Chapter 99

I woke the following morning feeling a little tired from sneaking out the night before. Nazim peeked into my room to see me climbing out of bed and huffed before disappearing downstairs to wait for me. I shared a quick bite to eat with everyone — Mum shooting me concerned glances as usual, before Gramps, Nazim, and I headed out back. Eating up the distance to the tree line, Gramps tried to engage me in conversation.

“Are you excited to meet your grandaunt?”

“Are you?” I countered, trying not to frown. “Mum doesn’t seem to think highly of her. Even you said she is basically just going to use me to get what she wants. She doesn’t sound like a nice person.”

Gramps didn’t answer me immediately, though the way his eyes moved told me he was thinking about it. I didn’t interrupt, letting him take his time to find the right words. Dry detritus crunched beneath our feet as we trekked up towards our permanent campfire and the spot in the stream where I swam each day.

“It’s not that my sister isn’t a nice person,” Gramps said, finally interrupting the quiet serenity of the forest. “She just views the world a little differently from your Mum and I.”

“How so?”

Nazim led the way as we continued to scramble over rocks, the wolfkin clearly listening in. As well he should, since if my grandaunt ended up accepting — a voice whispering in my mind she wouldn’t — then he would be affected as well.

“Agnes would help family if it didn’t cost her too much,” Gramps said. “I think that is the best way to describe it. The world is a ledger to her, and while small losses are acceptable, large ones are not. When I was exiled, the cost to help me was far too great compared with simply standing to the side and doing nothing.”

“So, Mum is angry she didn’t help you?” I asked.

“Partially, but also because Agnes offered to take your Mum in rather than have her go into exile with me.”

“That doesn’t seem so bad,” I pointed out.

“True…” Gramps hedged before sighing. “But it came with strings attached. I am sure you’ve noticed how some people tend to take an unhealthy interest in your Mum?”

That had been hard to miss over the years. Most seemed to give up with a slight rebuff or, in the worst cases, a stern warning from Gramps. Magatha had pushed that line beyond propriety, and Marcus had taken a piss on that limit before his death. Thinking about it, his bones were probably buried somewhere out here. I was getting distracted though, so I looked at Gramps and nodded my understanding.

“Yes, well, your mother was born with an Advanced Attribute that isn’t normally seen in humans—”

“What’s it called?” I asked, my curiosity immediately piqued.

Gramps frowned, but after a moment of silence, relented.

“You are not to share this with anyone,” he stated.

“What about Nazim?”

The wolfkin huffed in amusement from where he trudged up in front of us.

“Nazim is family now,” Gramps pointed out. I noticed how the wolfkin’s steps hitched for a moment before resuming his normal gait.

“He is,” I agreed, for once a positive emotion filling the hole inside of me instead of the anger that normally roiled within. “So, what’s it called?”

“Compelling Allure,” Gramps stated quietly as though the forest might have ears.

Nazim froze, spinning on his heel, yellow eyes wide. “You’re joking.”

Gramps shook his head. “She was conceived on the third floor of the Echoing Depths. My wife and I suspected that it influenced Penny’s birth.”

For once, I didn’t need the answer spelled out for me. My tome — the one I read religiously like it was a holy text — had details about the third floor of the Echoing Depths and the monsters one might encounter there. One of the most feared was the Water Nymphs, creatures of unnatural beauty that could lure adventurers to their deaths with song. Mum’s affinity was Water too — just like the Nymphs.

“I just thought she had invested in Charm when she was younger and came to regret it,” Nazim admitted. “Compelling Allure though…can she?”

Gramps sighed. “She can. Like the attribute, she was born with the Skill. She doesn’t use it though and we have long since found that it cannot be removed. It is a part of her, not something she gained from a Path.”

The Skill they were talking about was also mentioned in my tome — Luring Melody. I did wonder how they got the name of the Skill to add to the knowledge in the tome. But all of a sudden, Mum seemed both dangerous and pitiable. She couldn’t control how her Attribute impacted others, and even if she didn’t use her Skill, some people were just going to end up drawn to her until they were snapped out of it.

“Why doesn’t it always work when you try and deter people who get affected?” I asked.

“It usually does,” Gramps pointed out. “Unlike the Water Nymphs, your mother has never invested in her attribute directly, and she has learned to avoid Paths that might give rewards towards it. It’s weak enough that most people with any sort of will or sense of self can ignore it quickly enough or not be affected at all.”

Going over in my mind the people who had shown an interest, I had to admit that most of them did seem like they were a little more weak-willed. Even Magatha had shown her greed on multiple occasions in a way that made me think the Hedge Witch had some serious impulse control issues. I tried very hard not to see the same in myself and came back disappointed. The self-reflection just drove the anger at myself and lacking capability deeper, and I looked away from Gramps, unable to meet his eyes. He didn’t seem to notice.

Instead, I tried to distract myself from my bout of self-hate by bringing the topic back to what we were originally discussing. “Grandaunt Agnes knows about Mum?”

“She does,” Gramps admitted unhappily. I finally put the two things together and frowned.

“Did Grandaunt Agnes want Mum to work for her?”

