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He held his hand out to Tacey as he walked past her. She took it without hesitation. They slipped out into the corridor and began a leisurely walk in the direction of the drawing room.
“You don’t seem worried about your fate,” she said, with a little laugh.
“I’ve weathered worse storms than that man could possibly whip up.”
The Reluctant Recluse and the Invisible Rain crossed their paths.
“Can you see him?” Mercury asked.
“The Reluctant Recluse?”
Mercury shook his head. “The Invisible Rain—well, Mercury Raine, but it’s far too confusing to call him that.”
Tacey smiled at him. “I can’t see him.”
“I was always invisible,” the Invisible Rain said. “I always will be.”
“And I have been unseen for nearly a thousand years,” the Reluctant Recluse said. “It’ll take some getting used to being visible and audible once again.”
“I still cannot understand how it is that my father—lands, it is strange to be speaking of an identifiable person as ‘my father.’” He took the briefest of moments to, for the hundredth time at least, let the oddity of that wash over him. “If my father couldn’t see you, how did he know you were there, let alone trade you to me?”
The Reluctant Recluse smiled a bit. “You come from a line of very remarkable people.”
“Will you tell me about him sometime?” Mercury asked. “What kind of man he was? What happened to him? Why, assuming he was still alive after I was taken to the orphanage, he never rescued me?” So many questions.
“It sounds to me as though you have more adventures yet to embark upon,” the Reluctant Recluse said. “And more questions to someday be answered.”
The Reluctant Recluse floated through a wall, alongside the Invisible Rain.
Someday be answered. Mercury had learned a lot about his past in the time since Granny Grey had arrived at Aventine. He would somehow—someday—find the answers to more.
They stepped into the drawing room to find the Quiet Queen waiting for them.
“The rift in the Rending Rock was created when the first ghost exchange happened,” she said in what was not quite a question.
Mercury dipped his head in acknowledgment.
“Now that the rift is healed, are ghost exchanges still possible?”
Mercury hadn’t given that any thought yet. “I don’t actually know.”
“The best way to find out is to attempt one,” she said, very matter-of-factly. “I would like you to trade me for the Violet Giant.”
That was decidedly unexpected.
“You wish to be attached to the Vanns?”
“I wish for him to no longer have to be,” she clarified. “He has certainly earned some peace.”
“But you would have to live with them, and they are terrible people,” Tacey said.
An almost wicked smile, one filled with tremendous satisfaction, pulled at the Queen’s features. “I am not one to endure ill-treatment without doling out the appropriate retribution.”
Mercury almost laughed out loud. “You’re certain about this?”
She nodded.
“I suspect agreeing not to lock the Vanns in the tunnels might convince them to agree to a swap.”
