Page 86 of Sunsplitter

The man’s flinch nearly sent him out of his chair.

“Fucking Void, Kolbeck!” he shouted. Then, when he spotted Antal looming behind her, “Fucking. Void.What are you—”

“Focus, Clarence.” Fionamara snapped her fingers between them. “Don’t look at the scary daeyari, look at me. There we go.”

The other patrons watched warily. Better than fleeing, as they’d done on the Summer Plane. Antal dipped his head in what he hoped was an unintimidating manner—deeper, when the shop owner peeked outside.

“You said we should get coffee,” Fionamara said.

Clarence, one of the smugglers she’d told Antal about, stared at her. “Did you—”

“Figure out what coffee shop you go to, so I could keep tabs on your clever ass? Obviously. Now, I have a job for you, Clarence.”

“You already gave me a job.”

“This is a more important job. Themostimportant.”

He glanced at Antal. Back to Fionamara. “Uh huh.”

“Clarence, I need you to use that wonderful brain of yours. I need you to utilize every one of the stellar contacts I know you have.” Fionamara leaned across the table. “And I need you to find every mysterious fire that’s happened recently in this territory. Make me a list. Locations. Dates. Who to speak to. I want all of them, Clarence.”

Hunting an aedari wasn’t as exciting as Fi hoped.

She spent that first week trailing a pack of daeyari as they combed the Summer Plane forest, sniffing through ashes, searching for tidbits of scent. Fi could only watch. At one point, Antal held a suspicious stick up to her nose, asking what she smelled.

It smelled like a fucking stick.

Avroz, she never took her eyes off. He’d agreed to Antal’s compromise—but something was off in his demeanor toward her. Fi keyed to the daeyari like a fox skirting a wolf, itching at the subtle shift in him, a reluctant tolerance for her presence that kept her on edge. He’d carved open Antal’s last human lover. Why play nice this time?

Will you be more useful to me than the last one?he’d asked when they were alone in his study, claws slicing her scalp. Fi catalogued every glance, every slip of fang, searching for his angle. Did he think letting her join the hunt would make Antal more malleable? Or was Avroz trying to turn them against each other?

This was a cunning creature. It might be both.

The other two daeyari, Avroz’s kezri, Fi struggled to get a read on. All Syvr did was smirk at her, a lot. Ixli kept her distance, all cold glances and twitching tail. A truce for now, but still man-eaters, still loyal to Avroz. Fi never let her sword out of reach.

When the daeyari split up to search more ground, Fi and her useless human nose stayed with Antal. Even her horse was a better tracker. She brought Aisinay to each of the burn sites. A couple times, they followed a scent to the closest road before the trail vanished.

“Aedari can teleport?” Fi asked. “Like daeyari?”

Antal crouched beside the road, massaging dirt between his fingers. He sniffed the soil. Scowled. At his side, Aisinay huffed in equal frustration.

“The mechanism is different,” he said. “Aedari don’t dip into the Void to teleport. They dematerialize. A faster process, instantaneous, but they can only move within their line of sight.”

Fi surveyed the dirt road, dappled in forest sunlight. Not a major thoroughfare. Only locals would use it, and probably rarely.

“Avroz said the aedari is looking for something?” Fi asked.

“Information.” Antal rose. “A scout, searching for the route to the Twilit Plane, interrogating humans. This is why daeyari keep the knowledge closely guarded.”

“All because of some distant war in the Planeverse?”

“Not a war. Not large-scale battle. The daeyari govern our section of the Shattered Planes. The aedari rule theirs. The Contested Planes lay in between.”

Antal recited the answer like a grade school lecture. Maybe it was. Fi had never considered what daeyari history lessons must look like—or what other immortal species and pseudo-wars had been left out of hers.

“The aedari slaughter first-form daeyari wherever they can,” Antal said. “But in the Contested Planes, most of what they encounter are our derived kin. A stalemate. The aedari slowed wholesale culling of the beasts when they realized how we reincarnate.”

“Slowed… but didn’t stop?”