Page 132 of Hijack the Seas: Seismic

“Oh, boo hoo.” That, of course, was Alphonse. “Lots of us got the shit beat out of us as kids—”

He broke off, maybe because the other half of that sentence, “and didn’t turn into murderers,” wasn’t exactly true in his case.

“At least I’m on the right side,” he mumbled as our eyes met, and finally shut up.

“—and when she turned out to have more vengeance in her heart than concern for their people’s welfare, he left her to come here,” Bodil continued grimly. “And risk his life for a force to unseat his father and restore order to his lands.”

“The Alorestri have been battling Aeslinn’s people for centuries,” Pritkin pointed out. “Even if he won control of their army, how could he hope to triumph now when they never could before?”

“He knows his father’s kingdom like no other,” she said. “Knows who are disaffected and might turn against him given enough help, knows secret ways into the castle—a hundred things! And Aeslinn’s forces have been weakened in the war; he is vulnerable. Why do you think I partnered with the son of our oldest enemy?”

“I had wondered about that,” I said and was ignored.

“We only end centuries of war by ending Aeslinn, and this boy is our best chance to do that. So, no, he doesn’t die. I will talk to him when he comes around—”

“Talk! That’s great,” Alphonse said.

“—and explain that the girl must live.”

“The Pythia,” Pritkin said sharply. “And explain it to her.”

Suddenly, everybody looked at me as if this was my choice, which I guessed it was as it was my life on the line.

I wondered if there had been a reason that Faerie had shown us what she did from that precise angle. She didn’t need a slave being dragged back to Dolgrveginn to be a late-night snack for a god to make her point. She could have shown us the city’s destruction through a thousand different eyes.

But she chose that one.

Maybe because he had been saved by someone who was supposed to be an enemy, and only by working together had they been able to survive and help the others with them. Subtle, I thought, looking up and meeting her eyes. Like a brickbat.

But effective.

There were just six of us against ridiculous odds. We needed everyone, even an arrogant fey prince with anger management issues. So, I was just going to have to suck it up.

“Æsubrand lives,” I said shortly. “This time.”

Chapter Thirty-Eight

What felt like a year later, we were all sitting around the floor watching Pritkin work on the black slab that formed the back of the mountainous chair. He was trying to summon his mother’s tunnel, which apparently hadn’t been just a one-off thing. And which might get us to the portal room without risking whatever the Margygr had put in that water.

I say might, as it wasn’t going well.

“So she made a tunnel that just . . . moves around?” Alphonse said, his forehead wrinkling.

He was sitting on the rocky edge of the chasm while Enid paced nearby. She’d handled the trip into a troll’s brain better than I’d have expected, maybe because she was part fey and the Common wasn’t completely unknown to her. But sitting around while her fate lay in someone else’s hands seemed to bother her a lot more.

I could sympathize.

It wasn’t exactly doing me a lot of good, either.

Pritkin nodded. “On call might be a better word for it, as she had no way of knowing when or where she might need it.”

“But how? And that’s the back of a chair you’re working on. There’s nothing on the other side to make a tunnel through.”

Pritkin shot him a mildly amused glance. “The same way that the Svarestri, whose element is earth, use it to create almost anything they choose, from cities where none should be possible to great stone defenders of their realm.”

Alphonse did not seem satisfied with that answer, and I couldn’t blame him. Human logic and magical logic were often not compatible. “Okay, but that explains the what, not the how.”

“You want me to explain elemental magic while you wait?” Pritkin asked dryly, glancing over his shoulder at the big vamp.

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