Rurik frowned. “So they wish to renew their war?”
“They wish to find their queen,” Elin corrected, biting her lip. “From what I can make of this, King Rodan was shot with an arrow. The peace was shattered, the elvish queen was never surrendered, and the King of Álfheimr was forced to retreat through the portal. The dreki then used the Key of Chaos to lock the gates… with the elvish queen on this side of them.”
“So they’re looking for their queen?” Marduk asked. “If this Tyndyr has been trapped on this side of the portal for all these years, then why has he not found her?”
Elin shrugged. “I know nothing of the elvish queen beyond these few sentences. I’ve never heard her mentioned before.”
Queen Freyja frowned. “My mother spoke of some of the circles that litter the countryside. She used to say it was never safe to enter them, for sometimes, when the world’s aligned, one could step through and find themselves in Álfheimr. On Winter’s Solstice, she said if you listened closely you could hear the elvish queen crying out, for she was trapped within one of the circles, forever searching for a way to return home.”
Elin glanced at her a little disdainfully. “You could spend a thousand years waiting for the worlds to align in the correct formation. That sounds like human superstition to me, Your Highness.”
Freyja tilted her eyebrow at the young drekling. It wasn’t the first time she’d been forced to face dreki prejudice about her human heritage. “Where do you think human superstitions come from? They are stories, Elin, passed down through generation after generation. Perhaps there is some truth in it, no? For Marduk said that World’s End is one such circle, bound by thirteen enormous lintel stones. And it leads to Álfheimr.”
“We will look into it,” Rurik promised her, squeezing her hand.
Freyja pressed her lips thinly together.
“Without Ishtar, there’s only one other way to achieve their goal,” Solveig said, leaning forward a little hungrily as she locked eyes with Rurik. “They’ll need the Key of Chaos.”
The king slowly drummed his fingers on the table. “Nobody has seen it for over a thousand years.”
Marduk winced.
This was punishment. Surely it was punishment.
“We have to send warning to the other courts beyond our allies. They’ll need to be made aware,” Sirius said. “Because if the alfar discover where the key is, then they won’t need Ishtar.”
“It doesn’t matter who we warn,” Árdís said. “Nobody’s going to admit they have it.”
Closing his eyes, Marduk released a sigh. “I know where it is.”
“You do?” Elin blurted.
“What? Where?” Árdís demanded.
He could sense all eyes upon him, and slowly opened his. But the one gaze he was trying not to meet was locked upon him.
“You said you’d told me everything,” Solveig growled. “You lied.”
“I never lied,” he pointed out. “‘Everything’ is a vast statement.”
Fury flushed color beneath her olive skin. Dreki dared not speak a direct lie for fear their magic might suffuse their words—though it was rare, it had happened in the past with dire consequences—and half-truths and careful silences had become etiquette.
But he was already standing on thin ice when it came to her.
“It’s a rumor I heard in my travels,” he told her. “There is an Ethiopian dreki tribe who were said to be in possession of a powerful relic. Nobody knows what it is, but they are said to collect Chaos relics. And… there are whispers they once brought a dreki back from the dead.”
As the key was rumored to be able to do.
Thought raced in Rurik’s eyes. “Then we need to send emissaries to warn them.”
“An excellent suggestion, brother mine…, but the relic is no longer in Ethiopia.” He was stalling, and he knew it. “I’ve heard it was given as dowry to another court when the eldest daughter of the Ethiopian dreki clan chief was formally mated.”
“To whom?”
“This is the bit you’re not going to like. Which European court has an obsession with Chaos magic and the most practitioners in the northern hemisphere?”
“The Zilittu,” Árdís whispered. “Mother’s clan.”
“To take and to hold,” he echoed the Zilittu clan motto as he spread his hands. “There was a strange illness within the Ethiopian clan. The Zilittu, it seems, were the only ones with the cure. So they bartered the cure in exchange for the hand of Andromeda—and her dowry. There’s a very quiet murmur that the illness in her tribe was some sort of poison, and that the Zilittu got what they wanted all along.”
“I’ve heard nothing of this,” Solveig argued, “and I have eyes on every continent of the world.”
Marduk shrugged. “I daresay you haven’t. It’s not the thing one speaks of unless you’ve been smoking kif in Chefchaouen with a certain dreki smuggler you’ve spent years cultivating trust in.”
She stared at him.
“What?”
“You keep company with such… friends?”
“I’ve been in exile for ten years. Do you know how many courts sneered down their nose at me? And how many dreki I met in back alleys and taverns who would have promised me their arm—despite their so-called reputations?”
Rurik closed his eyes as if he could taste something vile. “We need to warn the Zilittu.”
“The Zilittu who aren’t supposed to have such an item in their possession and are probably quite intent on maintaining the secrecy of its existence?” Marduk drawled, reaching for a grape from the platter on the table. “The Zilittu who birthed Mother and our evil uncle Stellan into the world? The Zilittu who hide within their cloaking mists and pretend—when a traveler goes missing within their lands—that they’ve never seen or heard of them? An excellent idea, brother. I do not volunteer.”
But he could see a plan was already forming in Rurik’s head. “The Zilittu are our cousins by our mother’s line. We have long held a… truce with them. And with Árdís and Ishtar wielding Chaos—with no means to learn how to control their powers—we have cause to send an emissary.”
“They’re still not going to give you their most important relic.”
“I wasn’t planning on asking for it,” Rurik said.
Goddess’s Mercy. “You want to steal it?”
Staid, upright Rurik?
“If there is one thing I have learned over the years, it is this: the Zilittu give nothing away freely. With the key, we can close the portal for good. And I prefer to think of it in terms of borrowing it.”
“You’re talking about war,” he pointed out.
“If it comes to it, yes. But I would rather fight the Zilittu than an entire army of elves.”
Árdís paled. “You’re sending me and Ishtar to the Zilittu court to steal the key?”
The king smiled. “A formal diplomatic party that comprises of the two of you”—his eyes came to rest, unerringly, on Marduk— “and my beloved brother. We haven’t congratulated the new Zilittu king on his mating lines yet, either.”