“When did she tell you that?” Adam asked, his voice very calm and quiet.
“Since Aiden left, she’s started showing up when I go outside alone,” Jesse said, answering Adam’s real question. “I asked Aiden. He told me that there wasn’t much she could do given the rules she is constrained by. He advised me not to let you know she was bothering me, because then she’d know she was bothering me. She’d look on it as encouragement. And maybe you’d try to renegotiate the rules. He thinks that she’s as bound up by rules as she is willing to be. Any negotiations are likely to backfire. I thought I should listen to him when he talks about Underhill.”
Adam grunted unhappily. Jesse was right. Aiden was probably right. But I expected that Adam would go have a chat with Tilly the next time she showed up anyway. Hopefully it wouldn’t happen until he’d had a chance to cool off.
“She told you that story was about Zee?” I asked.
Jesse nodded.
“Your dad,” Izzy asked Tad, “can make jewels out of someone’s eyes? And goblets out of children’s skulls? And he drank out of them?” She’d let go of Tad’s arm and taken a step back while I wasn’t paying attention to her.
Maybe if it had happened in the past century, I might have had a different attitude about the story. But that tale was from the Poetic Edda, written a thousand years ago, more or less. It felt like a cautionary tale, not something that happened to real people. I couldn’t see Zee, my old friend, doing something so horrible.
Okay, I could, actually. Because he’d done something similar fairly recently.
“When people live a very long time, they have room to change,” I said, carefully not saying that Zee had changed.
Tad gave me a look that said, Thanks, but please don’t try to help.
“I warned you that my father was not just a grumpy old man,” he told Izzy. “I told you he’d done some very terrible things.”
She gave him a look that would have done credit to a kicked puppy.
I wanted to tell her that even if Zee had been terrible once, he didn’t do things like that anymore. But it would have been a lie. I was pretty sure that parts of the bodies of the Gray Lords who’d held Zee and Tad captive in the fae reservation were still turning up in unexpected places. The fae, even the powerful ones, had started to have a certain tone in their voice when they referred to Zee.
There hadn’t been, as far as I’d heard, any jewels that were formerly eyeballs, though. I hoped that Tilly had been wrong—mistaken, not lying—that that story had been about Wayland, who wasn’t also the same person as the Dark Smith of Drontheim, who had become my Zee.
But I had to admit, if only to myself, that it was altogether too plausible, given the stories I knew about the Dark Smith. One of the Gray Lords had told me that Zee had made Excalibur. There were stories that attributed Excalibur’s making to Wayland.
“But he’s so nice,” said Izzy.
We all stared at her. Zee was my mentor, my friend, and I loved him. But “nice” wasn’t an adjective I’d have used to describe the grumpy old smith. He could be kind, yes, but “nice” implied something less . . . dangerous.
Izzy’s back stiffened at the incredulous look Tad gave her, and when she spoke, her voice was defensive. “Last week I had a flat and called Jesse to tell her I’d be late. She said since I was only a mile or so from the garage, she’d see if someone could come help me. Ten minutes later your dad showed up with a new tire. He changed my flat, told me I needed new brakes. He followed me to Mercy’s garage, where he fixed the problem, then gave the whole car a once-over. He wouldn’t let me pay him.” She glanced at me. “Though I suppose I should have been paying you.”
I shook my head. “Up to Zee. I don’t argue with his decisions.”
She continued, “He gave me a free soda—told me I needed fattening up.”
Like the witch in Hansel and Gretel, I did not say. I wondered what the old smith had been doing. I would have expected Zee to fix a flat for one of Jesse’s friends. The rest of it made me uneasy. It was out of character for Zee—or maybe I was just freaking out about the story of the jeweled-eyed skull cups.
Izzy glanced at Tad and then away. She looked at Jesse and evidently found that easier. Tad’s face told me that he wasn’t happy about Izzy’s story, either, but it wasn’t worry or concern I saw there; it was banked rage.
Tad wasn’t someone who overreacted. And I didn’t think he was freaked-out about the story of the skull cups. Or maybe he was. The skull cups were not the only thing that Wayland Smith had done in that story.