“I tried on the council lands, and it killed people on impact.”
“Is that when you shit yourself and hoped no one would notice?” Hadriel asked.
“You’re projecting your situation onto me, Hadriel,” Hannon said as he studied the castle in the distance. “I don’t think anyone has ever shit themselves accidentally as often or as flamboyantly as you have.”
Tamara, standing nearby with Vemar, started laughing despite the severity of the situation.
“But to your point, no, I am not positive I can do it,” Hannon said. “I have not tried on actual stone, and I don’t want to try in the ship in case I sink us all.”
“What about the ground, though?” Tamara asked. “Did you leave divots or holes or anything?”
“Brimfire does not react to the ground as it does to other objects. It will burn it, but it will not eat through it. I’ll learn why that is when I have more time.”
I blew out a breath. “Okay, in summary, our options are essentially to”—I held up one finger—“sneak in a few of the staff entrances that Dolion either doesn’t know about or hasn’t thought about”—I held up a second finger—“try to break in heavily barricaded doors that are armed with magical or poisoned traps”—a third finger—“or see if Hannon can cut a hole in the side of the building. If he succeeds, though, we’d have the whole interior of the castle on the other side, waiting to attack.” I put my hand down. “That about the gist of it?”
“What a slew of very promising options,” Hadriel said dryly. “Tell me again why the demon king wouldn’t know about those entrances?”
“Servants are below him,” Govam replied. “And those doors belong to the lowliest servants. He would be disgusted to know too much about them, and it wouldn’t occur to him that someone of my caliber might concern himself with them. Usually, he would be right.”
“And in this case?” I asked.
“When you are trying to document all possible ways of escaping without dying, you stop worrying about social tiers.”
“Fair enough,” Tamara murmured.
“We have no choice,” Nyfain said, his arm coming around my back. “We’ll follow Govam’s plan. We’ll divide up and go through the staff doors. Once inside, we’ll try to sneak our way to the staff mess hall to meet up. Then we’ll attack. That’s the only way. The faeries and wolves are good in close combat. The court dragons know the sword, and some from the villages do as well. The dragons who don’t will stay with Hannon. Hannon, you’ll need to distract them and figure out how to shit fire through that stone”—Hadriel spat out laughter—“or whatever you have to do. Don’t get killed, though. We can’t wait for another dawn for you to come back to life. We don’t have that kind of time. Finley, you stay with Hannon and direct the—”
“Don’t even say it.” I pulled away from him. “That is absolutely not going to happen. We talked about this on the way here. If you go down, who do you think Dolion is going to go after next? Me. Except I don’t have even a quarter of the knowledge you do, and your mom doesn’t know anything about warfare. If he takes you down, it’ll only be a matter of time before he gets to us. We work best together, Nyfain. You know we do. We have to stay together. Dragons are tough, you said so yourself. Our child must be tough as well. We will all be fine, so long as we stick together.”
He stared at me for a long moment, anguish plain in his eyes. “Fuck,” he said under his breath, turning to stare straight ahead at nothing. “How do you always get your way?”
“By speaking sense. Okay, let’s stop fucking around. We need to go see Starvos, give him the plan, and then get underway.”
Wet from the rain and cold but not feeling it because of adrenaline, part of our host gathered on the weather-battered side of the island in a cave mostly cut off from the elements. We’d taken a precarious rock path to get here, up from a tiny inlet that had been impossible to see from farther out. There were only four entrances that might work for us, all of them too small for our party to go in together. Govam had volunteered to lead our crew, clearly knowing that Nyfain would want to keep his eye on him. Denski led another, and Sonassa and another demon led the third and fourth groups.
A gently used firepit sat in the middle of the floor with a stack of wood sitting on top of wet straw. Little droplets of what looked like rust dotted the side of the cave in a line, leading from deep within the cave to the opening.
“Blood,” Govam said without being asked, leading us deeper into the cave. “The dying or freshly dead are given to the officers to be made into creatures. Sometimes the body is too old and has to be disposed of in a different way, though, and other times someone doesn’t want to see a friend made into one of those things. They use this exit to dispose of the bodies.”