David Baldacci - The Keeper

She was shaking her head. “They knew nothing, Vega.”

Put off by her answer, I said testily, “They clearly knew something if they survived all this time in here. As we’ve both seen, it’s not that easy.” I paused for a moment and then added, “And they didn’t have magic, did they? Not like us .”

She gave a long, penetrating look. “If you’re asking me how I did what I did with your wand, I can’t tell you because I don’t know.”

“Yet you grabbed it and said the incantation.”

“I heard you say it before, when the lycans attacked,” she said quickly. Too quickly, I thought.

“It’s the killing spell. The only one that does it outright.”

She gave me a condescending look. “Well, lucky for you, then. Otherwise, you’d be dead.”

I ignored this. “And even though you said it was just luck, you clearly knew how to use the Finn.”

She rubbed at her burned hand. “It was just luck,” she insisted.

“So, your family?” I persisted. I’m sure my look told her I was not going to yield on this.

She let out a quick breath and scowled. “All right, damn it. I had an uncle. My father’s brother. He was a bit odd. Kept himself to himself, but he took a liking to me. We used to take walks together. And we would talk.”

“About what?”

“He said, well, he said that we didn’t belong here. That he thought there’d been a mistake.”

“A mistake? How so?”

“I don’t know. But he seemed angry about it. He said that we should be living somewhere else.”

I thought back to Delph’s remark about Petra seeming to understand that there was another place outside the Quag. And this also might be what Silenus had alluded to — that some Maladons had been trapped in here.

“Maybe your uncle thought you belonged in my village.”

“Maybe,” she said doubtfully. “But the thing is...”

She looked away, unable to meet my eyes.

“Petra, please just tell me.”

“Will you promise not to tell the others? Not even Lack knows.”

“I promise.”

She eyed me severely, as though measuring the sincerity of my words.

She pointed at my wand. “My uncle had one of those.”

“A wand! Your uncle?”

“I didn’t know back then that that’s what it was,” she cried out. “I swear I didn’t.”

“But how do you know now that it was a wand?”

“Because of what he did with it.”

“What did he do with it?”

“He could move about. Go from one spot to another.”

“ Pass-pusay, ” I said.

“Yes, I remember him saying those words.”

“What else?”

“He could make a fire with it. We would cook what we killed over it.”

I gripped her arm. “How could your uncle do things like that and no one other than you knew? Why didn’t Lack know, your father, your mother?”

“Because he never showed them the wand. He never did anything with it around them. Only with me.”

“And why was that?”

She peered up at me. “Because... Because...”

“Because he knew you could do it too?”

She nodded jerkily and her lips quivered.

“How?”

“He let me use it once to bring down some eggs from a nest for my meal.”

“So he told you a spell to use?”

“He told me the words.”

“Where did he get the wand?”

“I don’t know.”

“What if I were to tell you that he could only have come by it from a family member who gave it to him with a piece of themselves embedded in it?”

She looked utterly astonished by this.

I went on. “So that means someone in his family, meaning your family, passed him that wand. What happened to it?”

“I don’t know. When the lycans came, we were sleeping. We had someone on watch, but they must’ve fallen asleep too. My uncle was killed. I don’t know what happened to his wand.”

I looked at her again, watching every move of her body, every twitch of a facial muscle. I knew something for a fact. I knew that she was lying. Petra had her uncle’s wand somewhere. Knowing what she could do with it, she never would have left it behind, lycan attack or not.

“Do you want to go down there?” she asked quickly, looking over the edge of the granite. She obviously did not want to continue this discussion. And I decided not to push it. I had certainly learned a great deal.

I nodded. “You can stay up here if you want.”

She shook her head. “No, I don’t want you to go down there alone.”

“You’re sure?” I said. I wished I could trust her. But the fact was, other than Delph and of course Harry Two, I could trust no one.

“Yes.”

So I harnessed her up and we leapt together.

If anything, the gloom intensified on the ground when we landed. I had to light my wand and it still provided only the barest illumination. I didn’t like this. An army of jabbits could be sneaking up on us right now and we’d never know it until we felt their fangs against our flesh. I grabbed Petra and pushed her to the ground as something flew over us so close that I felt the wake from whatever it was lift strands of my hair.

“Keep quiet and stay down,” I whispered to her.

I carefully lifted my head and looked around, listening intently for anything that might tell me what was out there. The next thing I heard was totally unexpected.

Laughter.

And then a voice from out of the gloom.

“Does my heart good to see the likes of them wallowing in the dirt, right where they belong no less.”

I settled on my haunches, my wand ready as I looked around. That was a male’s voice. There was someone in here with us who was not a beast. For one wild, panicked moment, I thought Thorne had escaped Luc and the other ekos and caught up to us somehow. But it wasn’t his voice.

“Who are you?” I called out.

“Trouble and strife which cuts like a knife. One who enters my ground will be hunted right down.” Laughter followed this silly song, along with a whooshing sound like the thing was whizzing overhead.

Trouble and strife , I thought. Okay, Astrea had told me about this bloke.

“Are you Eris?”

The whooshing sound stopped.

“How come you to know my name?” the voice snarled.

I thought I might give him a bit of his own medicine.

I sang, “I always know the name of one I’ve come to tame.”

Silence.

O-kay. Maybe I had gone a bit too far.

A figure started to solidify in front of me. He was like a fat baby, only with whiskers, dressed in a gray cloak with his bare feet protruding from it.

“Tame Eris?” he said, a low, malicious undertone to his words now.

I held up my wand. “Astrea Prine sends her best.”

His beady eyes on my wand and with sudden understanding in his features, he said, “Well, good luck on finding your way in the gloom. And that wand of yours will lead to your doom.”

Okay, I could figure this out, I was sure. Astrea had told me much about this bloke and the Third Circle. This place was filled with darkness, though luckily not accompanying depression as with the Second Circle. But there was something that could cut right through that darkness. What was it again? Ah, yes!

I said, “ Rejoinda , cucos,” and moved my wand back toward me, as though I were pulling something in slowly and steadily.

A moment passed and then an inkling of light came out of the gloom. Then the light grew bigger, brighter and bolder. When a sliver had passed, the light had cut right through the dark.

“Blast!” screamed Eris.

The light was now like the sun coming up and burning off the moist air. The gloom was lifting everywhere. In another few moments, we were surrounded by cucos, small birdlike creatures that fluttered around, their wings glowing with light. They were brilliantly colored, as though they had small bits of rainbows embedded in them. I held out a finger and one of them perched on it. I felt my spirits rise along with the light.