Light Betrayed: The Petra Graves Chronicles Book 4: A Seven Hungers Urban Fantasy Adventure by Morgan Quaid

Author:Morgan Quaid [Quaid, Morgan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Vanilla Groove Media
Published: 2024-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

13. Bargain

Petra encountered three more statues along the path ahead. Each was fashioned in the form of a different member of her team, and each contained a simple message. After Max, a salt version of Malachi had appeared, grinning broadly, as was his custom and looming above her as she plucked the message from his outstretched hands. The towering form fell to the ground, as it had been with the Max statue.

Petra read the message.

Grant me freedom, and I shall grant you the past, Lightborn.

Nina’s statue was next. Once more, it was of exactly the same kind as the other two and, again, it offered an expertly penned message.

I can offer you the memories you have lost, those stolen by the Shadow. And I can offer more besides.

Petra smiled in response. The messages had obviously come from Threnody and, though they’d only spent a few hours together, she sensed Abigail’s hand behind the words.

Clearly the Whispersnitch had used some kind of magic or mystical devise to pull Petra’s team out of time, dragging them forward so that it could make its petition. It was an odd way to communicate, but Abigail, or Threnody as she should now think of him, had seen Petra and her group fight more than once. Perhaps the Whispersnitch reasoned that communication would be safest with a little physical and temporal distance between them.

Petra didn’t know a great deal about Wish Brokers, other than what their title suggested and the little she’d learned from the Thrice Twain before her demise. They were said to grant wishes, to give boons of extraordinary scope in exchange for secrets or items of worth. Petra was familiar with that kind of barter, given its prevalence in the Hungers. The time she’d spent in the First Hunger in particular had provided a crash course in many of the trade systems of the hungerborn.

In most hungerborn cultures, it was the height of prowess to dupe a client or comrade into a one-sided bargain. One couldn’t simply offer a deal that was blatantly tilted toward one’s self, however. The bargain had to appear to be beneficial for both parties. If anything, the best deals would even favor the customer rather than the vendor, at the initial stages of the bargain at least.

Where hungerborn traders derived their pleasure, however, was with the sting in the tail, the barb that only appeared once the deal was struck. Hungerborn traders were experts at crafting small print, leaving behind little linguistic tricks which were difficult to pinpoint but effectively changed the entire nature of their bargain. This is where children’s tales of farmers being tricked out of their harvest, or firstborn children being offered up as the unwitting price for a trade, leaned heavily on hungerborn psychology.

Entire libraries had been written within the Hallowed World, warning of deals with fae creatures and the like. Most of these were seen as harmless children’s tales or ancient myths, but every Crown sorcerer and hungerborn knew that there was truth behind those stories.

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