I didn’t tell him I didn’t have a magic wand. Though it would be cool.
He turned back to straightening the weapons rack after telling me to meet the next day, if there wasn’t a battle. I felt his eyes, and thoughts, on me as I walked away. His desire fed and filled me.
Uneasily, I wondered what I was becoming.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
In Which I Receive an Unexpected Guest
Larch and I walked in companionable silence back to the tent. I felt pleasantly tired out. Maybe some healthy exercise was what I really needed. Wash that man out of my hair and all that. Nothing like being around a healthy, red-blooded human man to make a girl feel better in her skin. And to fill up her well of magic.
“I shall return later, to escort you to dinner, my lady sorceress,” Larch told me on parting.
“What? What dinner?”
“With General Falcon. He requests your presence at dinner.”
Great, another mad war tea party.
“Okay,” I sighed. “I’ll get ready.”
I dragged the tub back into the tent, happily filling it with steaming water with a thought. At least the magic had come back. Who I would be here without it didn’t bear considering.
Pulling off the dress, I examined the now raggedly torn and dirty hem. I’d stepped on it more than once.
Cocktail length for war then.
Grimacing at my rapidly stiffening muscles, I climbed into the tub, sighing as the heat penetrated the soreness. I let my head rest against the high back of the tub.
“We’re living in a tent?”
I started out of my skin, water sloshing onto the floor. “Jesus, Starling! What the hell are you doing here?”
Starling twirled in place, skirts spinning out, blond locks shining. “I’ve arrived!”
“So I see.”
“They diverted me here just as soon as we heard, and here I am! No, no, don’t get out of the tub. Gracious, where are your servants? The page out front told me to come in, but not that you’d been abandoned without serving girls. Are you being punished?” Starling’s hands flew to her mouth in dismay. “You didn’t accidentally turn them into butterflies or something, did you?”
“What? No! There was Dragonfly, but she’s gone and I’m fine without servants. Now what are you doing?”
Starling had carelessly tossed her cape onto my workbench, tapped the rubber ducky on the head with a cooed “How cute!” and swooped down behind me.
“Washing your hair for you. And super-neat pillows! Now dunk to wet your hair.”
“I’m still soaking.”
“No, you’re not. Your page said you have dinner with the general. You have to get ready.”
Resigned, I dunked. Starling immediately started in on my hair with Blackbird’s nutty shampoos. The scent made me smile, remembering that day she’d washed my hair in my tower room at Rogue’s. “Who diverted you from where, once you heard what?”
“Lord Rogue. He’d already sent for me to meet you at his castle, to help you settle in, when he sent word that you were staying here and needed me.”
“So you were on your way to Castle Mistiness to meet me? I thought you had to reach your majority before you could…come serve me.”
“Dispensation,” she sang out. “Oh, and you didn’t notice!” Starling pranced into view, tossing her hair like a young starlet.
I wiped the soap out of my eyes. “I did so notice. Blond and beautiful.”
“I know!” She nearly squealed it. “It’s so sticking. Your advice was perfect.”
“Well, it’s only been, what, a week now?” So much had happened. I dunked again, rinsing my hair, and climbed out. Starling met me with a drying cloth and started to rub me down. “Starling, you don’t need to do this.”
She stopped. Stared with glistening dark eyes. “You won’t let me serve you?”
This again.
“No. I mean, yes. Stay. Love having you here.” I wrapped myself in the cloth and sat at the vanity, taking up my comb.
She sagged in exaggerated relief. “Oh good. We’ll have the best time.”
“You talked to Rogue then?” I tried to sound casual as I combed out the tangles in my hair. Starling slipped the comb from my fingers and took over the task. I sat back and enjoyed the sensation. There was something wonderful about being tended to.
“Mmm,” Starling hummed a noncommittal answer, her thoughts very blank.
“What does that mean?”
“My lady sorceress,” Larch intoned from the doorway, “Lord Falcon awaits you.”
