Page 96 of Quicksilver

Of course he would show up right as I was about to get inside Ren’s guard. Of course he would ruin my focus. It was just my luck. I wouldn't give him the satisfaction of seeing me rankled, though. Not this time. “Let me guess. You've come to show mepersonally just how useless I am with a sword? Come on, then.” I held my hand out, gesturing for him to come forward. “Be my guest.” I might not hold my own against the likes of him for very long, but I’d make sure I got at least one hit in before he thrashed me.

Kingfisher smirked ruinously. “You're not ready forme,human. I don’t come with a training mode.”

“Are the captains gathered?” Ren asked, striding toward Fisher. “Is it time to speak with them?”

Fisher nodded. “Just waiting on one or two stragglers.”

“Then I'll need to head back to my tent and change. I'll meet you there.”

Fisher caught Ren's arm as he passed. “I don't think I'll be needed.”

For the first time since meeting him, I watched Renfis bristle with anger. “You're more than needed. You'rerequired.We're done with this, brother. If you bear me any love or respect at all, you'll come to the meeting.”

Fisher's expression formed a defiantnoat first, but then he met Ren's eyes, huffed with annoyance, and let him go. “All right. Fine. I'll be there. But take the boy with you for now, will you? I need to speak with the Alchemist.”

Was ‘Alchemist' an upgrade from ‘Osha’? Didn't sound like it. Not when it was said with the same heaping dose of disdain. I hurried after Fisher, who moved with frustrating speed through the camp, his head ducked to avoid the curious eyes of the Faewarriors who watched him flit past their cookfires with interest. After a while, I realized that it wasn't actually Fisher they were interested in. It was me.

“Human?”

“A human.”

“It's ahuman...”

I kept forgetting that I was an oddity here. Word had traveled quickly around the Winter Palace that a human had arrived after my kind had been absent from Fae lands for so long. The shine had worn off pretty quickly there. It hadn't taken long for the members of the Yvelian court to forget all about me. Here, I was a novelty that hadn't been seen in centuries. Some of the warriors had clearly never laid eyes on a human woman before in their entire lives. The pressure of their eyes made me want to find a dark hole to crawl into, but I didn't have that luxury here, so I jogged after Fisher instead.

“Where the hell are you taking me?”

“To my quarters,” he said, the words clipped.

His quarters? I was going to raise holy hell if he tried to bind me there again. “Gods, will you slow the fuck down? My legs are a lot shorter than yours.”

Fisher grumbled something, but he did slow down a little. I waited for him to lead me into one of the wooden structures at the center of the camp. We passed a mercantile and what looked like a food store, along with a number of other mysterious buildings, and then there were no more solid structures left. Only the sea of tents.

A large tent, then. Had to be. Fisher would need a sizable space to house his fucking ego, after all. But there were no tents with grand awnings or entrances festooned with shimmering fabrics. They were all the same size, and one was just as dirty and weather-bleached as the next.

Eventually, Kingfisher ceased his charge through the churned-up mud—thanks to the hundreds of boots stomping through the walkways, the snow couldn't stick here—and grabbed a tent flap, stepping to one side as he held it open. “Go in. Please.” He winced when he said please; manners were evidently painful to Fisher.

I entered the tent willingly thanks to that word, though. Inside, a small fire burned in a grate that wasn't vented in the slightest. There was no smoke. It was going to take a long time for me to adjust to the common, everyday use of magic. It was quite impressive, though, as was the size of Fisher's quarters. In some ways, I had been right. Fisher had secured himself a comfortable base for himself. You just wouldn't have known it from the outside. The tent's interior formed on a large space, at least ten times bigger than it should have been given the tent's dimensions. A huge king-sized bed sat at the back of the tent, nowhere near as grand as his bed back at Cahlish but still far more impressive than the small field cot I assumed was waiting for me somewhere in this muddy hell hole. There was a tall bookshelf next to the fire, heaped with a messy stack of books. There were books everywhere, in fact, stacked on the rug—yes, therug—by the foot of the bed, teetering in a pile on the floor beside the overstuffed couch. There was even one propped-open at a page, lying on the washstand by the entrance to the tent.

“Doing some research?” I couldn’t imagine that he was the type to settle down with a work of fiction.

Fisher surveyed the collection of tomes that covered every available surface and grunted. “You could say that.”

“Something important?”

“Very important to me,” he clipped out. From the hard edge in his voice, he wasn’t going to say anything further on the matter.

I let it drop.

In the very center of the tent was a wooden table big enough to seat four people, on which sat a basket of bread rolls and two bowls of steaming hot soup.

I stared at the table—at the soup and thetwosettings—and asked in a flat tone, “What's this?”

Fisher heaved out a weary breath, unfastening his cloak. He threw it onto the bed, then sat heavily down in a chair at the table, rubbing at his temple. “It's just a meal,” he said. “Let's eat it and try not to draw blood this time, shall we? Please?”

There was that word again.

Fighting him was my baseline. All I knew. But he looked so tired, his mood genuinely bleak, that I didn't have the heart to kick up a fuss. I joined him and started to eat in silence.