“How about I steal the Fitzster’s match packet for you?” Keefe suggested.
“How about no?” Sophie told him, not even wanting to imagine what might be in there.
“Okay, then what if—”
“Just so you know,” Lady Cadence interrupted, “from here on out, you shouldn’t say anything unless you’re comfortable with Dimitar’s soldiers hearing it.”
“Are we in Ravagog?” Sophie asked.
None of the scenery looked familiar. The Ravagog she’d known had been a series of swampy caverns, along with elaborate structures carved into the side of a mountain. But all she could see was stark, barren earth stretching into striated badlands.
“This is called the King’s Path,” Lady Cadence explained. “It brings us to the restricted portion of the city, where Dimitar keeps his private palace. He showed me the route when he realized this boat was too wide to fit through the main gate. If I wasn’t wearing this”—she pulled her Markchain out from under her cape—“the battalions stationed in these foothills would’ve blasted us to splinters by now.”
Cold sweat trickled down Sophie’s spine as she scanned the hills again. No matter how carefully she searched, she couldn’t spot a single ogre. But she had no doubt they were out there, weapons trained and ready to fire.
“Prepare to dock,” Lady Cadence said, and every nerve in Sophie’s body sprang to life.
The mosasaurs pulled them toward a flat rock that jutted out into the water, and Lady Cadence cranked the lever to drop the anchor.
“How far is it from here to the palace?” Sophie asked as she helped Keefe to his feet.
“See that gap in the badlands up ahead?” Lady Cadence pointed to an especially deep crevice barely a hundred yards away. “That’s where we’re headed.”
The shadowy crack looked neither grand nor palatial.
It looked dark.
And dusty.
And miserable.
Lady Cadence hopped onto the dock and secured the houseboat to a deadly-looking hook, before lowering a short platform for them to disembark.
“SOLID GROUND!” Keefe shouted, dragging Sophie to a nearby boulder and bending down to kiss the rock’s edge. “I don’t care if this place smells like morning breath—I’m never leaving.”
“That can be arranged.”
The scratchy, all-too-familiar voice came from the shadowy crevice, and Sophie’s legs stopped wanting to cooperate.
“What’s the matter?” King Dimitar asked as his gorilla-shaped body emerged from the darkness, moving with a regal grace that didn’t match his hunched posture or especially long arms. “Not happy to see me?”
King Dimitar camouflaged perfectly with the mottled rocks around him, right down to the lumpy features of his face. The only parts that stood out were the glinting yellow stones set into his ears and the polished metal of the diaperlike armor he wore.
“The fifteen minutes we agreed upon begin now,” he told Lady Cadence, scratching the swirling black tattoos that crowned his bald head. “Go ahead and convince me why I shouldn’t kill all of you.”
Thirty
LADY CADENCE LAUGHED—which definitely wasn’t the reaction Sophie had expected her to have to King Dimitar’s time-limited death threat. Especially since his hand was hovering uncomfortably close to the hilt of his spiked sword.
“Don’t take him too seriously,” Lady Cadence told Sophie, smoothing her somehow-still-immaculate bun as she turned to face the ogre king. “Dimitar greets me the same way every time I visit. And he has yet to make good on his threat.”
Dimitar cracked his knuckles. “There’s a first time for everything.”
Lady Cadence sauntered closer—close enough to be within sword swiping range—before lowering herself to one knee and dipping her head in a bow. “Good to see you again, my friend. Thank you for conceding to this meeting.”
Dimitar’s only response was a grunt.
His eyes shifted to Sophie, and she hastily dropped to one knee, her dark clothes still dripping water as she did her best to copy Lady Cadence’s posture—from a much safer distance. Blur did the same at her side, though it was hard to tell, now that he’d smudged his form again.
Keefe stayed standing tall.
His hair was droopy and his clothes were soggy and he still looked a little green. But his shoulders were square and his gaze was intent on the ogre king.
“Am I supposed to see this as bravery?” Dimitar asked him. “The arrogant young elf lord who dares to taunt me?”
