Hendrik hung his head. “No.”
“Then we won’t let it,” Jessica replied, voice softening. “The time is right; we have accurate, current information about the City, people with connections to navigate it, and a terrifying sense of urgency. The least we can do is seek answers.”
“What if you do find where the—the murder-god is? What then?” Hendrik asked.
“Well, there has to be some way to end it,” Piret replied.
“I was just thinking that,” Dagan said thoughtfully, sucking plum juice from his fingers. “In the old stories they always end up defeated. If it’s the same thing.”
“This isn’t a story where the hero’s going to slay the monster.” Hendrik shook his head. “You all haven’t been inside that place, so you don’t know. Kajja, Piret? You can’t think…?”
But they both met his gaze fearlessly, daring him to finish. Kajja, after a moment that felt like an eternity, said, “What other choice is there, Hendrik? Give me one that doesn’t end in the mountain falling down on all our heads somehow, and I’ll listen. But better minds than ours have been at this for decades, in one way or another.”
Piret added, “And it is an opportunity. We’re here, Marsalis has the books, the Heart Wood kind of has to help us, or this thing will suck them dry, too.”
Something about that expression, suck them dry, made Hendrik shiver. And yet, he couldn’t think of an alternative. And apparently neither could greater minds than his. “Just—okay, but this isn’t happening today, right?”
Jessica shook her head. “We’ll need time with the books. They’re on the way. And we’ll need Bartolo, our Head Scout, to approve of any plan.”
“Good. Kajja, I’ll go if you stay here,” Hendrik decided.
Kajja, of course, was immediately indignant. “No.”
“I’m a better fit. I can fight, which for all your brains you definitely can’t—”
“My brains are why I have to go! I’ll be the brains. And I’ll have Piret to fight.”
“Piret, you and me together?” Hendrik begged. “We could do it. You know we could.”
“Yes.” Piret sighed. “There’s no point arguing now, though. It’s not a plan yet.”
“But she’ll be even harder to convince to stay home if she has her mind set on it,” Hendrik protested.
“She’s right here, and she got this far, so she’ll do whatever she thinks is best.” Kajja’s voice, along with her cheeks, went hot.
“Kaj—”
But Dagan cut in with, “Is Gareth in? To infiltrate the City, I mean?”
“If he’s asked,” Piret said. “He said he’d come.”
Dagan said, “Me too.”
Hendrik could’ve screamed. “Are you completely out of your senses? After everything I told you about that place?”
Dagan’s golden gaze was unwavering, just like it had been in the face of a protective mama bear. “That’s exactly why I want to go, darling. If that mess spills into my forest, which it already has, what kind of life will there be for any of us? Jessica’s right; it’ll have to be scouts.”
“Fine, but not you,” Hendrik said through his teeth.
Dagan cocked one eyebrow. “You’d have to catch me first, and I seem to remember you saying something about how I could beat you in a fair fight, even if you did.”
Hendrik gripped the tabletop hard to keep from flipping it. “Dagan, please—”
Jessica held up her hands. “We’ll wait for Bartolo before we can make any decisions. That’s just the rough idea. No point beating our skulls off a tree for something that may never happen.” She clearly had not bargained for pushback of this magnitude.
Hendrik was not sorry to disappoint her. And he was just getting started.
Chapter 3: Wildcrafter Settlement, Heart Wood
A wagon full of books, heavy and leatherbound rather than the light, bark-bound books popular in the Heart Wood, arrived in the middle of another Council meeting. Kajja, Marsalis, Thad, and Jessica commandeered Dagan, Innan, and several other involved parties to weed through the masses of information buried within them.
Hendrik had never cared that he was a weak reader until this precise moment. He accepted a glass of wine from a server, who set it down before him. “Need anything else, let me know.”
Hendrik waved them off but accepted the glass. It was elderberry, not as good as Dagan’s mother’s, but lovely and silken on the tongue. Food and drink tasted so much more vibrant here than what he remembered from the Stone City. Of course, he couldn’t let the Heart Wood fall to the same evil that had taken Kass. Of course, he was going to do everything he could to avenge Kass and Lyla and the probably thousands of people that had died in vain before them.
But the list of people he cared for was thin, to say the least, and it couldn’t be that every single one of them had to be involved, too. What was next, Alara and Kon as secret resistance agents?
Kajja and Dagan had that same drive and the same right to protect what they loved, too. And yet, Hendrik’s mind couldn’t wrap around the idea of them facing the City itself, let alone whatever ripped out dozens of throats a year and, potentially, magically sapped the land itself when that wasn’t enough. Of course, it might not be the same thing…but was it likely there were two life-eating forces at play here?
The thought sent a shiver of dread down his spine. He downed the glass of wine and waved politely for another.
The readers barely paused for supper, and by the time they finished for the night Hendrik was well and truly drunk. Which made him less angry but slightly more indignant, somehow. Dagan, Kajja, and Innan found him in the hall, carrying glasses of their preferred drinks, and slid into his table.
“My brain hurts.” Dagan knocked back a glass of wine in two gulps and waved for another.
“Hen, you can’t believe how ugly it all is.” Kajja sighed. “I mean, mostly it’s just lists of births and deaths and the Founder’s bloodline, but the books that do have some history in them…”
“I don’t understand how Marsalis smuggled them all out,” Innan said, shaking their head. “Did he do it in shifts or…how?”
