Page 23 of Master of Storms
Freyja pressed her lips thinly together.
“Without Ishtar, there’s only one other way to achieve their goal,” Solveig said, leaning forward a little hungrily as she locked eyes with Rurik. “They’ll need the Key of Chaos.”
The king slowly drummed his fingers on the table. “Nobody has seen it for over a thousand years.”
Marduk winced.
This was punishment. Surely it was punishment.
“We have to send warning to the other courts beyond our allies. They’ll need to be made aware,” Sirius said. “Because if thealfardiscover where the key is, then they won’t need Ishtar.”
“It doesn’t matter who we warn,” Árdís said. “Nobody’s going to admit they have it.”
Closing his eyes, Marduk released a sigh. “I know where it is.”
“You do?” Elin blurted.
“What? Where?” Árdís demanded.
He could sense all eyes upon him, and slowly opened his. But the one gaze he was trying not to meet was locked upon him.
“You said you’d told me everything,” Solveig growled. “You lied.”
“I never lied,” he pointed out. “‘Everything’ is a vast statement.”
Fury flushed color beneath her olive skin.Drekidared not speak a direct lie for fear their magic might suffuse their words—though it was rare, it had happened in the past with dire consequences—and half-truths and careful silences had become etiquette.
But he was already standing on thin ice when it came to her.
“It’sa rumor I heard in my travels,” he told her. “There is an Ethiopiandrekitribe who were said to be in possession of a powerful relic. Nobody knows what it is, but they are said to collect Chaos relics. And… there are whispers they once brought adrekiback from the dead.”
As the key was rumored to be able to do.
Thought raced in Rurik’s eyes. “Then we need to send emissaries to warn them.”
“An excellent suggestion, brother mine…, but the relic is no longer in Ethiopia.” He was stalling, and he knew it. “I’ve heard it was given as dowry to another court when the eldest daughter of the Ethiopiandrekiclan chief was formally mated.”
“To whom?”
“This is the bit you’re not going to like. Which European court has an obsession with Chaos magic and the most practitioners in the northern hemisphere?”
“TheZilittu,” Árdís whispered. “Mother’s clan.”
“To take and to hold,” he echoed theZilittuclan motto as he spread his hands. “There was a strange illness within the Ethiopian clan. TheZilittu, it seems, were the only ones with the cure. So they bartered the cure in exchange for the hand of Andromeda—and her dowry. There’s a very quiet murmur that the illness in her tribe was some sort of poison, and that theZilittugot what they wanted all along.”
“I’ve heard nothing of this,” Solveig argued, “and I have eyes on every continent of the world.”
Marduk shrugged. “I daresay you haven’t. It’s not the thing one speaks of unless you’ve been smokingkifin Chefchaouen with a certaindrekismuggler you’ve spent years cultivating trust in.”
She stared at him.
“What?”
“You keep company with such… friends?”
“I’ve been in exile for ten years. Do you know how many courts sneered down their nose at me? And how manydrekiI met in back alleys and taverns who would have promised me their arm—despite their so-called reputations?”
Rurik closed his eyes as if he could taste something vile. “We need to warn theZilittu.”
