Page 44 of Brimstone

Carrion turned his attention back to his book. “Don’t worry, Fane. We’ll have a big birthday party just as soon as people stop dying all over the place.”

“I don’t want a party.”

“Why not? You always used to come tomybirthday parties.”

“I used to go toKala’s,” I corrected. “You and your drunk friends just so happened to be there too sometimes.”

Lorreth shot Carrion a smirk. “Only Faelings have birthday parties, y’know. We stop celebrating that kind of stuff when we turn fourteen. What are you now, seventeen hundred years old?”

“Watch your tongue, old man. I’m not ancient like the rest of you,” Carrion snorted, turning a page. “I’m only one thousand and ninety-six, thank you very much.”

“Impossible. The Daianthus heir went missing when we were Faelings. I was . . .” Lorreth frowned, searching his memory. “I was thirteen when it happened. I was preparing for my oath. What about you, Fisher?”

Unlike Lorreth, my mate was neither perturbed nor confused by the revelation the warrior had stumbled upon. “Nearly ten,” he said.

“Right. So that means youarenearly our age.” Lorreth raised dark brows at Carrion.

“He isn’t,” Fisher said softly. “It’s as he says. He’s probably only eleven hundred or so.”

Carrion pointed at Fisher. “Thank you. Idoknow how to count, Lorreth of the Broken Spire.”

“So he’snotthe heir, then?” Te Léna sounded just as confused as the rest of us.

“Wait. I’m not?” Carrion was sitting up very straight all of a sudden. “I’m off the hook?”

“Heisthe heir. I’ve thought about it a lot since the maze, and there’s a plausible explanation for Carrion’s age,” Kingfisher explained. “When my father took him through the quicksilver, something must have happened. My money’s on the gods, interfering again.”

“You think there’s a chance they wanted to speak to him?” I asked. “The way Zareth spoke to me?”

Slowly, my mate nodded. “Time is strange in their realm. When they took me at Ajun, I stood with Bal and Mithin in the middle of a field of swaying tall grass. I saw two figures up on ahill in the distance. The first was Zareth. The second . . . wasyou, Osha.”

Whatever I’d been expecting him to say, it wasn’tthat. Fisher had fought and nearly died at the Ajun Gate over a thousand years ago. I had been pulled through the quicksilver and into the gods’ realm only a few short weeks ago. “But . . . how? And how do you know it was me?”

I didn’t know your name. I didn’t see your face. But I knew, Osha. My soul recognized a flicker of itself burning inside someone else and it knew.The explanation was for me alone. Fisher’s eyes burned with intensity as he conveyed the message. To the rest of the room, he said, “When my father fled with the Daianthus heir, one or more of the gods must have delayed their escape. At least at their destination, anyway. Time continued here in Yvelia, but in Zilvaren, I believe it stood still.”

It was certainly within their power. And the gods did love to interfere in the matters of the living. I wouldn’t have put it past them. But the question was wh—

“Why?” Carrion asked the question before I’d had the chance to finish thinking it. “To what end? I don’t remember going there. I remember nothing. I don’t even remember your father, Fisher. Did he have some kind of plan for me? Do thegods?”

My mate chewed the inside of his cheek, staring down at his hand where it rested on the table in front of him. It took him a long time to speak. “I barely remember my father, either. And I don’t pretend to know anything of plans made by gods. All we can do is make our own and hope for the best.”

“Agreed.” Until now, Renfis had been notably silent throughout this exchange. He rubbed his jaw, looking around the room. “The agendas of the gods will have to be tackled later. For now, nothing is more important than the task at hand. We’re woefully low on silver, but that doesn’t even seem to be an issue anymore. The horde is at bay. Saeris has forbidden them fromleaving the dead fields. We don’t have to worry about them showing up at the river anymore. It’s true that we don’t have the relics yet, but we can do without them for now.”

“Oh, we still need them,” I said.

Everyone looked at me again.

“We need them even more than we did before. The feeders at the river yesterday shouldn’t have been able to disobey my edict, and yet they did.”

“Because they were infected by the rot,” Ren said, slowly. His shoulders slumped, his face falling. “And the rot is spreading. If the horde at Ammontraíeth becomes infected . . .”

“We’re screwed,” Fisher finished. “Fuck.” He frowned, his eyes a million miles away as he processed that.

“The relics still won’t help us if we need to face an infected army,” Lorreth muttered.

I kept my mouth shut this time.Iwasn’t going to be the one to say it. As usual, Fisher took on the burden of the difficult task, bearing the weight of it for the rest of us. “If it comes to that,nothingwill help us,” he said. “We’ll have to leave Yvelia. And for a mass evacuation on that level, we’ll need far more than fifteen thousand relics.”

There were other realms. Places where we might be able to outrun the decay for a while. But it would be a temporary fix. From what Zareth had said, the rot that was fast spreading toward the mountain range separating Irrín from Cahlish was already finding ways to hop from one realm to another.