“The staff.”
“Yes?”
“Do you have it?”
“It’s . . . safe.”
“Safe where?”
He didn’t say anything.
I bit my lip. “You don’t trust me?”
“It’s not me. . . .”
“Then who?”
“The king. He said—”
“What king?”
Pritkin stared at me. “The one we met yesterday?”
I just looked at him. “Yesterday” was a difficult concept when you jackrabbited around the timeline as much as I did. Like, really difficult.
“The one who tried to kill us?”
Not narrowing things down much.
“The one you somehow froze in place?”
And then I remembered: the face of an angel, if you didn’t count the expression. Reflexes faster than those of anyone I’d ever seen, including other fey—almost including me, and I’d been shifting. And a shiny mailed boot stabbing down, not on me, but on the roof all around me, which had been thatch, too.
And which had broken, sending me falling straight into the hands of the Pythian posse.
I frowned. “You mean the blond—”
“Yes.”
“—was the Sky King?”
“Yes. Caedmon. He told me—”
“Caedmon. You’re on a first-name basis now?”
Pritkin’s eyes narrowed. “After you disappeared—again—he agreed to let me take the staff back to court, to use as bait to try to find out what’s going on. Or don’t you want to know why all three of the leading houses of Faerie are currently on earth, at the same time, in the same place, with armies?”
I shook my head. “We already know that. The Svarestri stole the staff, and the Blarestri came chasing it. And now Nimue—”
“But that’s just it. Why did they come? The Svarestri barely know this world. Why bring the staff here, where they are at a serious disadvantage even among other fey, who have at least some familiarity with it? And where their power doesn’t work nearly as well as in Faerie? They steal a staff that could easily caus
e a war, and they bring it here. Why?”
“I don’t know. But we’re not going to find out if you lose it—”
“I told you, it’s safe.”
“But you won’t tell me where.”