FORTY-THREE

ARE YOU SURE Dimitar’s not agreeing to the meeting so he’ll have the perfect chance to slice off Fintan’s head with his extra-scary, extra-spikey sword?” Fitz asked. “Because if I were him, that’s what I’d want to do after the way the Neverseen’s plague plan backfired on him. And I’d be good with that. They’re welcome to take out Alvar, too.”

“I wouldn’t mind if the ogres finished off Brant, either,” Sophie added, trying to scrape the selkie slime off her shoe. “Same goes for anyone else that helped attack Wylie.”

“Don’t worry, they’ll be in huge trouble for letting him get away,” Keefe promised.

“Do you know how they’ll be punished?” Fitz asked.

“I know it won’t be fun. Alvar told me that when Brant realized Sophie actually was the girl they’d been looking for—and that Alvar messed up the day she saw him disappear—he locked Alvar in a room and set everything on fire except one square of floor in the middle. He left him roasting in there for a whole day.”

“Good,” Fitz said. “I hope they do even worse for this.”

“That’s . . . pretty dark, dude.”

“So is what he let them do to Wylie.”

Sophie reached for Fitz’s shaky hand, wishing she knew how to peel back some of his building anger. Fury was always his mask, but if he hid too far behind it, he might lose himself.

She also couldn’t stop imagining Keefe trapped in a room, surrounded by smoke and flames. “If they find out you came here . . .”

“They know I’m here,” Keefe told her. “There’s an ogre enzyme that stinks like the entire world is rotting, and I may have accidentally knocked a vial of it into the laundry basin while I was washing Fintan’s favorite cloaks. It can only be removed with selkie skin, so they sent me to get what I need to clean up my mess.”

“He’s making you do his laundry?” Sophie asked.

“It’s one of my chores. That’s what happens when you join an organization that attacks the gnomes. We’re stuck doing everything ourselves.”

“And he won’t be able to tell you went to Havenfield before you came here?” Fitz asked.

“Nope. I found a way to hide five seconds from my tracker. I’m pretty sure Dex would think it’s the stupidest trick ever. But it works. And I used those five seconds to drop off the bead before I headed here. It was perfect.”

“But all it takes is one mistake,” Sophie told him. “Especially now that the ogres are back in the picture. King Dimitar will remember you from Ravagog, and I’m sure he’ll try to convince Fintan that you’re a traitor.”

Keefe had been their distraction during the mission in the ogres’ capital, pestering the king with questions and misleading information while Sophie and Fitz searched his memories.

Keefe shrugged. “I won’t be getting anywhere near King Dimitar—and not just because I sometimes have nightmares about that metal underwear he walks around in. He demanded to meet with Fintan alone.”

“That sounds like a really good way for Fintan to get killed by an angry ogre,” Fitz noted.

“I dunno. If the meeting unravels, I think we’d have fire-roasted ogre long before we’d have a headless Fintan,” Keefe told him. “But, I also think this is one of those ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’ kind of deals. Or is it ‘my enemy isn’t my enemy if they’re also my enemy’s enemy’?”

“You lost me,” Sophie admitted.

“Yeah, the logic’s kinda wonky. What I mean is, the Neverseen and the ogres both want the Council gone. And now that King Dimitar’s being forced into treaty negotiations, he must be feeling pretty desperate. He has to know his only chance of beating the Council is with help from the Neverseen. I’m sure the Councillors have all kinds of secret defenses that Fintan knows about, since he used to be one. And Fintan has also realized that he needs the ogres’ help to pull off his plans. So my guess is, he’s going to offer to share his secrets with the ogres—and provide elvin backup—if King Dimitar works with him to overthrow the Council. I’m sure they’ll turn on each other afterward, and there’s no telling who would win. But it won’t matter because by then everything would already be ruined.”

“But didn’t the ogres and the Neverseen already try teaming up for the plague?” Fitz asked. “It didn’t go well.”

“Right, but they didn’t really commit, either,” Keefe reminded him. “The Neverseen sat back and let the ogres do all the dirty work, and the ogres thought the plague would be enough. If they teamed up for a real attack, I think it would be a whole other story.”

“You really think the Council could fall?” Sophie whispered.

“Yeah, I do,” Keefe said. “Don’t get me wrong—the Councillors are freakishly powerful. I was a little stunned at how prepared they were to stomp us when we broke in to Exile. But they’re also too slow. Too blind to a lot of our problems. Too reluctant to make the hard choices. Look at how they handled the plague. They investigated a bit, called a few assemblies, and . . . that was it. We had to stop it—and Calla had to give up her life.”

Sophie locked her arms at her sides so she wouldn’t pull on her eyelashes as the Councillors’ faces filled her mind. Some good. Some cruel. Some annoying. Some she didn’t even know.

None of them deserved to die.

And Oralie . . .

Imagining the ethereal Councillor in the hands of the ogres—or the Neverseen—made her want to leap back to Eternalia and beg the Council to go into hiding.

But would that really keep them safe?

And what message would that send the rest of the world?

Then again, what would happen if the Council fell?

“We have to stop it,” Sophie said.

She didn’t know how. But . . . they never knew what they were doing, and somehow they always made it work.

“There’s the confident Foster we all know and love!” Keefe cheered. “I bet your head is already filling up with brilliant plans.”

“Not yet,” she admitted. “Warning the Council seems pointless. They’ll just tell us they can handle themselves.”