“You took one of my most prized artifacts with the express purpose of clearing any remembrance of your visit, risking its loss as well as the rest… and then you simply didn’t use it. Help me understand.”
“Gk,” Cato managed, the darkness beginning to narrow his vision again. Was this how he was going to die, he wondered? Something of an ignoble end, though not without its poetry. Haspar had saved his life once, his breath-starved brain found a pleasing symmetry in Haspar being the one to take it away…
And then the pressure was gone. The first full breath he took was almost more painful than the deprivation. He coughed and spluttered in the leaves, pain shooting through his ribcage as his body readjusted. Haspar waited dispassionately for him to regain his composure, shaking his head. Once he could breathe more or less normally, Cato hastened to tell the whole story. The breathlessness helped him cover a few of the details he didn’t much want to get into. Like what exactly had motivated him to kiss his captor.
“Well then. What a mess you’ve made.” Haspar glanced up at Inota, who was motionless by Cato’s side. She’d been with their leader even longer than Cato had, and nobody in the coven knew how to weather his storms better than she did. “It seems Inota will be forced, yet again, to tidy up after you. Go back to the mountain, kill the dragons who saw him.”
Cato froze, horror pooling in his stomach. Every dragon who’d seen him? It would be a massacre. The Queen and her court, to start with, not to mention Acantha. And it was with Acantha’s face burning in his memory that Cato found himself speaking out of turn, quickly and urgently. He usually made up his best ideas on the fly, but this was a real test of his wits.
“Wait, Haspar—let me share my thinking. I didn’t forget, I opted to let them remember me,” he said, almost tripping over his words. “It was a plan, I was making a plan, you know me, always planning.” This was a huge gamble, but he was in this far now, right? “Haven’t you always said that my creative thinking is my greatest strength?’
Haspar’s eyes narrowed. “An exaggeration that borders on an outright lie, Cato.” But he could still breathe. That meant he could keep talking.
“It was the Archives,” he said rapidly, his racing mind filling in the details of the plan even as he spoke. “You should have seen them, Haspar. A truly ridiculous stockpile of magical items. These dragons don’t even know about the rest of the world—they think the Fog is all there is beyond their insula. They have this ancient, enormous stockpile of treasures, and no idea what any of it does. I could have filled that satchel a thousand times and barely scratched the surface of what’s there, Haspar. Honest. That’s what got me caught—I had the gauntlet in my hands, but I knew what a waste it would be toonlyget the gauntlet.”
“What got you caught was stupidity,” Haspar said. But Cato’s breath was still coming easily, and he resisted the strong urge to glance down at Haspar’s hands to check if the pale blue gemstone was glowing in readiness to steal the air from his lungs again.
“I planted seeds there. I told them I was a poor wretched thief with no home to call my own… so here’s the plan. I go back. I throw myself at their mercy, tell them a sob story about my tragic life, offer to trade them all my magical knowledge in exchange for a safe home there. Then we take every single artifact they’ve got. Clean the whole place out.” Haspar didn’t look convinced. His fingers twitched thoughtfully, the wind stirring around Cato’s face—he knew he had barely seconds to change his mind what else could he say, think Cato,think—
“Their Queen can control the Fog!” he blurted out.
Jackpot. That arrested not only Haspar’s attention but Inota’s, too. He felt the woman’s head jerk sharply around to regard him. Cato pressed the advantage, mind racing to catch up.
“I got it out of the captain who was interrogating me. Something happened last year, some series of disappearances, they’d the insula upkeep rituals slip and the borders were collapsing but their Queen went out into it. She took hold of the Fog itself and formed a door,” he said, seeing the look of stunned recognition on Haspar’s face that it had taken everything in him not to let show on his own features when he’d heard the story from Acantha.
“How?” Haspar demanded, stepping closer to Cato. “They have an artifact that ”
“No artifact,” Cato said with a shake of his head. “Just the Queen’s will.”
“Impossible. This dragon was lying to you.”
“Sure,” Cato allowed. “It’s possible.” He waited, holding his breath. And then, with a rush of relief so strong he almost fell into the leaves again, he saw Haspar take the bait.
“You’re on thin ice, Cato,” he warned, his voice hard. “And if any part of what you’ve told me here is a lie, well, I don’t need to tell you the consequences, do I?” Cato shook his head mutely, and he didn’t need to manufacture the look of fear on his face. “A treasure trove of magical artifacts and a dragon who can shape the Fog at will… these are worth a second visit, I’ll allow that.”
