« Forgiveness? You already have that. I have told you that by telling me the truth, you have gained that forgiveness. I don’t want revenge on you. I won’t harm you when I’m free. You have my word!»
His strange, wizened face scrunched down farther on itself and the yellow eyes glittered. «Your forgiveness was the price for my truth. That bargain is made and done. This bargain is new, Grianne of the Straken Lord’s jails. If I give you your freedom—from this cell and from the collar—you must give me what I need in turn.»
She stared at him, realizing suddenly that he had failed to reveal as yet his reasons for coming back. Coming to her aid was not something the little Ulk Bog would do out of the kindness of his heart. He had abandoned her, cast her off as useless to him when she had refused to allow him to lead her where he wanted—which was right where she had ended up anyway. But he had lost his chance at reinstatement as Catcher with Tael Riverine, a loss that left him homeless and shunned. He had come back because he expected her to do something about it.
« I can’t give you anything,” she told him. «It isn’t within my power to give you anything.»
« Ah, Straken, you underestimate yourself. You are exactly the one who can help me, and it is for that reason that I will help you. A favor for a favor. I don’t want much. I don’t want anything more than what you want for yourself. Freedom. From these prisons and from this world. I want you to take me with you.»
Take me with you.She stared at him. Take him out of the Forbidding, he meant. Take him back with her into her own world. Voluntarily release a creature that had been locked away by the Faerie world since before the dawn of Mankind.
« You want to come with me?» she asked him, still not certain she was hearing him right. «You want to leave the Forbidding and come back with me into my world?»
He licked his lips and nodded eagerly. «When you find a way to get free, you must free me, as well. I know that you were brought here against your wishes. I know that you are trapped. But I have seen what you can do. I think that you know a way back—or if you do not, that you will find one. I have seen how resourceful you are, much more so than any other Straken I have ever encountered. You may be a match for Tael Riverine himself!»
« I am a match for no one,” she countered. «I don’t know if I can help you. I don’t know if I should.»
He bristled at her words, stepping back from the cell door and hissing at her like a snake. «Then I don’t know why I’m wasting my time! I don’t know why I bothered coming here at all! You would rather stay in this cell than escape back into your own world? You would rather die here? Better that than help someone like me? Is that what you are saying? That I am not worthy of your efforts, that I don’t deserve your help?»
He spit at her. «Free yourself, then!»
He wheeled and started to walk away. It took everything she had to refrain from calling out to him, from begging him to come back to her. But if he thought she needed him more than he needed her, she would be in his power, and that was a price she could not afford to pay.
He was halfway down the hall when he wheeled about, his face contorting in fury. «I came back for you!» he screamed so loudly that she jumped in spite of herself. «I risked everything to come back for you! I came to save you, and now you won’t help me? One little thing I ask of you, Straken! One tiny, little thing!»
He came rushing back down the hall, sobbing uncontrollably, his shoulders shaking. «Nothing, for someone with your power! Nothing! Why won’t you do it?»
She took a deep breath. «I can’t be sure of my power here. I can’t be sure of what it will do. What if taking you out of the Forbidding is more than I can manage?»
He shook his head slowly from side to side, as if her words made no sense. «Don’t you understand, Grianne of the cat sounds? I was driven from my tribe for eating my children! They will never take me back! No Ulk Bog door will ever be open to me again! Losing the protection of Tael Riverine closed every other door, as well. Now all creatures are my enemies. I am shunned by everything that breathes. I have nowhere to go and no one who will take me in. Better I was dead than to try to live like this!»
« But why bother with me, Weka Dart?» she pressed. «If you just wait, won’t this demon that Tael Riverine has dispatched to my world break down the Forbidding and free you anyway?»
« Free me from what?» he screamed at her. «Free me from one prison so that I can go into another? Free me from one world in which I am outcast so that I can be outcast in another? I don’t want the Straken Lord to succeed! I don’t want the Forbidding destroyed! If your world becomes like the world of the Jarka Ruus, what difference will it make whether I escape into it or not!»
He pushed his face up against the bars. «You can help me, Straken. If I can help you, surely you can help me! How hard can it be for someone like you to give me what I want?»
In truth, she didn’t know. What would it take to escape the Forbidding? Was the boy foreseen by the shade of the Warlock Lord real? Was he coming to set her free, or was the prophecy a cruel trick? She couldn’t be certain, but it was the only hope she had. The shade of Brona had not lied about the truth behind the reason she had been sent into the world of the Jarka Ruus—Weka Dart had confirmed that.
She was here so that a demon could be free, a demon that would destroy the wall of the Forbidding. If Brona’s shade had told the truth about that, then it might well have been telling the truth about the mysterious boy.
So she must gamble on the words of a monster. She must accept the possibility that her only chance for escape was through the coming of a boy she didn’t know. It didn’t seem to her that Weka Dart’s hopes for escape were any less realistic than her own. While she did not relish setting the Ulk Bog free in her world, it would be infinitely worse to refuse his bargain if it meant that she must stay imprisoned, as well.
« If you release me,” she said, «I will try to find a way out of the world of the Jarka Ruus and back to my own world. If it is within my power to do so, I will take you with me. I can promise you nothing more.»
« I have your word?»
« You do.» She held up one cautionary finger. «But remember, I don’t know yet that I can find a way back for either of us. I don’t know that I can save us, even if you set me free. I don’t know that I can find a way to stop the Moric from destroying the Forbidding. I don’t know that.»
He was already working the key to her cell into the lock. «You will find a way. I know you will.»
He released her from the cell, then used a second, smaller key to unlatch the conjure collar. Stepping back, he handed her the collar, his wizened face bright with pleasure.
« I kept my keys to the cells and the collars from my days as Catcher,” he said to her. «Tael Riverine never suspected I would dare to do such a thing.»
« He has misjudged us both,” she said. She cast the collar aside. She would never wear such a thing again or ever again be anyone’s slave. «How do we get past all the guards and their demonwolves?» she asked as they stood facing each other in the empty hall.
He grinned, all his teeth showing. «We won’t go that way. That way is death. We will go another way, a way I know that few others do. It is how I got into Kraal Reach to find you in the first place. I know secrets, little Straken. 1 know many secrets.»