Which makes our job anything but simple. I’ll have to assume every fae with him is invisible.
“How do we know he’s here then?” I ask.
“He’s recruiting.”
At my frown, Aren gives me his signature half smile then motions me to follow him over the low wall. I slide over the wind-worn stone and grimace when my feet squish into the ground. There are no cobblestones on this side of the wall. Or, if there are, they’re underneath an inch-thick layer of mud. The city is built on a hillside, and we’re standing in a shallow canal that cuts between tall, stone buildings.
Trev sinks into the muck beside me. Without a word, we both follow Aren. Since the fae are silent, I keep quiet, too, suppressing a number of curses because it’s hard as hell to keep my shoes on my feet. The mud keeps suctioning them off. It’s slowing me down more than usual, so when Trev glares over his shoulder at me for the third time, I throw off the impractical dress shoes, hoping there’s nothing in this sludge that will slice open my feet.
When I catch up with Aren and Trev again, I realize we’re not alone in this canal. We’re following a fae. I only see the back of his shaggy head, so I can’t recognize him, but he’s not dressed in any kind of armor. And, if I’m not mistaken, he looks young, too young to be one of Lena’s swordsmen.
“He’s imithi,” Aren says, slowing his pace until I’m at his side.
Imithi? Curious, I squint through the darkness as the fae stops and faces us. Aren used to be one of them. They’re orphans, fae who have no parents, no homes, and no roots linking them to anywhere in the Realm. They fissure from city to city, stealing, looting, and generally creating havoc wherever they go.
When we reach the imithi, the boy cocks his head at me, his silver-blue eyes openly taking me in from rain-drenched head to sludge-covered feet, which feel like blocks of ice now. I think he’s young, but I’ve always had trouble guessing how old fae are. They age slower than humans do, except in their early years. From birth until the teens, we mature almost at the same rate. It’s a good thing, too, because it would be freaking bizarre to talk to a twenty-year-old man who looks like a five-year-old boy. Still, it’s difficult to figure out those later teenage years. The boy looks like he could be a high-school freshman, but he could just as well be the age of a college graduate.
“She’s the shadow-witch?” he asks in Fae.
“She is,” Aren answers.
The boy makes a face. “She doesn’t look like she could slice a leaf.”
Slice a leaf? I glance at Aren and see the corner of his mouth lift into a smile.
“Careful,” he says. “She’s stronger than she looks, and she has the willpower of a kasnek.”
I have no idea what a kasnek is, but Aren’s words are clearly complimentary, and his tone is warm and affectionate. It makes me warm. And it makes me want to slide inside his embrace. As soon as we have a moment alone together, he’s going to tell me what’s really making him put distance between us.
“Really?” the boy says. He shakes his head, flicking his wet, curly brown hair out of his eyes. “Can I touch her?”
“If you want to damage your magic, sure,” Aren says with an it’s-your-funeral kind of shrug.
I glare at Aren. It’s human tech that damages fae magic, not humans, but most fae are so paranoid about their magic that they’ll believe almost anything about us. It doesn’t help that Aren’s spread more rumors about the “shadow-witch” than I can count, turning me into some kind of mythological creature.
Aren just grins back at me. “This is Dicer.”
It takes an effort to ignore the way that smile makes my stomach flip.
“You’re letting the false-blood recruit him?” I ask, forcing my gaze back to the boy and remembering that Aren said recruitment was the reason Nimael was here.
“We’re here to capture Nimael,” Aren says, “so no one’s going to be recruited. But, yes, that’s the purpose of the meeting. I’ve been talking to Dicer and a few other imithi for the past few weeks, waiting for this to happen.”
He says that as if he was all but certain the false-blood would eventually reach out to the imithi. But maybe he was sure of it. That’s how Thrain found him. He was imithi until the false-blood decided to use him.
“How much farther?” Aren asks Dicer.
“It’s just up here,” the imithi says, walking a few more paces through the sludge, then stopping when he reaches the corner of the stone building that makes up part of the right wall of the canal. “Straight ahead.”
Aren’s gaze follows Dicer’s pointing finger. He’s just tall enough to see over the edge of the canal. I’m not. I move to the wall where a stone juts out from it, and use it as a foothold.
Aren steadies me with a hand—a subconscious touch, I think—then points to a detached home about thirty feet away. Two tall, short-needled plants sit in pots to either side of a dark door. Drapes cover the two windows I can see, making the interior look as black as the sky.
“Is it just us three?” I ask.
“No,” he answers. “Jacia and Taber are paralleling us. They’ll circle around to the back.”
Automatically, I look to the left but only see the other wall of the canal. If the two fae are paralleling us, they’re on street level. Which means they’re not in this sludge. Lucky for them. Still, it’s comforting to know they’re here, even Jacia. Atroth wanted Kyol to form a life-bond with her. The king thought they were a good match, but Kyol refused the bond. I’m sure Jacia knows I was the reason for that rejection—anyone who wasn’t blind realized it—but she’s given no indication that she resents me for it. She’s fully capable of annihilating a whole contingent of fae, and so is Taber, who’s one of Kyol’s top swordsmen. Aren doesn’t have an army set to encircle Nimael, but he’s brought powerful backup.
“Nimael is an older fae,” Aren says, making me turn my attention back to the target house. “He’s close to two centuries old and has streaks of gray in his hair. We need to capture him. The other elari in there won’t be able to lead us to the false-blood. Tholm’s silver wall will keep him from fissuring, so you shouldn’t need to read his shadows, but you’re all of our eyes. Make sure we know where he is.”
I nod, then ask, “Are we going in or making them come out?”
“We’ll see what happens when I knock on the door,” he says.
My foot slips off the stone protruding from the canal’s wall. “Knock on the door? That’s your big plan to capture the false-blood’s second-in-command?”
He gives me a devil-may-care grin. “You have no idea what I’ve accomplished by the simple act of knocking on a door. King Atroth was overthrown because I tapped on the right ones.”
This is the Aren I fell in love with—confident, carefree, and sexy as hell. If he’s still trying to push me away, he’s doing a crappy job of it.
He reaches inside a draw-stringed purse that’s attached to his weapons belt and takes out a coin. Tinril, the currency is called here. I have no idea what the different colors and sizes are worth, but Dicer catches the coin in the air.
“Now, run off,” Aren says. “Far off.”