Fire Touched (Mercy Thompson, #9)(94)

Aiden lit some beeswax candles. Maybe if I’d been human, it would still have been too dim, but I see pretty well in the dark.

The room was big enough, maybe fifteen feet square. Rough shelves lined three of the walls and held a collection of treasures—literally in some cases. A bird’s feather was displayed next to an elaborate silver crown studded with cabochon gems set in silver flowers and vines. In a world where you were mostly alone, the feather was as valuable as the crown. There were books, too, but not very many—none that I could have read.

On the fourth wall there were a pair of wardrobes. The first was itself a work of art. Every bit of the wardrobe was elaborately carved in abstract designs. The second, like the walls of the tree house, was cobbled together out of bits and pieces of other things.

“I’ve never had anyone in here,” Aiden told me. “I built this after most of the others were already dead.”

“It’s charming,” I told him, seriously.

“Aboveground gives you a lot of protection,” he told me. “The first one I built here had windows—that was a mistake.”

He opened the elaborate wardrobe and pulled out some thick rag rugs and threw them at random on the floor. “I sleep . . . slept on piles of these,” he said. “We can use the bedrolls, but the rugs will soften the floor.”

“Sounds good to me,” I told him. In lieu of speech, Adam stretched out on one of the rugs and rested his muzzle on his front legs. “Adam approves, too.”

“I might as well get the artifact,” he said, and opened the second wardrobe. As soon as the doors separated, I could feel a wave of power.

The wardrobe was split into two halves. The right half had shelves filled with bright-colored fabric bags of all sorts of sizes and colors, with small boxes of bone, wood, or lacquer, and larger, jewelry-box-sized boxes. The bottom shelf was full of folded cloth. The left side held staves and swords and pole arms of all kinds.

“Are these all artifacts?” I asked.

He nodded. “I keep them in this wardrobe because it doesn’t let the power leak. Around here, power attracts attention.”

“When the fae come back,” I said slowly, “could someone find your house and your treasures?”

He shook his head. “Once a place belongs to you, it belongs to you. No one will ever be able to find this place unless I’m with them. No one can come inside unless I invite them in. It’s how Underhill was set up—and even she can’t change the rules. That’s why, even though she’s mad at me, she couldn’t actually make us wander for long before I found my home. If I die, Underhill will reclaim what is here. She has her own treasure rooms—I’ve seen them. Some of this stuff comes from there.”

I looked at the contents of the wardrobe. “Don’t ever tell anyone this is here,” I told him. “The fae would never have let you go if they knew what you have.”

He nodded, reached in to the shelves, and brought out a small box and opened it. The box he put back on the shelf. In his hand was a crude bronze key. He gave it to me, then closed the doors of the wardrobe.

The key was warm in my hands.

“What does it do?” I asked.

“Pressed against a door, it makes any door a gateway to Underhill,” he said. “If you keep in mind where in Underhill you want to appear, that doorway will take you there.”

“How do you know that?” I asked.

“Underhill isn’t opposed to sharing knowledge,” he told me. “Not if she’s in a good mood.”

He looked unhappily at the key in my hand, and thinking he was worried I wanted it, I handed it back to him. But, though he closed his hands on it and stuffed it in a pocket of his jeans, the scent of his unhappiness didn’t change.

“It’s a good pick,” I told him. “Not a weapon, but valuable all the same.”

“She never abandoned me,” he told me. “She gets very lonely.” He looked up at me. “Am I doing the right thing?”

“You aren’t doing anything wrong,” I told him. “There might be other right things you could do, but that’s not the same as doing something wrong. She isn’t alone anymore.”

He snorted. “The fae. They don’t appreciate her—they use her like a slave, with no more thought to her than they give their shoes—less.”

And that didn’t sound like someone repeating a rant they’d heard once too often, I thought.

“We’ll tell Beauclaire that’s how she feels about the fae. Maybe they can do something about it,” I told him. “If you want to stay here, that’s something different. But thinking that you are the only one who can possibly keep her company—that’s a trap.”

—

We ate lunch from our packs and drank from our canteens.

“Is there a reason that we need to sleep here instead of heading out?” I asked, gathering our garbage and, after putting it into a plastic bag, stuffing it into the pack.

“It might take us a while to find a door to leave,” he said. “I can hurry it along a bit—that’s the real trick. Underhill can’t seal the doors from the inside, but she can make it hard to find them. That’s why she locked the fae out, and not in.” He got to his feet and paced a bit. “Night’s dangerous, more dangerous, here. It’s safer if we leave at first light in the morning.”