“I’m hurrying.”
Starling selected a gown for me—a lovely gold one with a soft Marilyn Monroe bodice. Even though I protested that it was too much, she insisted that I needed to look my best and just to put it on already.
“Why are all your dresses in the trunk still?” Starling complained. “Why haven’t your servant girls gotten you a wardrobe and hung these up?”
“I can just wish the wrinkles out—don’t fret.”
A quick look in the mirror showed that the gently gathered bodice flattered me. I wished it to the right length along with a bit of wrinkle-removal. But now the black pumps were just too low-heeled for the dress. I looked clunky, dammit. And the outfit needed jewelry. Mine had been in the purse I left behind at Devils Tower. Left behind with the other relics of who I used to be.
I had too many weird feelings about jewelry now, to think about wishing up any, but with a judicious thought, I grew my heels, picturing the sleek, stiletto look I wanted. Maybe I didn’t have gazelle-like legs, but I could hold my head up high.
“You shortened your dress? It’s really not appropriate for a lady…”
“Starling—I am just so not a lady, you can’t even imagine.”
“Yes, but the others…”
“Call me eccentric, whatever, I don’t care. Tell them it’s not proper in my land for dresses to be long.”
“Like your sorceress’s robes.” Starling was peering at my now-dry dress that I’d tossed on the workbench. “What did you do to it? And what is that stuff?”
I peered with her at the dragon blood distillate. The liquid was clear, with a silver sheen that reminded me of mercury. I took a moment to disconnect my distillate flask and seal over the top with a wish—better than any stopper, that. I set the flask on my workbench, carefully back in a corner where it couldn’t be knocked off.
“Dragon’s blood. Or a refined version of it. Kind of cool, huh?”
Starling looked at me dubiously.
“I’ll ask Larch to get the guys to drag the dragon blood equipment outside.” We probably didn’t need it in the tent overnight. I’d clean up the bowls, etc., tomorrow morning.
“I can do that.”
“Aren’t you coming to dinner?”
“Oh, no, Lady Sorceress. That is not my place. I wouldn’t be welcome. Besides, there’s lots to do here.” She wrinkled up her nose.
“Gwynn.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“You call me Gwynn or I won’t let you stay.”
Starling opened her mouth to protest but I jumped in.
“I mean it. I can only take so much in one day. Don’t you do it to me, too.”
“Yes…Gwynn. I’ll see that this is all picked up.”
“Thanks, Starling—but don’t let anyone touch the vial or the residue in the basin. I need to make sure they’re not poisonous or anything.”
Maybe I needed a workshop tent of my own, too, if I planned on messing with anything else that would prove an unpleasant sleeping companion. And Starling would probably be living here, too, now.
I sighed for my short-lived privacy.
“My lady sorceress,” Larch said, yet
again.
“What? Will he expire from hunger?”
“Lord Falcon…”
“Okay, okay. I’m ready.”
But I paused at the doorway, while Larch huffed with impatience.
“Starling?”
She smiled questioningly at me.
“I’m really glad you’re here.” I waved a hand loftily at Larch. “Proceed, James,” I declared with a posh accent, and grinned when Starling rolled her eyes behind his back.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
My Dinner with Falcon
The short trek across camp was becoming familiar. Homelike, in an odd way. It felt good, too, to walk on seriously high heels again. A certain confidence came from that, from the gliding hip-swaying steps those heels required. I was glad now, that Starling got me to dress up. Armor came in many forms.
I had a pretty good idea how I wanted to play this meeting. And, no, it did not involve agreeing to him having all the power.
A group of giggling pages of indeterminate sex danced around me for a moment singing an ethereally high-pitched song, presented me with a flower and scampered off. In the varied light of the moon, campfires and flickering pillows, it reminded me of a rose. Smelled like a rose, too. I spun it in my fingertips as I followed Larch’s proclamations of my progress, and felt nothing more than flower in it. Green plant energy.
