Quill of Thieves

Chapter 48

It had been her.

She had brought down that tunnel.

Not the psychotic, pigeon-toed spawn of Davina (to be fair, Abel couldn't be sure if Astrid did, indeed, have pigeon-toes, but it seemed an appropriate assumption based on her pointed nose); nor had it been the realm's socially inept saviour-to-be, Sebastian. No. It had been her.

A mere halfling, if Matthias's stories of magical Elven babies could be believed.

And she had done it nearly twice!

Abel stared down at her hands and flexed them into themselves. She could still feel the tingling sensation of the threads against her fingertips, how the dampened scent of fresh soil had overwhelmed her singing veins. How her awakened inbred nature had demanded that she get out of that confined space.

Escape.

Crush a hole through the tunnel's suffocating ceiling and straight into the open sky.

She sniffed the air now. The only whisper of Earth's threads she detected came from the three logs crackling away in Master Lambert's hearth. Either that, or she simply smelled the same wood-burning scent as everyone else.

It was hard to tell.

A spark popped. Abel jumped, blinking back into the present in time to hear Astrid say, "So, I hear you are trying to murder me, Master Lambert."

Astrid reached into her cloak, procured a book in the same gesture Abel had always seen Sebastian present his hidden novels, and slapped it onto the atrociously large desk. "I'm sorry to inform you that I have yet to die despite your kill-switch."

You could have, Abel thought, clenching her fingers, I could have smothered you with that tunnel.

Despite Astrid's less than conventional greeting, the librarian's expression hardly seemed shocked. Instead, he appraised the motley group spread out before his desk from behind his spectacles. On the contrary, he looked rather bemused. He peered at them over his fingers with a small, curious grin before frowning at the crinkled carpet Sebastian had tripped over upon their entrance.

Sebastian stretched his leg behind him to try to smooth it down.

It must have appeased Lambert who grinned once more and said, "Well, please do come in."

"Erm—sorry, but...kill-switch?" Sebastian's arm brushed against Abel's own as he stepped between her and Astrid. "What do you mean?"

Lambert ruffled some papers into a jumbled pile and slipped them into a drawer of his desk. Many others still littered his working space. He pushed his spectacles further up the bridge of his ink-spattered nose. "Yes, well, I'm afraid I cannot claim all the credit for that particular ingenuity of those dragons."

"Care to name-drop, then?" Astrid pushed. "Or I shall assume my statuesque captain is an utterly foul liar."

Lambert clapped his hands together. "Why, it was Queen Branwyn, of course."

The name rang a vague bell in Abel's memories, one of Imogene's molasses-smooth voice speaking the stories of Galandreal. Of Elves. Abel's spine straightened like an arrow on its target, but it was Matthias whose words lunged.

"Sinner!" It hissed like some ancient curse. "Deceit, greed, and death bred from a mortal heart."

Lambert met Matthias's anger with calm. "Hurl the prophecy at me all you want, Soiree. It is still the truth."

"It is a lie!"

Abel felt Matthias shake. His round shoulders vibrated, a furious heat radiating up his left arm from where he had his fist clenched into the inner pocket of his cloak. Soil. Abel's nostrils tingled. A single thread of Earth drifted outwards from whatever was in Matthias's pocket. Strange. She found her fingers swayed towards his wrist.