirls across the features.

There was even a dark blue, a color I had never seen on Earth, and that must be rare here, too, as there was only one. He had had most of one cheek blasted away at some point, but instead of hiding it as most people would have done, he had seized the opportunity. And set the teeth that had been revealed in his cheek with precious stones, highlighting the injury and turning it into something strangely beautiful.

At least, I found it beautiful. Ray seemed to be having a different reaction. Ray had begun making small hurking noises, which I had not heard from him before, and which I was at first somewhat worried about.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Trying to look like I’m sick,” he whispered back. “Plagues are a problem here. It’s the best way out of something like this.”

“Yes, but I don’t think they heard you,” I pointed out. Because the room was very loud, and while trolls usually have good hearing, discerning Ray’s subtle sick sounds in all this would be unlikely. Particularly as the band had just started another song.

“Hurk!” Ray said in reply, elevating the decibel level beyond that which what was really believable, but the trolls didn’t seem to notice. In fact, a few of them leaned closer as if under the impression that he was speaking some kind of strange, off-world language.

And then we were grabbed by the back of our tunic.

“Hurk! Hurk! Hurk!” Ray yelled frantically.

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