Nectar of the Wicked (Deadly Divine, #1) (6)

“I know,” I said, sighing as I perched atop his tall desk, which sat giant and imposing in the middle of the narrow library. Due to his short stature, he had a set of wooden steps behind it, as well as a stool. I’d once asked him why he’d never sought a smaller desk for himself. He’d said that he’d rather people not look down upon him when requesting his assistance. “I don’t know what else to do.”

“You count yourself blessed by Mythayla to still draw breath, and that you can now do so without living under Rolina’s tyrannical rule.”

I snorted, though he was right. I was fortunate, I knew, but I was so many other conflicting things that I couldn’t seem to feel any one feeling for too long. “Is it bad?” I asked, hesitant. “That I do not grieve her.”

Gane scoffed. “You are too human for your own good. She was a monster of a woman.”

“But she gave me shelter.” I traced a fractal of light spearing through the aisles and over the worn desk from tall rectangular windows too grimy to see beyond. “Food, and some semblance of safety.”

“And you were required to slave after her in return until she could send you away. If you ask me, that woman was far more faerie than you and those she despised. Hypocrites always meet their matches in the end.”

Indeed, Rolina had.

Gane laid his quill down on his afternoon checklist and placed his gnarled hand over my fidgeting fingers. “You’re feeling bereft because you did not get what you want after hoping for all these years, and now you’re afraid you never will. But Flea...”

I studied his hairy fingers, and how my own far exceeded their stubby length, but I looked up at him when he said, “You have a chance to live a life of your own choosing now. You don’t need to cower nor answer to anyone. Nothing is stopping you from doing exactly as you wish. You do not need Folkyn.”

Nothing stopping me.

Those words rang through me, bittersweet. “I still need answers,” I said, and I’d told him as much hundreds of times before.

The goblin did as expected. Taking his hand from mine to remove his spectacles from his almond eyes, he shook his head as he cleaned them with his plaid shirt. “You only think you do, but that you were dumped in Rolina’s care says otherwise.”

Rolina had always loathed to be reminded that her daughter was likely dead. All these years, she’d refused to believe it. Her few friends in town and at her place of work—the Lair of Lust—had supposedly ceased trying to convince her to grieve and move on long ago.

“But I can’t just ignore it,” I admitted. “I’ve spent too many years believing it will happen.”

I could understand why Gane thought it was a waste of time to worry over creatures who did not worry over me, but... what if they did? What if they’d spent twenty years hoping I was okay, and that they might one day see me again?

What if I’d been stolen from them and left here in Crustle? As vengeance, or for my own safety? What if my parents were dead, and there had simply been no one to care for me? There were so many what-ifs, I could make a list as tall as the rafters in the library.

And I would never learn anything if I stayed here.

Gane set his spectacles back upon his wide face, then scratched at the white hair climbing his cheeks in tiny curling clouds. “You have to ignore it. There’s no other option, so cease breaking your own heart. Crustle is your home, Flea.”

But he knew that wasn’t entirely true; otherwise, he wouldn’t have left his podium with another exasperated shake of his head as soon as he’d finished speaking.

“Wouldn’t you wish to at least know where you came from?” I called after him as he traversed the awaiting piles of books in the aisle closest to the desk. “I have to find a way, Gane.”

“You don’t have to do anything. Go home and enjoy Rolina’s lavish life.”

His unwillingness to talk of a land he had chosen to leave when his wife had perished some decades ago did not surprise me.

But his desire for me to leave him alone did.

I jumped down from the desk, hope rekindling and warming my blood. “Gane, if you know of a way, then you must tell me.”

He’d never claimed to, but then, I’d never thought to ask. I’d believed, almost as strongly as Rolina had, that the Wild Hunt would swap me. At the very least, that they would find enough reason to take me home.

My fingers swept over the spines of books as I trailed the hobbling goblin from one aisle to the next. “Gane, please.”

He stopped and feigned rehoming a thick volume on the history of merfolk. One I’d read cover to cover five times. “There isn’t a way. None that I would dare suggest.”

“Then how did you come to Crustle?”

All he’d ever said was that he’d left Folkyn. Which I now suspected wasn’t true.

His silence was telling.

He sighed and turned to squint up at me. “I went to the royal house of Hellebore with the intention of stealing a statue as old as the land itself.”

I blinked, then I smiled broadly. “Really?”

His lips quirked before he made a sound of irritation and shuffled away. “Be gone, Flea. You are no criminal, and I won’t see you endanger yourself.”

I followed him to the back of the library. “But you did it.”