Page 114 of Quicksilver

The wooden building at the center of camp was a tavern, and it had thebestdrinks. So far, I'd had five heavy pours of some very potent whiskey, and I was beginning to feel fuzzy around the edges. My anxiety was long gone, and now I was starting to see the ridiculousness of it all.

“At the end of the day, it's simple,” I said.

Lorreth peered into his glass, as if there were definitely still some whiskey left at the bottom of it but he was just having trouble finding it. “How so?” he asked.

“He's a fucking liar. He's been lying to me this whole time.”

Lorreth frowned. “Who,Fisher?”

“Yes, Fisher. Who else?”

The male shook his head. “Impossible. He's an Oath Bound Fae.”

“And?”

“And wecan’tlie.”

One eye closed, the other half-cracked, I studied him dubiously. “That’s some convenient-smelling bullshit if you ask me.”

Splaying his hands, Lorreth shrugged. “When we turn twenty-one, we kneel before the Firinn Stone and make our decision. Every one of us. We have a choice. Bleed on the stone and make our vow. To always be truthful. To always be bound by our word, no matter what it costs us.”

“Or?”

“Or we choose the Lawless path. A Lawless Fae may lie. They may cheat. They may steal. Useful tools in many situations, I’ll admit. But they come with a price that Kingfisher—and the rest of us, I might add—was not willing to pay.”

I arched an eyebrow at him. “And that was?”

He shrugged nonchalantly, as if the answer were obvious. “Our honor.”

I harumphed at that.

“So you see, no matter how much we might want to sometimes, we're physically incapable of breaking our word or telling a lie.”

“Hmm. Yeah, well,” I admitted. “Kingfisherdidsay that back in the forge at the Winter Palace. But I dismissed him.”

“On what basis?”

“On the basis that a liar who didn't want to get caught telling a lie would one hundred percent lie about being unable to tell lies. Gods, that...was confusing.”

“What did you even think he'd lied about?”

It came back to me at once. My thinly veiled ‘how big is your cock?’ question. And Fisher's slow, arrogant smile.

'Big enough to makeyouscream and then some...'

Turned out he’d been telling the truth about that, I realized with a healthy dose of annoyance. Fuck. “That's not important,” I said. “What's important is that he's known that you guys need me to make weapons for you otherwise you'll lose to Malcolm. But he made an oath to me that I only had to turn those rings into relics for you all, and then he'd let me go home.”

Despite being about ten percent more intoxicated than me, Lorreth's eyelids shuttered at this. “He made that deal with you?”

I nodded, then drained my glass.

“Well, if he made that oath, then you don't need to doubt it. Even if he wasn't bound by his own magic to honor an oath, which he is, then Fisher would honor it on principle. It's just who he is.” There was a tense note to the warrior's voice when he said this. The details of my bargain with Fisher seemed to have taken him by surprise, though he hid it fairly well.

I wanted to change the subject either way. “Tell me...” I leaned forward across the table, pointing at Lorreth's mouth. “Thoseteeth.Fisher said they were a remnant of the blood curse. But...they still work, right? You can still use them to drink blood?”

Lorreth instantly sobered. His pupils narrowed to black dots. Looking around, he assessed the tables on either side of us as if he were making sure no one else had heard what I'd just said. “Uhh, that's not the kind of thing we talk about in taverns, actually,” he replied in a low voice.

“Why not?”