She left before she lost her composure or her nerve. Havilar would find the note after she woke and take it to Mehen. By then Farideh would be gone, and Sairché would leave the both of them alone. She hoped.
Heart pounding-head pounding-Farideh pulled her cloak closer around her and hurried through the Harpers’ stronghold. There were still at least two hours before her deepnight deadline. She could make it out of the city, well away from anyone else who might track her.
Farideh made it as far as the middle of the crowded taproom before the sudden sensation of walking into a wire fence stopped her. Lines of power pulled her back toward the stairs. The protective spell, she realized, reminding her of its limits. Reminding her she was too far from Lorcan-who was gone.
Farideh took a step back, searching the faces of the taproom’s customers. A broad-shouldered half-orc nudged her out of the way, back into the sharp edges of the spell. When she tried to go back the way she came, she found it blocked by bodies pressed close to the bar. She edged her way around the tables and chairs, the searing pain of the protection’s limits enough to make her hold her breath, enough to make her head pound. The edges of her vision started to crackle, stars flashing bright as she inched around the last of the tables.
It should have pulled Lorcan toward her. It should have eased for her, if not for him. But if he’s not in the protection, she thought frantically, as the stars popped across her field of vision, a thousand swirling colors and shadows, if someone else has hold of it. .
Farideh turned and stepped away from the edge of the protection, square into a person. Ale sloshed over her cloak, and she heard a man curse.
“I’m sorry,” she said automatically. The lights bloomed over her vision and she couldn’t make out how annoyed he was. “I didn’t see-”
“Farideh?” Dahl said. She took a step back, and the lights dimmed a little. He didn’t look annoyed so much as surprised, even with an empty flagon and ale down his shirt. “What are you doing down here?”
She shook her head-not now, not now. The lights were still popping in and out of her vision, so abrupt and bright that her ears imagined sounds for them. She glimpsed Dahl’s face between flashes of blue and teal and silvery gray. Between the pops his expression hardened.
“Were you going somewhere?”
“Something’s wrong,” she said. “I don’t know. .”
“All right. You need to talk to Tam. Now.” Dahl took her by the arm and guided her back through the crowd, but also toward where Lorcan must be.
Or toward whoever’s captured an edge of your protection spell, she thought, weaving alongside Dahl, back through the bodies and the furniture and the exploding lights. There were more devils in the Hells than a person could count, and any one of them might be aligned against Sairché’s success. Her and Lorcan’s monstrous mother, any one of their half sisters, their terrible liege-lady, another collector devil-
“Is this. . fit you’re having to do with the devil?” Dahl asked as they ascended the stairs.
“I’m not having a fit,” Farideh said. But was she? Maybe it wasn’t Lorcan. Maybe this was some illness she’d caught in the Hells. Maybe this was some curse Sairché laid on her. “I just need to lie down, all right?”
“Lie down in your cloak with a haversack for a pillow?” Dahl said, corralling her up another set of stairs. “You were running away.”
No, Farideh thought. I was trying to keep my word. I was trying to get out of this horrible deal alive. I was trying to protect Havilar. “I was going for a walk,” she lied.
“I’m sure.” Dahl was silent a moment. “You know, I thought Tam could trust you. It’s not such a leap to see hidden agents and traitors in what I’ve heard of your tale, but I was sure that couldn’t be the answer.”
“I wasn’t here,” she said, as he marched her the rest of the way up the stairs. “I don’t even know who you’re fighting.” But he said no more, as they continued past two guards who spat bursts of yellow and black stars and streamers of red, past a ward he disarmed with a wave of an arm, and into the offices of Tam Zawad.
“Dahl? What’s wrong,” Tam said, silver bursts of light blooming over him like ice flowers across a windowpane. “Shar pass us over, Fari, are you all right?”
Three steps past the door, the protection grabbed hold of her again, strong, icy fingers of magic wrapped around her arms, her chest, her throat. She stopped, but Dahl urged her on. Another step, another two-the lights surged. Her legs buckled, and she stumbled backward before she could fall.
“I can’t,” she said, panting. “Something’s wrong. And I need to go. I need to leave.” Don’t tell them, she thought. Don’t bring them into this. “I’m not feeling well.”
“She was in the taproom,” Dahl said, “dressed for a journey.”
“Sit down,” Tam said.
“I have to stand,” she said. If she sat, she couldn’t move, couldn’t correct for the protection’s pull.
“You’ll sit,” Tam said. “Before you fall. Dahl, get a chair.” He turned to the sideboard, and through the shroud of lights she could hear the clink of glass. “I don’t have a better cure for nerves,” Tam said with a lightness she didn’t believe. “And perhaps then you can give us a better explanation.”
The popping was no longer her imagination, she was certain. The sound of a fire built high and damp, the sound of a thousand bullets from a thousand slings hitting the walls. She could hardly see for the lights and shadows. Though they seemed to grow, to surge off the two men, they swirled around the room like something alive.
Farideh shoved a hand in her pocket and felt the ring there. Whatever was happening to her, Tam and Dahl didn’t need to be pulled into it. Let them think she was a traitor, let them think she’d been corrupted in the Hells, let them think she was beyond saving anyway-just let them be safe.
The lights seemed to overtake her, as if they were boiling over from some source beyond the fabric of the world, like ethereal lava. She heard, dimly, the sound of Tam asking her something, the clink of a bottle being set down. The sound of the chair falling and Dahl shouting her name. She felt, at a distance, it seemed, her finger slip through the warm circle of the ring, and Dahl’s hands on her back as she collapsed into the space between worlds.
When Tam turned back from the sideboard at the sound of Dahl’s shout and Farideh’s wordless grunt, he expected his erstwhile charges puddled on the floor, one highly annoyed and one insensate and much heavier than expected.
Instead, there was only the chair, lying on its side on the well-worn rug, and the clink of the glass Tam dropped on the desk. Dahl and Farideh were gone.
Sairché waited until Farideh had left the library, off to assemble her things, and smiled to herself. Matched against a warlock in a game of wits? Even Farideh had to realize by now how unsporting that was.
Still, Sairché thought, it paid to make absolutely certain that she was defeated. Sairché knew better, after all, than to leave loose ends. She pulled a scroll from her sleeve, unrolled it and tore a large corner from it, making sure to catch just enough from the Netherese missive she’d snatched out of Rhand’s study. Enough to imply Farideh knew something about supply chains to the High Forest. Enough to be interesting to meddling Harpers. Enough to make even her family doubt Farideh’s innocence.
Sairché tucked it beside the ugly woodcut of a pit fiend. She tapped the little guardian on the nose. Farideh was going to wish very soon that she’d submitted quietly.
Chapter Six