Magic came to her as easy as breathing, which tended to make her more impatient when it came to my own struggles with the craft.

“All right. Midnight,” I said. “Where do you want to meet?”

“Courtyard should be empty and horse-free by then,” she said. “Best to do it outside where there’s a better connection. Until then, try to get some rest or something, okay?”

“Sure,” I said. Guess it looked like I was going to take Soren’s advice after all. Maybe for once, I could sleep without dreaming. How long had it been since I’d done that? I missed the blackness and utter oblivion that used to come with sleep. Closing my eyes and fearing what I might see once I drifted off did nothing good for my mental state. Not that my mental state was ever in tip-top shape to begin with.

I trudged back to the more livable part of the Erlking’s palace. When we’d first moved in, Soren had constantly complained about the décor—something I really should have seen coming considering his original statement about the palace the last time we were there—until Seppo had taken it upon himself to change how things looked. It was starker now, austere, despite the white-and-gold-veined marble, the jutting ice and rock helping complete the image. I still hadn’t explored the entire thing, mainly because I was sure there were a number of death traps I didn’t need to stumble into, but I was pretty sure both Diaval and Rosamund had the entire place memorized like the back of their hands.

There used to be more thralls too, I noted as I passed through empty halls. Humans that had been taken during raids and enslaved by goblins to do the skills they couldn’t, like I’d been.

But Soren had very little need for thralls in the first place, and the dozen he had originally to complete tasks that he himself wasn’t physically able to do, like create clothing and plant food, all things to do with creation, had come with him here. It still made my stomach upset, seeing them, even if Soren wasn’t going to mistreat them or allow them to be mistreated. Thralldom was still thralldom. It existed even in the human world. When different clans would raid one another, they would often take thralls, and my clan was no different. That changed when I came across humans in thralldom to nonhumans; it made me uncomfortable how much I had accepted thralldom as a way of life.

Still, Soren released all the thralls who originally worked for the Erlking that he didn’t have any need for.