Burn Bright

He glanced where the earth lay on the bedding. “The fae?” he said, as if Charles had asked a question. “Him I am less saddened by. I never met him either, but I have seen too much of what their kind have wrought in carelessness. He was certainly not Muslim, so the Salatul Janazah was not for him.”

“And yet,” said Charles, whose silent prayer had been for both the dead, “Hester loved him.”

Asil shrugged. “It is impossible to account for the taste of women.” But his eyes were sober.

The first thing they looked at was the sword. It was obviously old and well used and of fae making—the blade was something other than steel. Charles had felt nothing from it when he picked it up earlier. He picked it up again, paying attention—and still felt nothing.

“It is magic,” Charles told Asil. “But I can’t sense it.”

He handed it to Asil, who raised his eyebrows. He took it in a two-handed grip and brought it up and around in a quick practice swing.

“Remarkable,” Asil said, dropping his left hand away and making a second, more complex swing with just one hand. “A great weapon,” he pronounced, when he had finished. “I am sure it has killed almost as many as I have.” He didn’t say “I, too, am a great weapon,” though Charles had no trouble hearing it.

Asil looked at the blade closely then, let it drop to a less ready position. “It doesn’t feel magical to me in any way,” he said. “But it most certainly is.”

“How do you know?”

“How did you?” Asil countered.

“The blade isn’t steel. It is some sort of silver alloy.” Charles knew silver. “Or an alloy with silver in it—a metallurgist would tell you the silver content was not high. The fae like to use silver in their magical weapons. It holds the power better than other metals.”

“A metallurgist would have to despoil this blade to tell anything,” Asil said distastefully. “But that is an interesting answer. I expected that you might have made that assumption because Jonesy used it to kill himself. Such a one would never die by an ordinary blade. But there is a more sure way to know that this blade is A Blade.”

Charles could hear the capitals in Asil’s voice.

Asil turned the blade to the light and moved it until Charles could see three runes set into the blade, all three of them together no larger than a thumbprint.

“This is the mark of the Dark Smith of Drontheim,” said Asil, indicating the runes without touching the blade. “That one did not bother with magicless blades.”

Charles looked around the room and sighed. “We’re going to have to come back after we burn this place and look for anything that emerges unscathed.” Maybe his da would be back by then.

“Probably,” Asil agreed. “But do not despair, this is difficult magic, even for the fae. I do not believe that there are a dozen such objects of power here.”

An hour later, Asil was not so sanguine.

“At least we know it isn’t the Gray Lords we’re facing,” Charles said, holding a broken, decorative hair clip he’d found in Hester’s dresser drawer.

“How so?” Asil was emptying out a blanket chest so they could use it to store what they were finding.

“If the fae had any idea of what a hoarder Jonesy was, they wouldn’t have bothered with cameras. They’d have broken down the walls and taken everything as soon as they knew it was here.”

There were amulets, cups, gems, knives, a spear, four arrows from three different regions, three rugs—two simple rag rugs and a small Persian rug. There was a bone bowl and a handful of coin-like items.

Most of the items held fae magic, or fae-like magic. But the bone bowl was witchcrafted and stank of blood magic as soon as Charles touched it. There was an arrowhead that looked neolithic to Charles—and something slept within it. Brother Wolf warned him not to wake it up, whatever it was, because it smelled bad.

There were powerful items, but most of them, as far as Charles could tell, were just junk that happened to contain a spark of something. A bronze knife burned clear and bright with magic, like an artesian well. There was a blue-and-purple pottery jar that made him want to wash his hands after he touched it.

A lot of the magically charged things they found were broken pieces of larger items. Sometimes Charles could tell what it was part of—like the bowl of a clay pipe or the tongue of a buckle. Jonesy, he thought, was not very picky about what he collected. “Hoarded” was probably the right word for it.

The search took Asil and Charles too long to keep what they were doing a secret. If there was any doubt, it was dispelled when Leah opened the door, and said, “Everyone knows what you are doing in there—I didn’t tell them, Tag did. Is there any way you can hurry this up?”

Charles hadn’t told Tag what they were doing, but he couldn’t remember where Tag had been when he approached Asil. Tag, for all of his orange hair and size, could avoid being noticed if he wanted to.

“No,” Asil said shortly. “We will be done when we are finished.”

Asil liked Leah considerably less than he liked Charles—and he only tolerated Charles for Anna’s sake.

On their third search of the basement, Charles noticed an oddity in the soil on the bed—a straight line where there shouldn’t be one. With a grimace, he freed a folded piece of paper from Jonesy’s remains—a page ripped from a book.

“What do you have?” Asil asked from the other side of the bed.

“A page from The Simarillion,” Charles said, opening it. Across the typeset letters of Christopher Tolkien’s foreword, someone had written in a jerky hand without punctuation:

Hester Hester says they were asking about the wildlings there is a traitor and it is one of us Hester Hester

Hester’s name, repeated on either end of the message, was in written in noticeably smoother strokes of the pen than the rest of it.

Of course there was a traitor, Charles thought. How would anyone know about Hester’s isolated cabin if there wasn’t a traitor?

“Well,” said Asil, who had approached so he could read over Charles’s shoulder. “He could have been more helpful. Is the traitor one of the wildlings? One of the fae? One of the pack? At least we know they were looking for one of the wildlings.” He paused. “Or all of the wildlings.”

A hunt, said Brother Wolf with grim satisfaction. Hester has given us a hunt.

• • •

IN THE END, most of their finds fit in the blanket chest. The sword they wrapped in one of the discarded blankets. There was no disguising what it was, really, but at least no one would have details. Magical swords tended to have histories and be identifiable to someone with enough motivation. This way, all an observer would see would be him and Asil with random stuff—no details to attract someone (or something) out there looking for the silver shoe buckle of Asmodeus or some such nonsense.

Charles refolded the paper and stuck it in the back pocket of his jeans. They had agreed that it would be best not to talk to anyone except Anna about that note. If there was a traitor, the less said to anyone about it the better.

Charles was reasonably certain that Asil was incapable of betraying his da. It helped that Asil had vowed his loyalty to the Marrok and Bran (as if they were two different people) as soon as he had read the note through.

Asil closed the lid of the blanket chest and turned the latch so it wouldn’t fall open when they carried it out. “You know we did not find everything.”

“I do,” agreed Charles. “I also believe we have found everything we are going to.”

Asil smiled. “I do not miss being Alpha,” he said. “Especially at times like these I do not mind that you are more dominant in this pack than I. It means that I am not responsible for that which we have found—and more importantly, that which we have not found.”

Brother Wolf did not find Asil funny.

“Good for you,” Charles said.

Asil’s smile broadened, though he did not show his teeth. “Jonesy was a hoarder of the sort who make appearances on TV Reality Shows. Who knows how long he had been collecting? You and I will be out here as soon as the fire burns itself out—assuming Bran isn’t back, and probably even if he is. And we will still not find everything. And there is this, too. Jonesy, whoever he was when the world was young, could make the earth listen to his desires. If I had this ability, I would hide the prizes of my collection deep in the earth. You need to be very careful, or what you’ll have is a bunch of treasure-hunting fae invading the mountain, digging for treasure.”