House of Sand and Secrets (Books of Oreyn #2)(36)

It’s Garret, it must be. How much cheaper would it be if instead of having to buy wray from the rookeries, Garret could set up breeding programs like House Ives has done with the unicorns? It would take years to buy the right stock, but once he had enough of them, breeding magic lines to magic lines like Ives does with unicorns. If he could convince the Houses that the vampires could be another replacement for scriv, he’d have cornered a market.

But Garret would need females, and the vampire feyn are powerful and few. My mind rushes from one thought to the next, trying to find a true path.

The door flings open, and Isidro scowls down at us. “Why are you here?”

“Could House Eline ever get hold of a feyn – buy one from the rookeries?” I ask in a breathless rush. “More than one, many – and how much would they have to pay for them?”

Both vampires look at me as if I had just vomited all over their starched shirts. “Is she actually insane, or is she merely trying to insult us?” Isidro says to Jannik.

“But is it possible?” I hope desperately to be wrong, that I can simply abandon this line of thinking. It is too awful and ugly to be possible. “Please – I need to know.”

Isidro stares at me, his eyes narrowed. “You’d best come inside.” His reluctance is palpable. “Stay out of Harun’s way,” he adds to Jannik, who merely nods silently. “In here.”

He seats us in the garden parlour. Sunlight falls through the long curtains that cover the glass doors leading out to the garden steps. I think of the last time I pushed open that doors and walked that dew-wet garden, all its twists and turns that led me only to a small play that I had no right to view.

Isidro is staring at Jannik, who is doing his best to study one knee of his black trousers. It hits me that I am standing here again as nothing more than an observer to their play. Only this time I am a known factor, and they have to pretend to be nothing to each other. It throws me from the desperate fear of my realization to an anger brittle with tears, then back again. I vacillate between the two extremes until I am sure that at any moment I am going to simply kneel on the floor and cover my head while I sob from the sheer overwhelming horribleness of it all. Probably, Isidro would find it amusing, so I stand very still and very solemn.

“I suppose you want wine,” Isidro snaps. He’s talking to me, though his gaze has not shifted. “Don’t expect me to play servants to you like Harun does.”

At the name, Jannik’s head dips. Just the smallest jerk. Good. Let him feel guilty.

“I want nothing.” I make the words come out calm and cool.

Isidro just snorts in humourless irritation. He leans back against a small table, his long fingers tapping against the brass edging. “Tell me what nonsense you’ve come up with this time, Pelim.” Finally, he has managed to tear his gaze away from Jannik, who is still doing his level best to pretend he is not in this house, and look at me directly.

“You’re–” I pause, uncertain. While it is the gossip that Isidro was a Splinterfist whore who somehow trapped the Lord Guyin Apparent, no one has ever actually come out and said this to either of their faces.

“I’m?” Isidro mocks back.

“Acquainted with the rookeries.”

He stops tapping. “Say what you mean to say.”

“If anyone here would know if a House had bought feyn, it would be you.”

“Feyn are not sold,” Isidro hisses at me. He turns to Jannik, “Explain this to her. You seem to speak her particular language of ignorance.”

“I’m not a fool,” I say to Isidro, “I realize what I’m saying, believe me, I’ve met Jannik’s mother, I know you all worship the bloody ground the feyn walk on.”

“With good reason,” Jannik mutters.

“Because she’s powerful. I get it. She’s also a sadistic bitch.”

Jannik swallows a nervous laugh, and jerks his head up. He looks from me to Isidro, half in panic. Then he sighs and drops his head into his hands. “Felicita’s right. And she wouldn’t be asking if she didn’t think it was important.”

“Look,” I say. “I’ve not yet met Glassclaw or Fallingmirror, but I have had the circumstance to meet with the head of the Splinterfist. What I want to know is would you trust any of them to not sell a feyn to a buyer, were the price right?”

“Riam Splinterfist would sell her own children if the price were right, twice if she could see a way to do it, so yes,” Isidro says softly, “I believe she would sell another feyn, if enough coin were offered. Why do you want to know this?”

“Because I believe that as soon as he gets the Mata to change your status, Eline Garret would set up a breeding program using the feyn and as many wray as he could buy. He would mate them like animals. There would be an excess of wray born, and Gris alone knows how long he would let them live before slaughtering them for bones and teeth and whatever else he thinks will be useful.”

I did not realize it was physically possible for vampires to look paler than they already are. Their needling game of abnegation and confrontation is forgotten.

I push on, needing to make certain that they see just how real this could be. “A whole unicorn horn fetches at least one silver, what then would the skull of a bat be worth?” I spit that word at them, reminding them that the rest of this city will not see them as anything more than monsters.