Page 17 of Brought to Light
I could tell he wasn’t speaking English, but I could understand him. Like I’d become fluent in whatever language he was speaking without ever going through the intervening steps of figuring out a few words, getting a hang of the grammar, and building from there. I spoke mostly fluent Dari, and I could get by in Russian and Spanish, so learning another language wasn’t new to me.
This was, though. Magic was wild.
“Yeah, I can,” I said, and as I did, I knew I wasn’t speaking English, either. That felt even more bizarre.
Kaspar grinned at me, and then turned to Oskar. “I told you I could do it!”
The smile I hadn’t realized I was wearing fell away. “You didn’t know that would work? What the fuck? What would’ve happened if you were wrong?”
“Nothing. Probably,” Kaspar said. “It’s a basic spell, infusing a language into a spell-cake. I made it for you rather than making cakes for us, since you need to know the language to infuse it.”
“A spell-cake.” I was officially not fucking amused. “A cake that…holds spells. That’s what it’s for?” Kaspar nodded. “You could’ve put any damn spell on it, then.”
Maybe I needed the idiot sign on my forehead after all. Jesus fucking Christ. I didn’t scare easily, but a chill went down my spine. I wasn’t in Kansas anymore. And I wasn’t the one in control of this situation, no matter how hard I tried to pretend. I needed to readjust my thought patterns, stat. I’d been so focused on Oskar’s visible, very blatant weapon that I’d overlooked Kaspar’s fuckingmagic, dismissing it as—what? A figment of my imagination? Something that I’d never believed in, so it couldn’t be real?
I damn well knew better than that.
“Is he all right?” Oskar, whose rumbly voice didn’t hold even a thread of genuine concern. He sounded more like he wanted to evaluate my potential threat level if I lost my shit.
And that snapped me out of it. That, I could understand. I didn’t trust Oskar any more than he trusted me, but he was taking my measure the same way I was doing with him. He thought like a soldier. And I could work with that. Use it. I looked up at him, pushed myself off the wall, and stood.
“You don’t need to waste your time worrying about me,” I said. “It sounds like Linden’s the one you ought to be focusing on.”
Kaspar and Oskar exchanged a look, and I held my breath. Linden hadn’t told me what was going on. If he’d been any cagier, he could’ve been in a zoo. But these two clearly knew, and if they thought I did too…well, then I could get Oskar, at least, focused on the goal, and get him talking. If I couldn’t get information from Linden, then maybe I could squeeze it out of his friends.
“All we can do right now is hide him,” Kaspar said at last. “I can track his magic more accurately than anyone else can, since I know it so well. I felt it when he moved between realms, and we followed the trace into the labyrinth. But others might be able to trace him too, though not as quickly. And there are only two of us to protect him. His enemies are far more numerous.”
“Three of us,” I corrected him, only realizing how much I meant it as the words fell out of my mouth. Fuck. Oskar frowned and Kaspar looked thoughtful. “Linden didn’t have time to give me a lot of detail,” I lied. “What are we up against?”
And why, and…if I’d had the option of asking all the questions I really wanted answered, we’d have been there all week. But I couldn’t think of a better option to get them talking, and hopefully I’d be able to fill in some of the blanks.
Although given the total strangeness of the whole situation, I’d need to be careful what I assumed. Fuck, what a headache in the making. This was worse than trying to pry useful intel out of an officer.
Kaspar sighed. “Lord Evalt’s strength hasn’t grown since Linden left to hide in your realm, and in fact he’s suffered some setbacks. But that only means he’s more obsessed with Linden than he was before. He wants him dead, as quickly as possible. We thought Linden would be safer there than here, due to the Courts’ edicts. But Linden said you saved his life when an assassin made an attempt on him there?”
“Yeah. And I’m not sure that guy was totally human, either.” I’d thought he was at the time, but I could go either way on that. And if these two weren’t already thinking ‘hired human killer,’ I wanted to keep it that way. “Did Lord Evalt send him? If he did, then he already knew where Linden was.”
Which was, of course, one of the few pieces of the puzzle I’d already had. Lord Evalt, whoever he was, must’ve sent the assholes who hired Jesse and me. Obviously he’d found Linden.
“Someone told Lord Evalt that Linden had gone to the human realm,” Oskar put in, with a suspicious glare at me. “Someone is spying on him.”
I chose to answer the subtext. “Do I look like someone Lord Evalt would be in bed with?”
They both stared at me. “As far as I know, Lord Evalt takes only female lovers,” Kaspar said dubiously.
Right. I might be fluent in their language, but that didn’t mean I had any grasp on their idioms. I’d translated one of my own directly, without stopping to think about it. “Figure of speech. I’m not magical and I can’t track anyone with magic. I don’t think I’m Lord Evalt’s type, in bed or out of it.”
“Very few in the human realm are magical,” Oskar rumbled. “Even a sorcerer like Lord Evalt must use mundane tools when working there.”
If I got back to my own world alive and ever saw Jesse again, I had to remember to tell him some frowning fucker with a giant sword had called me a ‘mundane tool.’ I’d never hear the end of it, but it’d be worth it to see him grin.
“Yeah, well, I’m not working for anyone except myself.” Anymore. “I want to get back to my own world. I can tell you don’t trust me. Fine. I wouldn’t trust me either. If you want to get rid of me, send me home. If you can’t send me home, then you might as well try to work with me.”
And why was I now mentally crossing my fingers that theycouldn’tsend me home? Jesus fucking Christ. Jesse might be dead or on the run, one step ahead of being killed. He should’ve been my priority.
On the other hand, if the source of our problems lay here in this realm, then dealing with it here might be the only way to end it. If this Evalt character was pulling strings in my world, I had to cut them.
“We can’t send you home right away,” Kaspar said. He sat down in the room’s one chair with a sigh, and Oskar and I had a moment of understanding as we both eyed him with annoyance. “The only way I know how to use without risking an accident is through the labyrinth, but that’s too easy to track. Lord Evalt will be watching it now that it’s been used twice in such quick succession. And Linden’s magic isn’t really strong enough to travel between realms. You’re both lucky you weren’t stranded somewhere worse.”
