Page 7 of A Reign of Roses
“C’mon, boy. What would you give?” Len pushed.
This dishwasher’s hunt for companionship was grating my last nerve down to a fine thread. “Why ask such a thing?”
“Why not?”
“I don’t dwell on hypotheticals.”
Len snickered, toying with the knife still in his hands. Then he reached for my supper, and broke off a piece of crust, crumbing it in his hands and scattering it at our feet.
The fat, wiry rat crawled out of the floorboards, tentatively at first. Drawn to the scraps, but no fool. The rodent waited with practiced patience until Len scooted closer to the makeshift table and turned his back on the scene.
“What are you doing?”
“I don’t want you to dwell, boy.” Len had faced me, but his eyes were on that rat, grasping at greasy crumbs with reedy pink hands. Before I could stop him, Len lashed at the creature with his knife and speared the thing clean-through in a gorycrunch.
“For Gods’ sake, Len…” The man was senile. And all alone in this icy, lonesome town. I stood to leave, wondering if there even was a Faulk.
“Sit,” he commanded, laying the impaled rat on the table. Its meager blood pooled around my half-eaten pie.
Mists of shadow twined around my fists. Though irritated, I had no real desire to hurt Len. But this was—
“And none of that,” the old man said, jerking his chin at my hands. Len removed the knife, placed it on the table, and waited. I had no reason to stay, but some curiosity, perhaps some long-buried loneliness of my own, kept my feet from moving, and I watched as Len drew one wrinkled hand across the rat’s plump corpse.
With no incantation, no lighte, no otherworldly glow, the rat twitched. And twitched again. Len hadn’t said a single word when the rodent’s curved spine reattached with an audiblecrack. The long-tailed vermin released a disturbing, harrowing squeak before rising and scampering across the table. It crawled to the ground and back through the gap in the floorboards from which it came.
My heart rattled my broken rib cage. It was more than Briar Creighton herself could do.
Necromancy.
My eyes shot up to Len once more. That crinkle at the corner of his eyes. The smirk playing on his lips.
“It’s you. You’re…”
“Now answer me, boy.”
Knees loose, I dropped back down into my seat.
The White Crow had been with me all evening long.
I was a fucking fool.
And now I knew his question for what it was.
A test. One which I didn’t have the right answer to. I knew the truth—that I’d give anything, any limb, any life, any realm, to bring Arwen back. That I would shear the skin from my own bones, tear the world to pulp to hold her in my arms even just one more time—
But I had no idea if it was the response the White Crow sought.
“I’d give more…” I managed on a breath. “More to bring her back than you could ever know.”
“What if it spelled your own death?”
“In a heartbeat.”
“Yes, that’s an easy one, isn’t it? What about an innocent’s? What if her resurrection demanded an equal debt paid—”
Suddenly I was back aboard a ship in the heart of the Mineral Sea, reaching for a tear-stained, blood-soaked Arwen.“I knew I couldn’t go through with it. Not even for the good of all of Evendell…Do you hear me? I was willing to sacrifice the entire world to keep you alive!”
“Yes,” I admitted. Shame thick on my tongue, eyes down on the drying river of rat’s blood, tacky and near-black on the tabletop. “I’d kill for her. A thousand times over.”
