Page 39 of Of Bargains & Betrayal

Goddess, take me. My journal.

Its leather cover was in rougher shape than I remembered, and it smelled a little of ash, but a cursory glance left me relieved its pages were still intact.

But that begged the question—where the hell had it come from? It hadn’t been on the vanity before I’d gone into the bath, or in the hours I’d spent sitting there before.

I had heard no one enter or leave while I was bathing, though there was a chance I was too preoccupied to notice. Still, I didn’t love the idea of some strange dark fae handling arguably one of my most personal objects, and I was quick to flip through it.

Nothing obvious was missing, but a folded piece of paper was wedged in like a bookmark I didn’t remember placing. It marked the page with the last date I’d crossed out—four days after we left the fortress.

The day we made camp on the edge of the Wastes.

That made no sense.

And no matter how many times I flipped back to that page, I couldn’t parse what was staring back at me, or the marker clearly placed there with purpose.

There was no fucking way that was the last time I’d opened it and crossed out the date like I did every damned day of my entire adult life.

Our camp was found on Grimmoria’s border, weeks of travel away from Odessa, not days.

What in the hell could have led me to disregard one of my most ingrained habits for that long? Misplacing it could have been one simple explanation, but that clearly wasn’t the case if it had made its way to Grimmoria with me.

I closed the journal and scrubbed my hands over my face—I could start worrying about what day it was when I hadn’t decided if I was going to die first or not.

Even after raiding every cupboard and drawer I could find to try to fight off my creeping sense of dread and equally frustrating boredom, I came up empty-handed.

Dried-out cosmetics, sparse accessories far too delicate and feminine for me, and a couple of pieces of clothing in an armoire—that was it.

Unfortunately, the clothes were tailored with a bigger bust and smaller hips in mind, so I changed back into the outfit Maksym had brought me to wait out my fate.

The rattling knock on my door startled me at first, but I was relieved my dinner escort had finally arrived. When I hauled open the door, Eilir was hovering at my eye level, their beady black eyes glinting as they beamed a grin full of blade-sharp teeth.

“Good evening, Princess Enora,” they said in their soft, squeaky voice before extending their branch-like fingers to me. “I’m here to take you to dinner.”

It took a moment to realize I was smiling, though it dropped when a realization crept into the back of my mind.

“Thank you. I…” I set my hand in theirs and let them lead me into the hall. “Was it you who left my journal on the vanity?”

Eilir grinned.

“It was. I thought you might feel more at home if you had it. But don’t tell Max I borrowed paper from his study to make a marker for you. He and the mage are terrible at keeping track of their days; they could learn something from you!”

A lump built in my throat that I fought down. “That’s very kind of you. And that was…this week you left the marker on?”

They nodded eagerly. “I almost crossed out the dates just like you do, but that seemed like it might be rude of me.”

Thank the goddess I’d gulped down another slimy cure-all tonic before I left, because my stomach had half-knotted itself even with it. While I might not have trusted the same information coming from Maksym or any of his cabal, the sprite struck me as painfully honest.

And that made me desperate to change the topic to something less damning.

“Well, thank you for that.” My voice was shakier than I’d hoped, but Eilir was still beaming. “Are you going to join us for dinner?”

“Oh, no,” they chuckled. “We don’t need to eat like you walkers do, and Maksym doesn’t like it very much when I talk his ear off at mealtime.”

Walkers.

My poor mind. I was being accosted by something new every few hours in Grimmoria. At least this bit of information was a welcome distraction, and an easy one for me to hold on to.

“Is there anything the king does like?” I scoffed, because it certainly didn’t seem like there was much that pleased him.