Page 50 of Hijack the Seas: Seismic

“I’m not calling you that!” the man almost shrieked before getting hold of himself. “They’d have my head.”

“Rhosier?” I said because that was Pritkin’s dad’s name.

“Welsh form of Roger,” Pritkin said. And then he noticed my expression. “No relation.”

“We mostly choose names from Earth, Lady,” Rhosier said, averting his eyes from mine. “Or choose dark fey ones. We are not permitted to call ourselves after the light fey.”

“Why would you want to?” I muttered, which won me a surprised glance.

And then I guessed he decided that comment deserved something more and stopped dead in the middle of the corridor. But not to look at me, which seemed to genuinely pain him. But at Pritkin, who he pulled aside without the fake cravenness he’d been showing us.

“Why did you bring her here?”

“I didn’t.” Pritkin’s voice was flat.

“Do you know what they say?”

“Heard some rumors.”

“She’s dangerous!” That was whispered.

“You have no idea.”

“Can we go see the girl already?” Alphonse said, and he wasn’t talking about the poor thing with the bonked head.

Honcho had been hiding his waitress, something he’d readily admitted to Pritkin, who seemed to be everybody’s fair-haired boy. But he didn’t like the idea of letting me talk to her. Which was rich, considering that he didn’t have the same problem with Alphonse.

And the day that I was seen as scarier than Mr. Sinister over there. . .

Well, I guessed that day had come.

“They say she’s mad,” he said after dragging Pritkin down the hall a little further. He’d also put up a silence spell, but I’d aged it out of existence without him being the wiser.

“She isn’t mad. Usually,” Pritkin amended, shooting me a glance. Because he’d noticed what I’d done.

“They say she brought down Issengeir’s shield all on her own! They say she wiped out an entire legion of Aeslinn’s men, powdering them away into nothing and eating their souls! They say she wields the power of Artemis and has increased it in unholy congress with a fell beast of a vampire and. . .”

He abruptly stopped.

“And?” Pritkin said archly.

The man glared at him for a moment, then squared his shoulders and manned up. “And you! The things they say about the two of you—”

“What do they say?”

“I won’t repeat it! But they’re horrible—”

“And you don’t think that might have something to do with the fact that I’m here, competing for the throne, and everyone hates it?”

“Of course I do!” The man shoved limp blond bangs out of his eyes. The rest of the shoulder-length cut had been scraped back into a sad little ponytail, I guessed to keep it out of the food. “But some of the rumors began before that—”

“Imagine,” Pritkin said dryly. “A court who feared, admired, and hated Nimue in equal measure, gossiping about another demigoddess. One that none of them have ever even seen before today. One who is on my side—”

“Is she? Is she on your side? Or does she want the throne for herself?” And then Rhosier went off, to the point that the passion and venom in his voice were literally spine-tingling. “You know how they are! All of her kind—not just some of them, all. They see us as nothing but tools to snatch up when they like and throw away when they choose. They don’t care about us, about you, any more than their creatures do, those with but a drop of godly blood in their veins but all their cunning, their greed, their treachery.

“They and the gods are the same. They will toss you aside when you are old and broken in their service and never even bury your bones. You’ll be lucky if they don’t feed them to their dogs, who they treasure more than you! So, I say again, how sure are you that this isn’t a play to put a crown on her head and make another Nimue to scourge us? I won’t help with that! Do you hear me? I won’t help to enslave another generation of—”

“Why don’t we ask her?” Pritkin said suddenly, cutting him off.

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