“Psh, like the Council would ever make me a lord,” Keefe snorted. “Though, Lord Keefe does have a nice ring to it.”
“What are you doing?” Sophie whisper-hissed. “We need this meeting to go smoothly.”
“I know,” Keefe said. “But I’m the Mercadir for our group. And Mercadirs don’t bow. They salute.”
“Am I supposed to know what a Mercadir is?” Sophie asked as Keefe raised his left arm toward his nose in a zigzag motion.
“Actually, the salute looks like this,” Lady Cadence corrected, sweeping her arm from her nose to her chest and making a similar zigzag as she stood. “And no, Sophie, I wouldn’t expect you to know the term. I’m surprised Keefe does. A Mercadir is an ogre military designation. Dimitar’s army has no ranks—all soldiers answer directly to him—but he holds a small group accountable for ensuring his orders are carried out, and those soldiers are his Mercadirs.”
“Which gives them no power,” King Dimitar added, narrowing his gaze at Keefe. “If that’s what you’re after.”
“Yeah, not in it for that,” Keefe told him, copying the salute Lady Cadence had shown him. “All I care about is that you hold me accountable if something goes wrong today—and not her.”
He pointed to Sophie.
“That’s not what we agreed on!” Sophie snapped.
“Maybe not. But I’m not going to let you face any consequences for this.” Keefe slipped his mom’s scroll from his pocket and Sophie felt her jaw fall, wondering when he’d stolen it from her.
Had he played up the whole seasick thing so she’d be close enough for him to pick her pocket?
“I believe that’s mine,” Dimitar said, holding out his hand.
Keefe tucked the scroll away again. “You can have it as soon as you confirm that I’m the Mercadir.”
Dimitar scratched his pointed gray teeth with a long black fingernail. “It almost seems as though you want things to go poorly today.”
“No, I want you to give us the starstone and show us a way home that doesn’t involve a boat—and maybe commission a few statues in our honor to celebrate. But I’ve learned to prepare for the worst when it comes to my mom, so in case something in that scroll gets your metal diaper in a bunch, I want to make sure you keep Foster out of it. Take it out on me—which shouldn’t be too big of a sacrifice. I can already tell you want to punch me.”
“I would tread carefully, Mr. Sencen,” Lady Cadence warned. “The punishment for a Mercadir is far more severe than a punch. How do you even know the title?”
“From you. I found the reports on ogre culture that you sent the Council while you were living in Ravagog. Looks like Alvar was stashing them so no one would read them.”
Lady Cadence sighed. “I knew I shouldn’t have trusted that arrogant child.”
Sophie regretted the same mistake. She’d even asked Alvar to serve as their guide when they’d infiltrated the ogre capital—and he’d probably planned to betray them while they were there. If she hadn’t changed their strategy halfway through the excursion, who knew what could’ve happened?
Which made her wonder . . .
“How long have you had an alliance with the Neverseen?” she asked Dimitar.
“That’s none of your concern.”
Lady Cadence frowned. “Was I still living in Ravagog?”
The king’s silence said it all.
“Is that why you canceled our weekly meetings those final months?” she asked. “I’d assu
med it was because I sent the Council the update on the soporidine.”
“It was both. The boy revealed himself to me after you and I had our rather vocal disagreement on the matter. And he assured me that he would ‘take care of it.’ ”
“That’s why you agreed to ally yourself with their order?” Lady Cadence gasped.
“What’s soporidine?” Blur asked, beating Sophie to the question.
“I think it’s some sort of protein,” Keefe jumped in. “She wrote up a whole report on it—but it was long and boring, with all these science-y words, so I mostly skimmed.”
“It’s an amino acid,” Lady Cadence corrected, narrowing her eyes at the ogre king, “secreted by a hybridized bacterium called Bucollosisia, which the ogres cultivated during one of their experiments.”
“See?” Keefe said, making a snoring sound.
