“Bryn?”
He had been gone for far longer than was reasonable to ask anybody to huddle by a candle. That light had sputtered out a while ago. Now Hail was left to wander the den.
It was truly empty.
Hail found it eerie. The last time she had been here, which felt like a matter of days, it had been brimming with the orphans of the war. The large room where the whelps had all slept together was particularly empty by merit of how very full it had once been.
The pantry might have been full by Bryn’s standards, but she wanted to eat more than boiled barley, which was all he had in store. And she certainly wasn’t going to grind flour from the grains and bake bread herself.
Hail left the den. She was hungry, and Bryn had no right to tell her that she couldn’t feed herself. She was certain she could go out and get something to eat without causing chaos. She’d done it hundreds of times before. Sure, she was a demon-possessed monster who decocked men, but as long as nobody tried to defile her, they should be safe.
The stalls in the market were many and varied. They were also different in some part to those she’d gotten used to. Hail decided to approach a seller with some good looking vegetables. She did not know him. He must be new to town.
“Hello, I’d like to buy some produce, please.” She tried the words and hoped they’d work. She was afraid that the seller would look through her as Elise had and treat her as though she was invisible.
“Certainly. You can see my inventory laid out here. Anything you take, you pay for. Anything you put down on the table, I buy. Simple enough.”
“Simple enough,” Hail agreed.
She had taken the liberty of grabbing a few valuables from the den with a mind to sell them and thereby get enough money to buy food. Bryn had been neglecting the den. She wondered if him having adopted everyone out had something to do with her disappearance. Had she broken him? Had his loss of her led him to simply give up?
Hail felt an uncomfortable guilt at those thoughts, because they seemed to be true. The den had never been empty in all the time she had been there. It had been a lively place full of those who needed help. Now where did they go, the ones who needed help?
She absentmindedly looked through her pockets, and picked out a small ruby stolen from someone or somewhere. She doubted it belonged to Bryn. He wasn’t a ruby sort of guy.
“This is an heirloom ruby. It has to be worth ten thousand gold.”
“Ten thousand,” the merchant laughed. “Best I can do is eight hundred. That’s all I have.”
Hail sighed and looked in her pockets for something less expensive to sell. She put the ruby down on the counter for a moment to use both hands. In an instant, it was gone, and eight hundred gold coins were dumped in front of her.
“Wait. I didn’t want to sell that. Give it back to me.” She held out the pouch of money.
“Certainly,” the merchant smiled happily. “I can sell you this ruby for five thousand gold.”
“Five thousand!?” Hail exclaimed. “You just gave me eight hundred for it. Why can’t we swap back?”
“Not how it works.”
“Oh, I think that will be how it works,” Hail growled. “You’re not getting away with that.”
The merchant put the ruby on a shelf up on the counter. Hail grabbed it. It was hers, after all.
“THIEF! THIEF!” The merchant started yelling for the New Rahvin guard. The guard were on her in a second. Hail tried to explain, but they were not listening to explanations. They were going to kill her. Their swords were drawn, their faces all seemed absolutely identical—as did their voices.
She darted into a shadow to try to avoid being seen. Every lyrakin whelp knew how to avoid guards. But this time the shadow did more than hide her from view. It gave her power. The Dark welled inside her, and then emerged. She would never be able to explain exactly what happened, but as a guard came rushing for her, she reached out and magic flowed through her. It was not a healing spell as she had cast with the bearoark. It was something far more destructive.
A dark bolt hit the guard dead center, and she saw the life drain from him. A red bar glowing above his head told her that she had almost killed him.
She screamed for the others to stay away, but they wouldn’t. When they saw what had happened to the guard now sprawled on the ground, they attacked more aggressively than before. Six of them now, coming for her, making themselves open to the dark bolts which pulsed from her fingers almost of their own volition.