“Magic is about knowledge as much as power. It may be that the mage knew something that our friend from the market did not.” He looked at Pritkin. “And that I do not.”
He didn’t ask for help, but he didn’t have to. Pritkin was already bent over the desk, examining the book, his legendary curiosity getting the better even of his suspicious nature. A finger traced the intricate designs in the cover.
“This is fey work,” he told me. “But old. It’s not in any of the styles currently in use by the major houses. But you can see bits of them here and there, such as the shape of this leaf, like those on the Alorestri royal seal. Or that curlicue, like one the Svarestri use on their elite armor. And that flourish was designed after the shape of the Eirental, one of the main rivers that flows through the south. It’s the one House Veyris has above their—”
“But it is fey,” Adra broke in. “You are sure?”
Pritkin looked up. “Yes. I don’t need a title to tell me that.”
“No, you wouldn’t, would you?”
“So maybe that was why a fey could break it?” I asked, because the two men were sparking off of each other again.
Pritkin looked back at me and nodded. “And these stones—they are in the form of a faerie ring, a common pattern used to build a ward around an area to keep something inside safe—or in this case, to trap it.”
I frowned. “So the mage knew fey magic?”
“Or was fey himself.”
“But why would that matter?”
“Magic is about knowledge, Cassie,” he said, repeating Adra’s words. “Knowledge that the Ancient Horror didn’t have.”
“Yes, but—”
“Think of it like a Chinese finger trap. You’ve seen them before? They’re common as party favors.”
“The kind you stick your fingers in the ends of, and then can’t pull them out?”
He nodded. “You are far more powerful than the trap, which is usually made of flimsy bamboo. But unless you know the secret—to push inward instead of the natural instinct to pull your fingers apart—it can hold you for a very long time.”
“Then you’re saying the demon was tricked?”
“Not . . . precisely. I can’t imagine a scenario in which a mage—any mage—summoned an Ancient Horror on purpose. Even if he was mad enough to try, most of their names have been lost to time. More likely, he called it up by accident.”
“A syllable off, you know,” Adra agreed, taking some snuff. “It happened to me once.”
“A mage summoned you by accident?” I said.
He nodded. “Well, I assume it was by accident. He seemed quite surprised.” He sneezed prettily. “For a moment.”
I didn’t ask him to elaborate.
“But the mage in this case was lucky,” Pritkin continued. “The monster he summoned had no familiarity with the kind of magic he was using.”
Adra ignored the implied insult, maybe because Pritkin had actually helped out, and sat back in his chair. He looked thoughtful. “The Ancient Horrors were imprisoned millennia ago, in some cases before we encountered the fey, and thus know little about them. This one doubtless tried to escape using every means at his disposal—ones that would have worked easily against human or demonic magic—but which left the fey spells untouched.”
We sat in silence for a minute, thinking—or at least I was—about the awfulness of being trapped for so long, when he had the power to escape all the time. He just hadn’t known it. And then I thought of something else.
“I wonder if that’s what happened to the other one?”
Chapter Twenty-four
I shifted back into my suite at Dante’s an hour later, walked out onto my balcony, stripped off my robe, and face-planted onto my nice, soft chaise.
I just stayed there for a while, breathing and feeling the sun sink into my skin. I needed to get up and get some sunscreen, or I was going to burn. But right then, I didn’t care. Right then, I had bigger things to worry about.
Pritkin looked at me, and then he licked his lips. “What . . .” He stopped for a moment, and the vein was back, I noticed, pound, pound, pounding away at his temple. He tried again. “What other one?”