He nodded in response to the goblin’s question. “Bran would not be pleased if something happened to Mercy. Very not pleased.”

Larry tilted his head in a way that was neither human nor quite wolflike. “Bran was Grendel?”

He thought about Larry the goblin king and how everyone underestimated goblins. He decided it would be a good thing if the goblin king knew something of what the Marrok was.

“Not quite,” Adam said. “As I understand it, Beowulf was written down a long time after the events it purports to tell. The purpose of the story as it was recorded was to recite the final deeds of Beowulf, a great hero. Somewhere along the way, someone put him up against the scariest monsters they’d ever heard of instead of the terrible monsters who did kill him. That tale then blended back to the original.”

On one remarkable night, not long after Adam had been Changed, the Marrok’s son Samuel had sung (then translated) several versions of the tale of Beowulf.

“Beowulf,” Adam told the goblin, “isn’t any more accurate than any story told by mouth for centuries before it was written down, which is not very. Bran’s story is that a long time ago, he was broken. It had something to do with protecting his son. For a very long time afterward—decades and maybe longer—Bran was a mindless monster who killed every living thing in his territory.”

“When you were talking to Jacob, you said Bran’s mother was a witch,” said Elizaveta.

He hadn’t. She was fishing. So he said, “Bran has never said so. I’ve heard the rumors, though. So has Bonarata.”

Samuel had told him that Bran’s mother was a witch, and Adam figured that, being Bran’s son, Samuel had been in a position to know. But he didn’t have to tell Elizaveta who his source was. If Bran had wanted it to be known that he was witchborn, he’d have told everyone himself. Since he hadn’t, Adam wasn’t going to do it for him. But everyone had heard the rumors, and those Bran encouraged. Adam just didn’t need to confirm them.

“Interesting,” she said thoughtfully. “It would explain some things if it were true.” She smiled wickedly at Adam. “Some things that others have tried to do to Bran Cornick and failed miserably.”

He didn’t want to know, especially because she wanted to tell him. Elizaveta was one of his, but that didn’t mean he didn’t know what she was—witch and all that entailed. He wouldn’t invite her to bring her brand of horror to their suite—and it did not matter to him in the slightest that it was only Larry and Honey here, and they could protect themselves.

“Be that as it may,” Elizaveta said when it became clear he wasn’t going to question her. He could tell she was disappointed with him for spoiling her fun, though she knew him better than to have expected him to allow her to play her games here. “I am an old woman, and I’ve been up for far too long. I’m going to bed and going to sleep.”