Wicked Bronze Ambition

2

Strafa’s daughter, Kevans, let us in. Kevans has a lot of her father in her. She isn’t as slim or beautiful as Strafa. And she insists on being sixteen going on fifty around her mother. “Mom! You two are worse than a cage full of ferrets. You’re old! Can’t you at least pretend to act your age?”

Old is a matter of viewpoint. Strafa was thirty-one, which made for interesting generational math. I ignored it. I ignore the weird Algarda dynamic as much as they let me.

I kept my mouth shut. If I stuck even one finger into the daughter-mother competition, I’d get my arm ripped off and fed to me after one or the other beat me with it.

Yes. The family was the downside to being engaged to the most wonderful, perfect, ridiculously beautiful, loving woman in the world. There was no getting out of having the in-laws included in the package.

Kevans and I get along fine when her mother isn’t around. I get along with their father when Kevans and Strafa aren’t around. Barate is a smart guy. He really thinks that I’m the best thing ever to happen to Strafa-though it didn’t always used to be that way.

Nobody gets along with Grandmother Shadowslinger.

She works hard to make it that way. I am assured, however, that she thinks well of me. As well as is possible, she being Shadowslinger. My most endearing trait was that I was willing to make an honest woman of her spinster granddaughter.

Strafa asked Kevans, “What kind of mood is she. .? Right. Stipulated. Stupid question.”

“Foul. But not because of anything any of us did, for once.”

Like most of the more ferocious magic-users who dwell on the Hill, Constance Algarda, commonly called Shadowslinger, occupied a vast, gloomy, dark edifice that looked like ghouls and graveyard fetches had thrown it up more than two hundred years ago. A parade of grim residents had installed countless bad smells, dire dust, spiders with webbed accessories, and lots of random clutter. Shadowslinger was not famous for her housekeeping. She was not your cliche tubby little rosy-cheeked homemaker kind of grandmother.

Most of the smells actually existed only inside my imagination, but Shadowslinger had fixed them there-while wearing a big, greasy, evil grin. A reminder, she said, never making it clear of what. One odor I never failed to catch was that of rotting flesh. It seeped out of the very walls.

Nobody else ever smelled it.

“She does it because she cares,” Strafa said. “What do you want to bet she makes it go away after the wedding?” Her eyes were big and blue and filled with self-deluding optimism.

I hunch my shoulders and take what I have to take. It’s the price of admission to paradise.

Kevans told us we should follow her, then complained every step of the way till we reached the room where Shadowslinger waited. Then the girl actually smiled for a moment.

Kevans likes her grandmother, though I’ve never heard her say a good word about the hag.