Until he told me. “Not attack. I attack. I kill—”
He broke off.
I blinked. Maybe no one had talked to him about this, after all. “You didn’t kill anyone,” I said. “He’s upstairs resting. Didn’t they tell you?”
He nodded, and then shook his head violently. “I try kill. Same thing.”
“I don’t think the kid would think it’s the same thing.”
“She say stab. I stab. I can’t stop—” He broke off again and, for a moment, sat very still. “I try,” he finally said. “I run into things. I break. But no one hear.”
Probably due to all the screaming.
“That’s why you were covered in blood,” I said. Because the stab wound in the kid wouldn’t have caused that. The blade might have gotten a little messy, but Ymsi should have been fine. Except that he’d made himself deliberately bloody, not an easy thing for trolls, so that someone would notice.
And if everybody in the house hadn’t been in basically the same shape, maybe they would have.
“That was brave,” I told him, and got another look, almost angry this time.
“Not brave! I kill!”
He threw off the blanket, looking like he wanted to get up and punch something.
I knew the feeling.
“Well, I think you’re brave,” I said. “You tried to fight off an attack, all by yourself, with no one to help you. And when you couldn’t, you did the next best thing. You stabbed the wrong side of the chest, because you knew what this woman didn’t. That troll hearts are on the other side.”
Ymsi made a sound, and not a nice one.
It didn’t seem like he agreed with me.
I sighed
and looked up at the ceiling, which had some old explosion patterns on it, from Pip’s still. The boys had apparently halted production of their brew for the moment, because the hulking thing in the corner was silent, just gleaming a little in reflected light. And showing me a dark glimpse of the tortured face that Ymsi was hiding from me.
There was another long pause.
“Light Fey,” he finally said, his voice harsh. “Heart same side as human.”
“So if it was a Light Fey woman, one who didn’t know much about trolls, she might think you’d done the job?”
He nodded.
Sounded like Efridis to me. But that made even less sense now than yesterday, and it hadn’t made much then. Efridis of all people knew that Aiden was protected—she’d been the one to steal the rune in the first place. She had to know he was wearing it, so stabbing him would do exactly fuck all.
But if the troll kid had been the target, then it really didn’t seem like her.
Based on what Dorina had heard in that underwater room, it sounded like Geminus’ family were back in the smuggling business, assuming that they’d ever stopped. Geminus had been running weapons, and very dangerous ones. There was serious money in that, particularly in the middle of a war; it would make sense for some of his guys to risk continuing it.
And to kill a troll kid who knew too much.
What didn’t make sense was for Efridis to be involved. Claire might hate her, and with cause, but the fact remained that she’d come to warn us when she didn’t have to. She’d helped save our asses just a couple weeks ago. Why would she be helping the other side now?
And it wasn’t like there weren’t other suspects. Aeslinn, for instance, Efridis’ estranged husband. He was a leader on the other side of the war who had worked with Geminus in the past. He had every reason to put arms in the hands of his partisans here, and to sow as much discord as possible.
Plus, earth was his element; he could easily raise a manlikan force out of it. And he controlled a whole fey kingdom. He could probably also scrape up a vargr, if he thought he needed one. Like to frame his faithless wife for a crime he’d committed?
And, finally, there was the fact that Olga had slept a little too soundly the night that the troll boy was attacked. She’d put it down to being up for something like a day and a half, but I wasn’t sure. Food and drink are always offered to visitors by trolls; it’s seen as a major insult not to. So despite arguing with Geirröd, aka White Hair, and Trym, better known as Gravel Face, she had followed precedent.