She poked at her leg a while, trying to think of what to say. All this bullshit between them. Maybe if she’d just been honest in the first place, none of this would have happened.
Yeah, like she believed that. But maybe it was worth a try anyway.
“The thing is…”
Bael looked at her encouragingly. Var nuzzled her hand and she found herself scratching the soft fur at the top of his head.
“The thing is…”
Var licked her fingers encouragingly.
Tell him…
Bael touched her hand and she looked up, her eyes meeting his. His eyes were so green, impossibly green, shining like emeralds.
“The thing is,” her voice came out as a whisper, “there’s so much you don’t know.”
“Then tell me,” Bael said.
“I don’t know where to start.”
“Start anywhere.”
Var, cat-shaped again, slid onto her lap, his fur silky against her bare skin. He looked up at her, eyes as green as Bael’s, and purred.
Kett dug her fingers into his fur, and started talking.
Chapter Nineteen
Once upon a time, Bael learned, there had been a little girl who was made of stone. One day, she was turned into a real girl, but because she’d been a statue for eight years she didn’t know how to talk or move or eat. She babbled like a baby and nearly choked on ordinary foods. She crawled, shouted and hit people, because she didn’t know it wasn’t acceptable to do so.
She also didn’t know that it wasn’t usual for other people to change their shapes at will. She frequently turned into a dog or a horse without notice, since those were the animals she’d seen most when she was a statue. Later, when she was educated a little more, and learned about tigers and gryphons, she started trying to emulate them. On the island where she lived, there were dragons, but it wasn’t until her teens that she managed such a shape-
“Hold on,” Bael said. “Dragon island? The only one in Peneggan is Koskwim.”
Kett nodded. “I’ll tell you about it later.” She paused. “It’s-well, it’s not entirely my secret to tell.”
“But it might prove important?”
Her fingers dug into Var’s fur. “Yeah. It probably will.”
“Who undid the spell? Striker?”
She gave a half smile. “No. Striker was still imprisoned in the kelfs’ mythical hell dimension-don’t ask-pickling in his own madness. It was a couple of kids who’d nicked a magic book and went on some kind of spree, trying to turn inanimate objects into real things. And with me they just…got lucky. Or unlucky, depending on how you look at it.” Her gaze slid in his direction. “You’ve met one of them.”
Bael gestured with his hand for more. He was too tired to think which of Kett’s many bizarre acquaintances it might have been.
“Jarven. He’s the one who took me to Koskwim, didn’t know what else to do with me. He was pretty much the only one on the whole island who didn’t treat me like a freak.”
Bael opened his mouth to speak and closed it again. Jarven, silent and unemotional, quietly lending Kett the support she needed. A surrogate brother for an orphan child.
She told him how, when she was sixteen, a tall, lean man with chilling blue eyes, dressed all in black, had turned up and said he knew her father. Kett hadn’t believed him-in fact, up until then she’d rarely thought about her father. She’d discovered her mother had been a shapeshifter, but absolutely nothing of her father.
“He said he was taking me home,” she said, “and I told him I already was home. I’d never known anywhere else. I didn’t leave that island until I was sixteen.”
Bael frowned, because all he knew of Koskwim was that it was inhabited by a colony of wild dragons. But then, given Kett’s day job, he wasn’t that surprised.
“Who was he?” he asked, although he figured he already knew the answer.
“Striker. He and my dad go way back. He brought me here.”
She told him how she’d met her father for the first time, and he’d been distinctly underwhelmed, more interested in chasing pretty girls and separating wealthy people from their money than being a father. He’d sent her on to his own father, an Anglish earl, from whom Kett had been kidnapped by men who tried to sell her as a slave.
“Reckon he’d probably have left me there if they hadn’t gone after Nuala too,” she said without rancor.
“Don’t you
“What, that he prefers her to me? He’s known her longer. He was best mates with her brother-now the king-in their army days, saved his life once or twice. Nuala was like his kid sister-until she grew up, that is.” She smiled. “Funny, everyone thought she was still such a kid, but they treated me like an adult and I’m six years younger than her.”
Bael frowned, and she said gently, “It’s okay. You don’t need to go calling him out or anything. We actually get on okay now.” She gave a faint smile and added, “Apparently, finding out he has a teenage daughter can bloody terrify a man.”
The lamp grew dim as she told him about meeting her father’s exotic, glamorous and sometimes just insane friends. Striker was the tip of the iceberg, just one of many mad, bad and dangerous individuals Tyrnan of Emreland consorted with. Somewhere in between being the son of an earl and marrying a princess, he’d developed an infamous career in highway robbery. Perpetually pardoned by the king in Peneggan, and thrown in jail everywhere else, he spent his days with whom Kett called madmen and freaks.
“Most of them have settled down like my dad,” she said, “and the ones who didn’t are dead. Chalia and my dad knew each other at school. And then, turns out her mother and his father’d had a little…indiscretion. Like father, like son, I guess. Striker was the one who figured out Chalia was my dad’s sister. Lya…of course he made best friends with a kelf, why not? And Striker, they knew each other from their schooldays too.”
“I still can’t believe he was a child.”
“Well, of course he was. You don’t think he just hatched out fully formed, do you?”
“I thought he was something hell spat out.”
Kett smiled at that, stroking Var’s fur in a way that was quite distracting. “Hah,” she said quietly. “Some day I’ll tell you about how Striker got to be Striker. He used to be normal, apparently.”
“I can’t imagine it.”
“No, neither can I. He was a normal kid, a teenager, he joined the army, fell in love with a girl, and then got whisked away to a sort of hell dimension for twelve years. Enough to drive anyone mad. But he came back, mostly I think because he missed his woman.”
“Chalia?”
“Yeah. Funny what love does.”
Bael said nothing, watching her stroke Var. Funny indeed.
“’Cos it was love that got me killed,” Kett said, and looked up at him, as if judging his reaction.
“Killed,” Bael said steadily. Somehow, he wasn’t all that surprised.
“Love’s a curse. Falls on everyone. Everyone I know, anyway. You dreamed I was dead,” Kett said, “and I was, although not as old and moldy as you saw.”
“But-how? I mean…what…?”
She smiled at his confusion and pulled up her shirt to show him a small, jagged scar on her stomach. Bael knew