Sometimes a flower was just a flower, I supposed.
“Lady Gwynn.” Falcon swept a bow to me when I entered his tent.
“Falcon.” I nodded at him.
He raised an eyebrow on the clear side of his face. “Are you my superior, then, to neglect my title?”
“I’m not all that interested in titles,” I answered with a careless air, tossing my rose down onto the small square dinner table. Intimate and set for two, with the place settings on two adjoining sides, rather than across from each other. “Is this a date?”
“You refused Rogue’s offer. I assumed you had come to certain…decisions.” Falcon wore buff leather tonight, which clung to the long sinewy lines of him, the color one eerie shade lighter than his eyes.
“Did you now?” I flicked a glance at Larch, who stared steadily out the tent flaps, undoubtedly watching for marauding barbarians. Then I slid out the chair at my chosen place-setting and sat, crossing my legs, gathering my thoughts.
Falcon sat in the other chair, brushing my foot as he slid past. He filled my crystal goblet from a carafe, then filled his own. He held his goblet up, the faceted lines of it reflecting bloodred in the candlelight. “To us.”
“Happy days,” I answered with my grandmother’s traditional toast, lifting my own sanguine goblet and clinking it lightly to his. I waited for him to sip first before I tasted mine, and grimaced at it. Even sweeter than the white stuff. It didn’t seem possible. And I’d thought the Manischewitz wine at my college roommate’s Passover dinner was bad.
I leaned back in my chair, bringing my wineglass with me, and toyed with the rose lying by my plate, admiring its creamy warmth against the dark red cloth of Falcon’s table. I thought back to my first dinner here and the bargains I’d made that night.
“So, do you have a proposal for me?”
“You already belong to me. I’m willing to take you in, now that Rogue has discarded you.”
“Take me in?” I raised my eyebrows. Falcon leaned in, running his fingers down the inside of my wrist, his fingers long like Rogue’s but the nails a hard and pointed aged-ivory. The wine in my glass shivered with my trepidation.
“I don’t mind the filthy source of your power.” Falcon chuckled. “We can play games, you and I, that will keep you fully charged for battle. I know how to keep a woman like you on edge without draining the magic away.”
“I don’t believe my agreement with Rogue is void at this point,” I said with care. I sipped from my glass so I could slip out of Falcon’s touch. “What about his baby?”
Falcon waved a negligent hand. “You can pleasure me, pet, without danger of impregnation. And if Rogue survives until then, he can still claim you at the appointed time. As if that will save him.”
“Save him?”
“You were wise to refuse him.” Falcon laid his hand on my knee, inching the hem of my dress up a bit higher. “Even now the Black Dog escapes his control. The odds are against him surviving until your contract is up with me. You’ll be far better off as my pet than his.”
I studied the flaring triumph in Falcon’s yellow eyes. “You know, where I come from, sometimes people try to make pets of the wrong animals. They bring home a bobcat kitten or a part-wolf pup. At first everything is fine. Then they grow up and things change. One day, without warning, their cute little tamed pet is a vicious, savage beast.”
I held his eyes a moment, then shrugged and lifted my wine again and sat back, uncrossing my legs and recrossing them the other direction, again shaking off that clawed touch.
“Sadly, it often takes a serious injury or even death to open their eyes to the fact that Mittens the kitten is a wild and dangerous beast, with all the deadly power a true predator possesses.”
“Do you have a point, Lady Gwynn?” Falcon asked. I was pleased to see him drain his wine and refill the glass from the carafe.
“I thought you might enjoy debating the difference between a pet and a wild animal that is caged—” I touched my fingertips to my throat, “—and what happens when it is no longer restrained.”
Falcon seized my wrist, yanking me so the wine in my glass sloshed over the faceted rim, spilling down my arm in bloody rivulets. His pointed nails, nearly talons, dug in, drawing my own dark blood to the surface to join the mix. “Have a care, pet. Restraint can be immediately arranged.”