The old codger sighed. “Yes, she thought that using Penny as a presenter at the auction house would improve sales. Most wouldn’t be affected, but the few that would, might bid far more than necessary to impress your mother without even realising they were doing it.”

“And you said no, right?” I demanded more forcefully than I intended, eyes lighting up as the anger in my belly found a suitable target in Grandaunt Agnes and her schemes.

Gramps looked away from me so I couldn’t see his facial expression. “I did, though it may have been selfish of me — I wasn’t ready to not see my daughter for ten years.”

His words reminded me of the conversation I had eavesdropped on all those years ago. Thinking about it made me realise Grandaunt Agnes might ask the same again, using me as leverage this time. The thought just reaffirmed my plan to make myself so invaluable to my grandaunt’s schemes that she couldn’t use me against my mum.

Those sullen thoughts followed me for the rest of the day as we worked through my usual training. When night came, I prepared for my next foray into the shadows. I didn’t like the idea of stealing from Baron Joss. He had been a fair and relatively kind noble from my admittedly limited experience. However, I didn’t think there was anyone else in Hornpeak that might have spidersilk from the Echoing Depths, besides Mum’s dress — which I refused to use. I already felt bad enough about lying to her and Gramps without adding the destruction of the gift I had given her on top of it.

Clambering silently out the kitchen window, I considered my plans. I would spend tonight gathering information — using the arc and direction of the moon to determine the best place to enter the keep while sticking to the shadows. I’d also try to figure out the rotation of the guards and how they moved about the walls, along with anything else I could determine. Tomorrow night I would sneak in and hope I could find the items I needed for Magatha’s ritual. Success wasn’t guaranteed, and that was more than enough to turn my stomach. Fear of failure, of rejection by Agnes, of demands placed on my Mum, all filled my mind.

I tried to push them away and instead saw the scene again from a year ago. Lucille calling for me to help — and how I was too slow, the axe burying itself in her chest before my own axe could reach the soldier.

Failure, I thought as I crept around the corner of the outpost and fell squarely on my ass as I ran into something that shouldn’t be there.

“Where are we sneaking off to?” Nazim asked casually from where he waited before sniffing the air. “I can’t smell you at all… when did that happen?”

Some part of me — the piece filled with anger — debated trying to run, even though I knew it would be futile.

“What gave me away?” I asked quietly, not getting up from where I sat on the dusty ground.

“You were clearly tired and distracted all day,” Nazim explained as he knelt to be closer to eye-level with me. In the darkness, the yellow of his eyes almost glowed. “It was a change, but not the one I had been hoping for. You have been angry since your friend left. Depressed too, but mostly angry. I had hoped the training would quench your fire and that, as the pain faded, you would find yourself once more. I admit I did not know how to help, and for that, I am sorry. I might have thought that perhaps your being sleepy was a sign of the depression getting worse, but you put down your shield when you went for a swim. It still smelled of you, but only a little, like your sweat and body odour had been removed. That was when I wondered if you were sneaking out, so here we are. Now, we will talk, because I think keeping everything inside has not been helping.”

I turned away, looking off into the darkness sullenly. My childish urge was to clam up, push all the emotions down — but what had that gotten me? I was lying to Gramps and Mum again — which I hated, even if I hadn’t been able to stop myself. Now I was considering stealing from a man I liked to make a deal with a Hedge Witch I neither liked nor trusted, all to impress a woman I didn’t know and had questionable feelings towards already. That wasn’t even including the risks I was personally taking — risks that were barely calculated and with rewards I wasn’t certain of getting.

The weight of it all finally broke through the barrier of negative emotions I had been wrapping myself in. At first the words were slow, mumbled under my breath and filled with shame mixed with self-hate. Once I had started, I couldn’t stop. I told Nazim about how I felt like a failure, how my inability to act fast enough — well enough — had cost Lucille her life and my best friend her grandmother. The same woman who had treated me like a beloved nephew and had watched over me at times since I could walk. How, in my heart, I knew that I wasn’t good enough for my grandaunt and Songleaf despite all the sacrifices and investments my grandfather had made in me.

In the end, I told him what I had done. Seeking the Hedge Witch and learning if she could help. The deal I had made and what I planned to do. Saying it all out loud made it more real. Even without the stupefied look on the wolfkin’s face, I could see how I had started digging myself a hole, and at every step, worked harder to dig the hole deeper rather than try to climb free of the pit I had created.

When I was done, Nazim’s lips lifted as though in a snarl. Then, without missing a beat, he gently slapped me across the back of the head.

“You are an idiot,” the wolfkin growled. “And so am I. You act older than you are sometimes, and so it is easy to forget you are a child.”

He offered me his right hand — the one with the claws filed off. Pulling me to my feet, he motioned to head back the way I had come.

“Come on. I am going to wake your grandfather. It is time you had a talk with him about this too — because he will tell you the same thing I am about too. It wasn’t your fault, Bastian. You did all you could, more than anyone could expect of a child. What happened that night wasn’t your fault, and you are enough. Unless your grandaunt is a fool, she will see that too.”

As we walked towards the backdoor, my face wet from tears shed, I felt something change. For the first time in a year, a little bit of light filled the hole inside me and wasn’t instantly consumed by the darkness.