Of Truth and Beasts

This reasoning was sound. If they were to travel to another guild branch in search of more answers, how else would he know what to look for? She viewed him as part of her purpose now. He should be allowed to know everything.

Wynn was still silent.

Chane understood her well enough. Everything she had brought to the guild had been taken from her. Now that she had regained some of her prized possessions, perhaps she was reluctant to relinquish them again, even to him.

“As you said,” he went on, “we must pass time constructively until the council decides. I will need to purchase the supplies for our trip if you are confined. Otherwise, I must better understand what has brought you this far.”

And still she hesitated.

“Were they not written to recount your experiences, share your knowledge?”

Wynn looked up at him.

“Of course, yes.” She stood up, stepping to her little desk table. “I recopied this one while on the ship from the Farlands. This recounts my journey to Droevinka with Magiere, Leesil, and Chap. You can start here.”

Her sudden acquiescence was a relief, but something in her eyes troubled Chane. Even as she held up that first journal, her small fingers were white from clutching it too tightly.

What was she hiding?

Chapter 2

Seven nights later, Wynn knelt on the floor of her small room, feeding Shade bits of dried fish. All was quiet except for the dog’s clacking teeth and smacking jowls. She glanced at the door again, wondering why Chane still hadn’t arrived, and then looked around at her simple room: the bed, desk, small table, and one narrow window with a view of the keep’s inner courtyard.

Once she’d felt safe here, in what was now her prison. The council had maintained a deafening silence, and she had begun to wonder if they’d ever decide her fate. She and Chane had pressed ahead, anyway, itemizing supplies for him to acquire and making preparations for a journey. He stopped by her room each night before heading into the city to either tell her what he’d acquired or to see if anything new had been put on the list—or to return a journal and pick up another.

Wynn clenched all over every time he did the latter.

It wasn’t that she minded him reading her journals. They were a scholar’s records, after all. But a fair portion of their content dealt with the undead, with hunting and eliminating them. Chane often grew sullen or even bitter whenever she mentioned her old companions, Magiere, Leesil, and Chap. She could only imagine his state while reading so much about them.

Wynn’s relationship to those three was ... complex.

Magiere was a fierce, dark-haired rogue and the only dhampir Wynn had ever even heard of. Leesil was half-elven, raised in his youth to be an assassin enslaved to a warlord, a life he had escaped. Chap was a majay-hì like no other, a true Fay who’d chosen to be born into a pup of the Fay-and-wolf descendants of the elven lands.

In Wynn’s time in the Farlands of the eastern continent, she’d journeyed with these three in search of an artifact once wielded by the Ancient Enemy of many names. Their journey’s last leg ended in the far south of the region, in the high, desolate range of the Pock Peaks. There they’d finally uncovered the artifact—the orb—as well as those old texts that had given Wynn nothing but misery since returning home. She and her companions carried away what they could, and upon their return to the new little guild branch in Bela, Wynn had been given the task of bearing those texts safely back to Calm Seatt.

Magiere, Leesil, and Chap had sailed with her, bringing the orb. Their journey encompassed the better part of a year. They stayed together until the city of Calm Seatt loomed into sight and then parted ways. Wynn’s companions—mostly Chap—had decided the orb was too dangerous to bring to the sages. So they’d left to find a place of hiding for it against those who might seek it out.

Wynn still missed them. Magiere, Leesil, and Chap had become more than friends to her. They were like blood ... like family. She was lonely for them, and Chane knew it.

He’d wanted so badly to read her journals, and she understood his reasons, but each time he returned one and took another, he grew more silent, tense, and matter-of-fact. Even worse, he feigned ignorance if she asked why. His darkening mood might have nothing to do with the journals, but she doubted it.

And to make matters worse, he kept returning to the topic of Sau’ilahk.

Sau’ilahk was gone—Wynn knew this. She’d seen the end, and Chane hadn’t. She’d described every detail to him that she could, though she couldn’t explain the influence of Chuillyon or the Stonewalkers upon the wraith any more than he could.

But he hadn’t seen it happen.