The other man nodded, silver rings glinting in his beard. “They bled into the sea to secure safe passage. And once they were here, bound to the shores by all that infernal fog that kept them from navigating back to the world, those offerings became more… involved. Full sacrifices. Bodies bled into the ocean and sunk with stones.”
Red shifted uncomfortably on her feet. She’d known the worship of the monstrous old gods was violent, back before the Kings banished them, but the books she’d read on them in the Valleydan library kept it vague.
Fife sat down in the chair Valdrek had vacated and wearily signaled the barmaid for a drink. Kayu did the same, holding up two fingers when the maid looked her way. The somehow familiar man at the table had laid down his cards, but kept staring at them, fair hair falling forward to obscure his eyes. Red only glanced at him, too taken with Valdrek’s story to try to puzzle out where she’d seen him before.
“The worship didn’t give them a way out,” Valdrek continued. “Not once the Leviathan was locked away with the rest, the lines of communication blurred and broken by the Shadowlands. But it did give them odd knowledge. Pieces of things that came in dreams, seemingly unconnected. They recorded them, anyway, carved them into the wall alongside everything else.”
Red thought of those spiked, runic carvings alongside the fluid lines on the wall. Violent marks that didn’t seem to fit.
“But the shorthand language they used to carve those things died out with the worship. And good riddance, too. It apparently drove those who knew it mad.” Valdrek fingered one of the rings in his beard, thoughtful. “It was only the first generation who knew how to decode it. The rest of us have left it alone.”
The barmaid came with drinks. Kayu passed one of hers to Raffe. Fife shared his with Lyra when she held out a hand.
Red could’ve used one herself, but it felt like whatever they were headed for would require her mind to be at full capacity.
Valdrek took a long drink, leaving foam in his beard when he lifted the tankard away. “So yes, Wolf, I know the carving you refer to. But no, I don’t know what it means.”
“I do.”
The man across the table finally looked up from his cards. His expression wavered somewhere between clarity and confusion, like he hadn’t meant to speak up. Pale hair fell across a white brow, eyes dark.
It took her a moment, but Red finally remembered where she’d seen him before. “Bormain.”
Chapter Seventeen
Red
The last time Red had seen Bormain, he’d been raving with shadow-sickness and halfway rotted, chained up beneath Asheyla’s shop across the square. Even after she and Eammon had healed him, he’d been pale and waxen, still looking half a corpse.
He’d recovered since then, and well. Now Bormain looked like a healthy young man, none the worse for wear after his brush with something far more awful than death.
“That’s me.” He nodded, almost sheepish. “Um, thank you. By the way. And I’m…” A swallow down a tight throat; he looked pained. “I’m sorry for anything I said while I was sick. I know I—I said some unkind things, according to others, and I didn’t—”
“Don’t worry about it.” The poor man looked so ashamed, and Red knew what it was like to try stringing that into words. She gave him a slight, reassuring smile. “No need for apologies.”
Eammon didn’t seem as surprised by Bormain’s transformation as Red was. Apparently, he’d known the man well enough before being shadow-sickened to recognize him now. The Wolf leaned forward, all business. “So you know what the carving means?”
Bormain shrugged, like Eammon’s attention made him slightly nervous. “I think so,” he said, picking at the edges of his playing cards. “Ever since I was shadow-sick, I’ve been able to read some of the… the stranger carvings, for lack of a better term. So if your key-grove is one of those, it stands to reason I should be able to read it, too.”
Valdrek still sat with one hip propped up on the table, but every line of his body had gone stiff. He looked at Bormain with an odd mix of grief and wariness. “You didn’t tell me that, boy.”
Another stilted shrug from Bormain. “I’ve been enough of a burden,” he murmured. “And it’s nothing, really. They give me a headache sometimes, but I can mostly ignore them.”
Silence. Eammon’s eyes flickered to Red’s, both of them making the tandem decision to stay out of this moment.