Cato nodded, hardly daring to breathe. It was Inota who spoke next, her voice hushed. “Haspar, could this be… this is it, right? This could be a lead. This could help us find out how to vanquish the Fog at last. This is what we’ve been looking for ”
“We don’t know anything yet,” Haspar cut her off, his tone dismissive. “No sense getting our hopes up, we’ve made that mistake before.” He locked eyes with Cato for a long moment… then gave him a short nod. “Fine. But it’s your head if we fail.”
Cato watched the leader stalk inside, forcing himself to wait until Haspar was out of sight before he sank Into the leaves again, his whole body shaking. He’d bought himself some time—that was a win. But the look Inota shot him over her shoulder as she followed Haspar inside confirmed what he already knew. If he put a foot wrong again, his life was forfeit. He rubbed his right wrist absently as he caught his breath. Then he headed into the house to join his coven. Cato’s life had been forfeit since he’d first met Haspar.
When you got down to it, nothing had really changed.
Chapter 9 - Acantha
It was peaceful this far from home. Acantha shifted her weight where she was lying stretched out on the lee side of a small rise in the undulating forest floor, her body leaned up against a couple of trees that were stopping her from rolling down the hill. The trees were a little patchier in this part of the forest than most, which was why Morgan and her weird little crew of scholars had been visiting so regularly. Here, right on the edge of what the shifters of their community thought of as the forest, was an ideal place to study the Fog.
At least, that was what Acantha had been told. She didn’t pretend to follow exactly what was going on over there—from what she could tell, it was ninety percent conversation, which could just as easily have been done back home in the Palace. But Morgan had said they needed to do some fieldwork, and Acantha was hardly going to let her sister and a couple of unarmed scholars hang out on the dangerous fringes of their territory without a bodyguard. It wasn’t like she’d been doing much else lately. It had been two weeks since Cato had pulled his little disappearing act, and very little of Acantha’s shame had faded. She’d taken something of a leave of absence from the Guard, leaving a few deputies in charge of the day-to-day running of things, and the very next day, she’d found herself on guard duty for Morgan and her scholars. Part of her was suspicious that Morgan had engineered the whole project just to give Acantha something to do. A much bigger part didn’t want to find out one way or the other.
It was good to be out here in her dragon form anyway, stretching her wings and reacquainting herself with a shape she lately didn’t spend much time in. Morgan, Arric, and Hartwell stayed human-shaped mostly, citing the need for opposable thumbs, but they flew over together each morning. And as much as she would have felt uneasy to leave the three of them on their own, she had to admit, there hadn’t been so much as a rustle of danger. Everything the wolves had been reporting was true. The fringes of the forest were much safer since the patrols had been put back in place.
The Fog… she rolled over, staring out into the trees where the gray tendrils of mist began to thicken into an impenetrable blanket. From up high, from the peak of the mountain where they made their home, the Fog looked like it expanded beyond the horizon in all directions, a vast, limitless expanse of rolling gray that almost seemed to boil and seethe in places. There had been something oddly comforting about its limitlessness, back then. It was full of danger, of course, they’d always known that. But it was a danger they understood, a danger they’d encountered and learned to avoid.
Now, all that was changing. Now, it wasn’t just the beasts and monstrosities that dwelled in the Fog they had to worry about, or the way that too much time out there began to play strange tricks on the mind… no, now they’d learned that there were whole additional worlds out there. What had been that strange word Cato had used—insulas? Nobody had ever thought of the Valley as an insula. It was just that—their valley. Giving a name to the kind of thing it was would suggest that it was one of many. But that was what Cato had said. Could he be trusted? On this, she suspected he could be. It was clear that he was neither a wolf nor a dragon. He had to come from somewhere, and it definitely wasn’t here.
For the thousandth time, she growled in frustration that he’d escaped before she’d gotten more information out of him. It was maddening, the timing. Just when she’d suspected she was making headway, just when she’d caught a few glimpses behind the confident mask he wore… but had she? Or had that just been another act? And why couldn’t she stop thinking about him, even now? She hadn’t revisited the subject with Morgan since they’d talked that first day, but occasionally she caught her sister looking at her with that odd, slightly cross-eyed stare that told her she was looking at her aura, and the frustration would seethe in her anew.
Maybe that was why it took her a few moments to react when Cato came walking out of the Fog. She’d been ruminating on his disappearance so much that it almost made more sense for him to be a hallucination than anything else.