“Trust me, that discovery was anything but boring,” Lady Cadence assured him. “The bacteria themselves are harmless—but the soporidine they secrete is the most potent sedative I’ve ever experienced. A single drop accidentally touched my skin and I was gone for three days. No thoughts. No dreams. Even my vitals changed. And there was no way to awaken me. The only reason I regained function is because the soporidine eventually wore off. Had I been exposed to a larger quantity, I might never have woken again.”
“Just from touching it?” Sophie asked, her breath turning sharp when Lady Cadence nodded. “So it could be used as a weapon?”
“Such dramatics,” Dimitar said, a snarl creeping into his tone. “Cadence knows as well as I do that the unsustainability of the bacterium makes it nearly impossible for us to mass-produce soporidine.”
“Nearly impossible isn’t the same as impossible,” Sophie hated to point out.
“Spoken like someone who has no knowledge of microbiology,” Dimitar told her. “There is no food source for the microbes, so they perish within a few seconds of their creation—most before they ever secrete any soporidine.”
That still meant someone could cultivate the scary sedative—if they were really determined.
Lady Cadence must’ve agreed, because she stalked closer. “If the soporidine wasn’t important, I wonder why you allied with the Neverseen to keep the Council in the dark about it?”
“I allied with the Neverseen because they agreed that I had the right to keep the Council in the dark,” Dimitar snapped back. “You elves love to police the world, thinking you’re doing some brilliant service. But most of the time your rules do nothing more than hinder progress.”
“And what progress have you made with soporidine?” Lady Cadence demanded.
Dimitar gritted his teeth. “As it turns out, that substance had troubling effects on our species as well—which is why I’d asked you to hold off on notifying the Council until my researchers had a better idea of what we were dealing with. And after so many years working together, I’d counted on your support. But you chose to be as small-minded as the rest of your kind.”
“So you formed ties with murderous lunatics and decided to threaten an innocent species,” Lady Cadence spit back. “Excellent decision.”
“Aaaaaaand you wondered why I thought this meeting might need a Mercadir!” Keefe said as Dimitar gripped his sword.
“Don’t,” Sophie told him, but Dimitar was already circling Keefe with an expression that said Keefe had just been sized up and found . . . lacking.
“I do not give that title to elves.”
“Then why’d you give it to my mom?” Keefe asked. “I saw her wounds. They were curved, like they’d been carved by—not sure how I’m supposed to pronounce this one: a shamkniv?”
“The ‘k’ is silent,” Lady Cadence told him, still glaring at Dimitar. “Sham-niv.”
“Fine, a shamkniv,” Keefe repeated. “And according to her report, shamknivs are only used to punish a Mercadir who failed their assignment.”
“You mean this?” King Dimitar drew a dagger-size weapon from a hidden compartment in his diaperlike armor. The blade was short and heavy, made of black metal that curved like a crescent moon, and Sophie felt dizzy when she glimpsed the dried blood on the handle.
“Yep, that’s the one,” Keefe said.
Dimitar moved the blade much too close to Keefe’s face. “No one realizes the edge of a shamkniv is serrated until it’s tearing their skin. The jaggedness ensures that each cut leaves a scar. And when a Mercadir has seriously disappointed me, I dip the end in flesh-eating bacteria.”
Keefe swallowed hard. “Good thing I don’t plan on disappointing you.”
“All elves disappoint me.”
“I’m feeling the same way about ogres at the moment,” Lady Cadence told him.
For a second Sophie wondered if Dimitar was going to carve a few gashes into Lady Cadence’s face—and Lady Cadence must’ve come to the same conclusion because she strode closer, placing her hand on Dimitar’s arm. “But you and I have always managed to find a common ground. Even under difficult circumstances.”
“Like when two of the children who destroyed my city come begging for my help while bearing a message from an elf who failed her assignment?” Dimitar asked.
“Well, when you put it like that,” Keefe said.
The joke hit the ground with a thud.
“Did Lady Gisela fail?” Sophie had to ask. “I thought Gethen getting captured was actually part of their plan.”
“That was not the source of my disappointment.”
“What was?” Blur asked.
