Wystwood

42. A game of teeth

"You agreed to my terms of the pact," snarled Raeph, his hand now heating his knife's hilt.

"You know the way of dealings, young Wolf," replied the bird-seer. "The asker pays the price."

Raeph's boots turned up soil as he prowled past the cauldron and towards Ada. Though, even as the sisters remained hunched around the swirling steam, he kept his distance. 

"I am the one who asks," he said.

"But not the one who gains. I hear the lies that lace your words," said the fox-seer. "The question is the girl's."

"The girl's, the girl's," giggled the snake-seer. "Come at last."

"And how far she has come." The bird-seer had yet to turn her head from Ada, beaded eyes suspended with their lifeless sight. "Not of our world, but taken from your own. You came from above, climbed up and up towards the sky, only to come plummeting down." Her voice grew louder, deeper and harsher, until spittle flew from her lips and sent her ancient body quaking. "The rise and fall, drenched wet to bone dry. I see it, I see the agony. The sun and the moon, the young and the old, the question and answer. You're no fae, traveller. So speak. Ask. Let us hear you, let me see you."

Even Raeph stilled as the seer's screeching faltered out. She braced herself on the stone cauldron, the wheezes expelled from her shrunken lungs shifting its steam. Raeph's face had paled, the hollows of his cheeks almost skeletal in the waning light. There was no contempt in his gaze now, but only a broken horror.

Ada straightened. She breathed in the stale air and felt thorns of fear stab across her body. The bird-seer's words echoed around her head, as if they had always been there, and always would remain. Her cloak's hood swelled around her neck, and fallen strands of hair were the only shrouds to brush her skin. She bared her face to the seers, and still, they didn't flinch as other fae had. They simply waited for her answer.

"No," Ada replied. "I'm not fae. I'm human."

"Human," breathed the snake-seer, and a collective shiver swept through the sisters.

"It's been many a moon since a human came to ask us their questions," mused the fox-seer. "Your kind used to be brimming with curiosity. So much so that it would spurt out from you with the lightest of pressure. Out from your mouths, and ears, and hearts. You never knew where to stop. You thought magic could solve all of your problems." A sickly smile twisted her lips back, and Ada could see her rotted gums. "What is your sated soul worth, I wonder?"

Ada felt the fox-seer circle around her, not within the cavern, but in some misty place inhabited only by the mind and the senses. The old fae woman was lithe in a way that her body was not, sharp and quick with each dart of her eyes and flick of her tongue. Questions and answers. The circles and sneering and smiles. It was a game of predator and prey, one with stakes set by knowledge and lost with a single misstep.

Ada held her ground, casting her eyes away from Raeph as he slipped his ebony dagger from its sheath. 

"I know little of magic," she said, "but I know that questions keep the worlds turning. They keep us striving, and dreaming."

"Questions will burn holes through your mind," the fox-seer snapped back.

"Then answers will surely patch them back up again."

"And the question you ask? Will that mend your broken world?"

"I must believe that it will," replied Ada, and could sense the predator closing in. But she also knew what lay at peril if her question was not answered, her mind conjuring up portraits of her family in their faraway home, of Min in her caravan, and the bandits in the back streets. For them, she would pay the price.