“I’m sick of your threats, Falcon,” I whispered, a sweet smile curving my lips. “I’ve endured more pain than this—thanks for that, by the way—and dealt with department chairs more malicious than you. With more power.”
I hurled a brief and pointed desire his way, connecting it to all that dull rage I’d accumulated over the years, from every totalitarian senior professor, every smug condescension from Clive, each of Falcon’s maneuvers to cow me. With a shriek, Falcon yanked his hand away as if burned, clutching his hand to his chest.
Burned he was. The hand that had touched me sizzled charcoal, visibly smoking. The smell of cooked flesh filled the air.
It turned my stomach. Too much like that poor dead page—should have thought of that. But I clamped down on my own horror. Sometimes power lay in seeming not to care. No weeping during major magical power struggles.
I sat back in my chair, poured myself some wine. At least the cough-syrupy scent of it was thick enough to screen the smell of burning fae.
Falcon was shrieking for his servants. His pages bustled around him, slathering his arm with something, then wrapping it in silk. I stood, idly wandering the tent while they worked, keeping one ear on Falcon’s thoughts. Startled birds wheeling through the sky.
One strawberry-smoothie-pink fellow trotted up to me and offered a cloth and bowl of water to clean my arm. I thanked him but declined. The wound helped focus my thoughts. I raised my arm, watching the dark crimson drops well up and ooze down my arm in slow spirals. The wine might have been going to my head, but the sound of Falcon’s whimpers, my strength in the face of his crushed swagger, gave me a dizzying sense of power.
I strolled over to watch the first-aid efforts, enjoying Falcon’s cringe as I stood over him.
“You know, they always say that wild animals are more afraid of you than you are of them. And that may be true. But when people get attacked? That’s because the animal decides it has no choice but to fight. When destruction seems imminent from every direction, there is no disadvantage to giving every drop of life to the hope of survival, or at least mutual destruction.”
“I told Puck, that idiot, that you weren’t trained,” Falcon hissed, kicking one of the pages away.
“Not mindless, anyway.”
“I can still summon Marquise and Scourge to re-collar you. In slavery to silver you’ll find yourself less cocky, human monster.”
I put down my wineglass. “Try it. Just know this—I’ll fight. With everything I have. To the death, rather than go back to that. Which means I’ll take as much as I can with me—and you’re first in line, Birdboy.”
“You would be an oathbreaker!”
I looked around the lavish tent in mock surprise. “You know, I keep hearing about the dire consequences of breaking bargains, but I’m not seeing it.”
“You are a fool,” Falcon hissed.
“It seems to me,” I continued, “that you and I need to come to some agreements. To set the flavor of our future working relationship. I’ll serve out my time with you, but I decide what magic I do and how. You tell me what you want accomplished and I’ll decide how to do it. And this—” I gestured to the table. “No more of this. I’m no one’s pet. Not Rogue’s. Not yours.”
“Agreed, Lady Gwynn.” Falcon began unwinding the silk from his arm. The silk slipped apart, sliding easily, no blood or gore caking it together. “Do your magic as you see fit—I’m not interested to interfere.”
A buff golden color showed through the folds of the silk bandage, banded with browns and blacks, a hint of cream. Falcon stood, shaking the last of the wrapping away, flaring the wing his arm had become, feathers snapping to with a whoosh like a parachute grabbing wind. The candles on the table flickered and went out in the sudden draft.
My wounded arm suddenly throbbed in sympathy.
Falcon’s eyes had lost their pupils, gone to the clear cadmium yellow of the raptor. “As long as battle goes my way. Consider me duly cautious of awaking the beast within you.”
His face lengthened, sharpened beaklike, his voice growing oddly strident.
“But, Lady Gwynn, exercise caution yourself.” His clothing morphed into feathers. “See that you keep your word in the next battle, or you will have failed to serve me. Then you will see what it means to break your oath to the fae.”
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