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He grinned, trying to sell his excitement, but the look was gritty, his yellowed teeth made worse by the lack of light. If the scent from the bag had a face, his would be it. His eyes were near dark, his cheeks far too red, his lips more cracked and broken for even a life on the Qits. His was a deaths’ mask, a look that was one foul step away from demise.
“That’s not my name.” I spoke carefully, Yersua, however, just smiled.
“Oh really, because from what I have heard that is what you are calling yourself nowadays,” he continued in that voice, blotting the cigar out in a stained dish.
I refused to look away from Yersua as I counted the exits and took stock of the weapons that I already knew he was hiding behind the desk; two knives and one sword that he had inherited from his father. I had taken enough unseen walks through the space thanks to stolen time, I already knew it all. I knew I could finish him before he was able to reach for the blade he kept strapped to the underside of the table. He wouldn’t be able to make a sound before the splash of blood and water of his head landing on the floor echoed through the door.
I had never felt as though I would need to fight him; but I had also never seen him with that face.
“I don’t know what you are talking about.” My words were as hard as the mask I currently wore.
“Don’t you though?” he mused, those dark eyes flashing red. “Because the stories I’ve heard this last week, about the dangerous man who hunts Fae. A man who carries two golden blades and has eyes two different shades of blue. They sure sound like you.”
His smile stretched even further and my nerves coiled. By the Goddess I was fucked. He had heard about the eyes, the dual shades that would connect me to so much more. Things that he would kill me for.
“My eyes are not two different shades of blue.” I was firm, my magic flaring as I made sure it was still pulled taut, that my eyes were still a single shade.
He laughed as the Qit rocked, his table and chair sliding two feet to the left and sending me right into the wall.
“Don’t lie to me, Caspyn. It’s dark in here, but it’s not that dark,” he chuckled, the sound more like a bark. “I’ve seen the color slip more than once. Besides that one bastard eye of yours is so light it's near white. Like ice. There is no hiding that.”
He laughed again, but I wasn’t foolish enough to react. There was no point in countering that, the muscle in my jaw feathered as he grinned victoriously.
“So, what of it?” I snarled after a moment, not even attempting to disguise my slow placement of my hand on my knives now. His eyes followed the movement, but he laughed again, the sound matching the creak of the Qit as it swayed.
“Nothing. Nothing.” He waved it away, even though his eyes did not leave mine. “I don’t care what people call you, so long as you don’t bring me trouble. You keep bringing heads, and I’ll keep you around.”
He tried to ease the tension, but I didn’t relax so much as a muscle. There was something else there, something in how he shifted his weight, in the way his hands rested on the arms of his chair, his knuckles white against the aged wood.
I didn’t move my hands from my belt. He had heard the story of the Wanderer, and he had known enough to connect it to me. He had clearly connected those eyes to my wanted poster from all those years ago, the one that had been put out after all those deaths on the bridge in Callay. The bridge that his brother had just so happened to be thrown from. Of course, Yersua’s brother had been my only target that night.
Just like all the other threads in my plan were unraveling, so did this one seem to be. If I wanted to use Yersua for the sole purpose I had planned for him I had to act now.
“Don’t worry, you’ll get your heads. Unless the queen has bigger use of me,” I spoke slowly, careful in my wording as I watched him.
I had planned on using Yersua and his love of gossip to help gain my entrance into the Runturin, but with how he was watching me, I didn’t assume that would be possible anymore.
Sure enough, he laughed, the sound riotous and far too loud.
“The queen? What in the world would the queen want with you?”
“She wants the heads of those monsters, and I am the one who brings the most. It’s not what I want with her, it’s surely what she would want with me.” I swayed with the motion of the waves, the floor creaking and sending more icy brine over my boots. Yersua continued to laugh.
“Let me tell you something, Caspyn.” He leaned forward as the inn rocked, the motion sending him into the desk and some of the papers there floating to the damp ground. “The queen don’t care about these heads.”
“She put out that call for them.” My fingers tapped against the thick leather of my belt as I rocked to the side again, careful to keep my focus on him.
“Naw, that was from the office of the Runturin. Could have come from anyone, but not her. When we take the ears to the Runturin, they pay us and ask us all the same stuff I ask you. When you found the monster, when you killed ‘im, and how. They dot it on a map, pay us, and that be it. The queen don’t care about the heads, and she certainly don’t care about you.”
He laughed again as the door opened and Jarrurd walked back in, holding the purple blood prints of the ears that served as my receipt on a torn strip of parchment. The small scrap was just as wet and damp as the rest of this place, just as Jarrurd was. Jarrurd who had walked in with a dagger on his hip that he had not had before, no sign of the money he usually brought with him in his hand.
Fuck.
“But if it’s the queen you want, I think I know another way you can reach her,” Yersua continued, his hands having moved from the worn armrests on his chair to under the table, right where he kept a long blade.
Double fuck.
Goddess be damned, this was about to get interesting.
