“They didn’t ask. They’re arguing over what to do with it right now.”
“What to—you mean they’re planning to keep it?” I chewed my lip some more, because that . . . that probably wasn’t good.
I didn’t know how things had originally played out, before Calamity Cassie got involved, but I doubted it was with the little guys making out like bandits. They kind of reminded me of me, and our lives didn’t work like that. When pennies dropped from heaven, they were usually in five-hundred-pound sacks that crushed our skulls.
“That’s what they’re arguing over,” Pritkin said, watching me with a curious expression. “Some want to keep the staff and find a way to use it. They lost most of their lands, except for this strip by the river, a few years ago to the Green Fey, and the staff is the sort of thing that might be able to win at least some of them back.”
“Green Fey?”
“The Water Lords.” He tilted his head. “You know, the ones who usually come to earth?”
“Oh, right. Those Green Fey.”
“You probably know them as Alorestri, but that just means ‘They Who Wear the Green’ in their language, and either way, it’s meaningless. Just a name they give themselves so they won’t have to give us their real one.”
“Do you know their real one?”
Pritkin nodded. And then a liquid series of syllables came out of his mouth that sounded almost like singing—a whole song, because it lasted, like, a full minute. “That’s . . . beautiful,” I said, because it was.
“I memorized it as a child. Took me a whole week.”
“As a child?”
“And then there’s the second camp,” he said. “The ones who want to return the staff to the Blarestri and plead their case there. But others say it’s unlikely that the Sky King is going to fight the Lady of Lakes and Oceans—whom he used to be married to, mind you—for nothing more than the return of a piece of his own property. Which, for all he knows, they stole in the first place!”
“I—what?” I was having trouble keeping up. The fey had too damned many names!
“And then there’s the third camp, who want to give it back to us and send us on our way, effectively washing their hands of the whole thing—”
I brightened.
“—and who are in the minority. The others say they have it now, and any group who comes looking for it is likely to hold them accountable.”
“Then . . . then we’ve put them in danger?” I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of it before. God, I was an idiot.
“The Svarestri put them in danger,” Pritkin said, gripping my arm as I struggled to get to my feet. “They came into their lands, violating a treaty in the process of chasing us.”
“But what about now? What if they come back?”
“We’re well protected here.”
I stared at him. “Did you see those things?”
“Yes, and I’ve seen what our hosts can do on their home ground. They’ve fought off the Green Fey for years now. This place is well warded. They wouldn’t have brought us here otherwise.”
I felt myself relax slightly.
And then a screaming arrow came shooting directly at my head.
Chapter Forty-seven
I shrieked and Pritkin pulled me over by the tree, onto the pile of rugs. And the arrow disintegrated in a sparkling haze just beyond the edge of the platform, sending a few translucent bits of ash fluttering our way. “Looks like it’s time for the entertainment,” he told me.
“Entertainment?”
He nodded, grinning, because he was a bastard. He had always been a bastard, and youth had obviously not changed a goddamned thing—
“You can’t leave,” he told me as I struggled to get up carrying fifty pounds of freaking wool.