“And why was her punishment so much more severe than others?” Lady Cadence added. “You know I’ve always disapproved of your use of the shamkniv. But you’ve at least limited the cuts to one or two for a first offense.”
Dimitar tucked his shamkniv back into its hidden sheath. “You assume I was the one delivering the blows. Or that I was even involved with that part of her sentencing.”
“Who was?” Sophie asked.
“It’s none of your concern. But it was an elf—which exemplifies why I find little reason to put faith in your kind. For all your talk of peace, you allow any manner of atrocity to occur. And for all your power, you hold no actual control—even over your own people.” He turned back to Keefe. “Give me one reason you deserve the title of Mercadir.”
“Easy.” Keefe held up the finger he’d sliced open the day before, which was no longer covered by a bandage. “I spilled my blood to get us here.”
The gash was blackened with scabs, and Sophie wondered if she should’ve used a different balm—or called for Elwin. But in the grand scheme of wounds, it still looked like a paper cut pretending to be a battle scar.
And yet, King Dimitar said, “An elf willing to spill blood—even his own—is a rarity.”
“For good reason,” Blur told him.
“Ah yes, how can I forget your delicate sensibilities? Your poor, weak minds cannot bear the violence and gore.”
“Embracing violence doesn’t make you strong,” Blur argued. “True strength comes from finding a peaceful alternative.”
“Yes, I’ve heard that excuse before. And I give it even less credence coming from someone cowering behind a disguise.”
“Fear has nothing to do with it. This disguise is a statement—much like how you wear that”—Blur waved a smudged arm toward Dimitar’s metal diaper—“to show your people that their king needs no armor to protect him on the battlefield. I appear like this to show my people that I will push through any boundary if it’s in the best interests of our world.”
“Still sounds like a coward’s excuse to avoid being held responsible. Even this ridiculous boy has the guts to face me as himself.”
“Does that mean you’re accepting me as the Mercadir?” Keefe asked.
Dimitar studied Keefe again, before he turned to head toward the crevice he’d emerged from. “The title is yours. We’ll see if you lose more blood before this day is over.”
Thirty-one
THAT WAS AN incredibly dangerous move,” La
dy Cadence told Keefe, blocking him from following the ogre king.
“Oh, you want to talk about dangerous?” he asked. “How about the part when you almost started a brawl with King Dimitar? You were supposed to be the person at this meeting that he actually likes—that’s why we brought you!”
“I brought you,” Lady Cadence corrected.
“Technically true—though Keefe does have a point,” Blur said. “The Black Swan is counting on you to keep things peaceful today.”
“And I did. But I will not hold back from telling Dimitar when he’s been a fool—especially when I find out he partnered with the Neverseen while I was still living here. I’d always assumed the alliance formed when I was no longer around to be a positive influence. But apparently, he spent my final months lying to my face.”
“Do you really think the ogres aren’t planning something with the soporidine?” Sophie asked, trying not to imagine the horrifying possibilities.
Could they sedate a whole city if they misted the air?
Lady Cadence sighed. “I don’t know. It’s tricky. No food source naturally produces the amount of nitrogen the Bucollosisia require—and even if someone were to hybridize one, the bacteria also didn’t produce any enzymes to digest it. But I don’t like that the Neverseen are aware of it—especially since I was never able to conduct any of my own research on the bacteria. Things had turned so tense with King Dimitar—and the Council hadn’t expressed any concern. But I had no idea they weren’t getting my reports. Do you still have access to them?” she asked Keefe. “I’d love to take another look at my notes.”
“I can get them,” he told her.
“How?” Sophie wanted to know.
“I don’t have to go anywhere near the Neverseen, if that’s what you’re worried about” was Keefe’s only answer—which wasn’t good enough.
“Excellent,” Lady Cadence told him. “Bring all the scrolls to me when we’re done here.”
“I want a copy too,” Sophie added. “And I want to know where you found those reports, Keefe. You can’t keep—”
“SHOULD I ASSUME THIS MEETING IS FINISHED?” Dimitar called from the shadows. “BECAUSE MY PATIENCE IS ABOUT TO BE!”