The Valley of Lies (Lightkeepers #1)

Chapter TWENTY-THREE: Liss

"Who is Dev?"

Liss and Zan sat opposite each other at a small table on the back porch of the Squallside Inn, away from the crowded dining room, hunched over their steaming bowls of stew. It was a warm day, and Liss' grays were still damp beneath her cloak. A hot meal was probably not the best idea, but Zan had been gracious enough to pay her fare, a human tradition she was unfamiliar with, so she wouldn't complain about his recommendation. The clan bartered and traded certain goods, but she had never paid for food. The thought of having to do so every day, for each meal, was depressing. She was once again glad Zan had found her, otherwise she might have starved to death trying to live off berries and onion grass. She was no hunter, she'd never even caught a fish, a fact she was regretting.

When she didn't immediately answer, he went on. "When you opened the door, you called me Dev. I thought you were speaking a different language at first. But it was a name, wasn't it?"

Liss studied the hearty chunks of vegetables in her bowl. "The friend I went to the mountain with," she said, stirring her broth. "He didn't come with me, but I thought maybe he'd changed his mind and followed."

"Oh. This is his cloak, isn't it?"

She nodded. "He gave it to me before I left."

"That was fortuitous. I used it to keep the rain off your face when I carried you here." Zan cleared his throat, his shadowed hood dropping lower. "I'm sorry you were disappointed."

"You carried me here?"

Although he wasn't small, Zan had a narrow, wiry build and claimed he'd brought her quite a distance through a raging thunderstorm. It must have been an enormous effort, but he didn't seem tired.

"Mmm. You are rather skinny, and I'm stronger than I look."

He resumed blowing on his stew between small, frequent sips of broth. Liss wasn't easily offended, but the color rising to his cheeks made her question whether she shouldn't have reprimanded him out of principle.

A prolonged awkward silence elapsed before he spoke again. "So, aren't you curious about my quest?"

Liss had read hundreds of stories from Before–of her clan and other real and fictional elf clans; of human knights and the terrible dragons they slew. But she had never heard a tale like the one Zan told her, which began as a melancholy introduction detailing his early life with a dragon elf clan called the Yansu, and ended with him sitting at the table beside her, claiming that destiny had brought them together to free his sister from the Blackwater witches–humans with dark occultist magic. The same witches he claimed had cursed her clan and banished them to Cradelow Valley; which was a completely different story than she'd been fed her entire life.

"Why would the... Blackwater witches curse my people?"

Did the Council know? She would have asked this too, if she'd thought Zan might have the answer.

He bit his lip, glancing away into the forest. "The same reason any human might. They hate elves. Especially clans with a history of enslaving them."

A history of enslavement? This was news to Liss, but so was everything else. In the old stories humans were rarely mentioned, and witches even less so, but she'd never considered why. Everything she'd thought she'd known about her clan's history was proving a lie. But were they lies Elder Fex and the Council were perpetuating or had the witches tricked the Darkbane into believing their goddess was responsible for the atrocities they'd committed?

Liss wasn't sure if her head ached more from last night's ordeal or trying to make sense of Zan's outrageous story. It would be easy to give in to her doubts and wallow in despair. If it was the witches and not their goddess who'd cursed the Darkbane, then Dev and Mell and the rest of the clan deserved to know. This wasn't information Liss could keep to herself for long.