Page 62 of Leviathan's Song
Silas waved a hand dismissively. “I sent him to see what was wrong. Just because we aren’t physically present doesn’t mean the pact is null. You’ve made an enormous mess of these woods.” He stalked off through the trees toward the golem. I shot an incredulous look at Rafe before turning to follow Silas, trying to make sense of what he’d said and not trip over my own feet in the undergrowth. Levi reached out a hand to steady me but pulled back when I got my balance on my own.
“Yousent… what pact… Silas, I’m so sorry, I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.”
He paused in front of Domm’s foot and heaved a frustrated sigh. “Fleshlings have such short memories. Give them five generations and something is as good as forgotten.” As creepy as the term ‘fleshling’ was, it beat being referred to as ‘meat-people’ which was Rafe’s go-to. Silas pressed a hand to the side of Domm’s foot, and I felt his magic swell. He gave a satisfied nod when the pulsing magic stopped, and his glow returned to its original ochre color.
“Your ancestors made a pact with my family. We sojourn on your lands whenever we need to rest or we have a sapling to raise. In exchange for that, we pledged to protect your property and your family from harm, to come when you called. Look at this mess,” he muttered to himself, wandering off into the broken trees, pushing his magic into the ground and righting uprooted trees or sealing off broken limbs.
“So… you have three massive stone golems, one of which is a long-distance fire caster, and an army of dryad warriors at your disposal,” Levi muttered dryly. “The title of Empress is becoming more fitting by the moment.”
“Little good it will do the sprite city,” Silas mused as he wandered to the next tree. “Saltwater would poison our roots.”
“We could deliver the sentries,” Rafe murmured.
“What—Rafe, no. That’s crazy. I’m so sorry I called you out of the mountains on a false alarm. I had no idea—”
“It wasn’t a false alarm, Elara. You were nearly killed,” Rafe interrupted gently, and I felt Levi’s hand close over my shoulder. “If we took these in your stead, we could deliver them in no more than four days. We don’t sleep, we don’t need daylight to know the terrain, and we can cut through the mountain passes with them.”
“If you won’t allow that,” Silas continued, “we will at least accompany you to the shore—even though it will take much longer since you can’t go through the mountains with us. If nothing else, your father would want his sapling protected… and perhaps we can mitigate some of this…carnage.”
I cringed at being referred to as a sapling, but also in acknowledgment of the swath of broken trees and churned earth we were leaving in our wake. I cursed inwardly that I couldn’t cut through the mountains with them if they took that route—we’d never survive. But if I went the long way around with them, it would take the full two weeks, versus four days.
“I’ll still need to install them with their orders for the sprite city.” I chewed my lip, thinking hard.
“We’ll meet you at Whitewave in four days’ time,” Silas replied, eyeing the sentries.
“And if you have trouble?” I couldn’t help but ask.
“I’ll send the stag.”
If they had trouble in the mountain passes, I wasn’t sure what I could do. It was risky.
I eyed the sentries, knowing the dryads’ offer would be wise to take, and frowning when I realized my trip with Levi would be over. The selfish side of me mourned that our time alone would be over already. The private little bubble we’d created for ourselves would end.
While I was hesitant to give up control of the golem, I would be doing that when I handed them over in Whitewave anyway. And to be honest, Silas probably knew more about these sentries than even my father.
“Let me call my mother.”
* * *
It made sense,the dryad’s proposal. And since time saved equaled lives saved when delivering defenses to a city under attack, and my father knewand trustedSilas, my mother gratefully agreed to allow him to deliver the sentries on my behalf. She was just as baffled as I was about Silas’s claim of a pact and the emergency beacon in Domm. As far as she’d known, the dryad people had always spent time in our forests and that’s just the way things were.
I was already changing gears mentally. I thought I’d have more than another week before jumping into the next stage of the plan, but now that it was here, I found my brain skittering off in a million different directions, working through possible water golem builds and contingencies.
Rafe personally delivered Levi and me to the nearest town with our bags—after being admonished by Silas not to take too long or get lost—but not before making all kinds of delighted comments about how pleased he was that I’d “taken a mate” and wanting to know when I would have “new fledglings for him to spoil”. I heard Levi make a choking noise as I simultaneously flushed bright red all the way to my toes and imagined Rafe offering fat little grubs to our hypothetical future baby.
Rather than fixate on that bizarre mental image, however, my brain latched on to the idea of a baby with Levi,hisbaby, a life together, and it took my breath away with how much I wanted that. I tried without success to shove those thoughts to the back of my mind.
That dazed feeling followed me throughout the rest of the evening, as we found an inn and I got a proper hot bath, ate dinner, and finally fell asleep, exhausted, clutched in Levi’s arms. What would happen now that we weren’t traveling together with the same purpose, insulated from the rest of the world? And now that I had a massive project looming ahead of me? A golem created for the defense of a city was going to be the biggest project of my life.
* * *
Friday morning foundus at Muriel Ta’nith’s office in Whitewave. She’d returned my spectral message about the sentries being delivered five days early with one of her own. The council was being difficult about my contract for the new golem creation, and she needed to speak with me in person as soon as possible.
We’d Gate hopped between the Boundlands and the Void until we made it back to Whitewave, then sent our bags ahead of us to Oar’s Rest. I knew I should be grateful to the dryads for delivering our sentries early and for the benefit it gave to the sprites, but I couldn’t help feeling slightly irked that I was here instead of nestled in a hammock with my favorite siren right now. He’d been twitchy all morning, flinching every time he thought I might step away from him, and I noticed it became worse the more people were around us. I couldn’t even claim I didn’t like his need for me, though I wished I could have removed his anxiety about it. We were a bit of a mess right now.
We weren’t the only anxiety-ridden messes though. Muriel had dark circles under her eyes, and her desk was piled even higher with papers than the last time I’d seen it. It would be quite the headache to sort out if someone bumped a stack. She stood behind her desk, bent at the waist and staring down at it. I tried not to fidget in my oversized chair as I waited for her to gather her thoughts—she was obviously frustrated, her mouth pinched and her eyes hard.
“The council is… being exceedingly difficult,” she started, with a growl in her voice I hadn’t heard before. Her hands curled into claws on her desk. “Let me be honest here. It’s not the whole council—it’s the mer.” She flashed a quick look at Levi, who sat sprawled in the chair next to mine, and he gave a quick shrug with a raised eyebrow.
