“Two thousand years?”
“Yeah. Where… how…”
“Like I said. I have done things.” He sighs again and leaves it there.
Waiting to see what I will say to that, I guess.
“What have you done, Tarq?”
Wood wine is made from wood mud. And wood mud is what wood nymphs use to make their nests in the forest. It’s a nourishing thing for the wood-nymph daughter she will soon have. But it’s also a magical thing. At least, it can be. If you make it into wine.
Once the daughter is three days old she can no longer digest the mud. Some mothers just let it rot. But others make wine. They don’t get magic from the wine, but other monsters can. So it is a special thing. A precious thing. A rare thing.
More than rare, actually. Because there are no more pureblood wood nymphs.
There are only chimera.
So it is a non-existent thing.
Or, at least, it should be.
But obviously, it is not.
Tarq is watching me as I work out the logic. And maybe he’s a bit of a coward for letting me do this instead of just telling me what’s going on, but I can’t say I blame him. Because if he’s doing what I think he’s doing, he is a despicable man. “You keep… wood nymphs prisoner here.”
It is a drink you do not keep in bottles in office bars. There would never be enough for that. It’s so rare.
Unless… “You have… what? A farm?” It’s a really ugly word. But it’s the only one that fits. “You have a farm of pureblood wood nymphs here?”
He nods and I have to sink back in my chair a little. The idea that he is keeping nymphs prisoner is bad enough. But if he is forcing them to make wood wine… I can’t even conjure up the number of atrocities that would fit this reality.
“How? They’re gone. There were no more—”
“I hunted them,” he says. His tone is low. His voice a rumble. Almost a growl.
“You hunted them.” And even after hearing him say this, and repeating his words, and looking at the drink in my hand, I’m still unable to fully grasp what he is saying.
“I hunt them,” he corrects. Present. Tense. “I have a lab filled with alchemists who can open doors.” My eyebrows go up. “They have opened all the ones they can. And I have taken all the wood nymphs I can. But there are more doors, Pell. Doors that we cannot open, but…”
There is a beat here. A pause. A small moment for me to work out the reality of what he’s saying. Because Ostanes diluting bloodlines at the request of gods wasn’t the only reason wood nymphs went extinct. They only give birth once. They put everything into one girl child. The mother raises her, teaches her magic, and then, once the child has reached maturity, the mother wood nymph gives her magic to her daughter and withers away until she is dead.
But aside from that—because that’s just nature. So aside from that, there is another, darker, grosser part of what he’s saying.
“How many?”
”How many what?”
“How many are left?”
He huffs a little here. And it’s funny, I know what he’s thinking. He’s thinking… two minutes ago you thought there were none. Now you’re concerned with their possible extinction?
And the answer is yes, I am.
“How many are left, Tarq?”
“Twenty-five. But we have a problem.”
“What do you do with the wine? What kind of magic do you get from it?”