“Wasn’t my old lady on a horse and cart?”
Aeldryc snorted. “That was a pony.”
I made a mental note to ask someone what the difference between a horse and a pony was, preferably when I wouldn’t sound like a complete idiot. “So someone else got yanked through my mirror.”
“Possibly. I need to investigate. Hopefully, we can find the evidence we need to understand what happened to you.”
I put my bread down, appetite gone. Not because I was worried about some poor twink, but because of the other question at the back of my mind. What would happen if they could understand how the mirror worked? Would I be sent back to San Jose?
I could almost smell the mildew from the leaking sink in my crappy apartment. I could feel the sticky floor of Club Vortex, the cage pressing against my back, the uniform shorts a constant reminder of what I was selling. Flunking out of community college because every practical major felt like a life sentence. It was a world without Aeldryc, without magic, and the thought was suffocating.
I didn’t want to go back.
The thought landed with a physical jolt, even though it shouldn’t have been a surprise. I had been here over three weeks, and already it felt like home. His bed felt like my bed. Three weeks didn’t seem like much, but it was enough for me to know.
There was nothing in San Jose worth going back to.
“How long will you be gone?”
“A day. Perhaps two. Thyren will remain with you, and we’ll have a guard on you at all times. You will be safe.”
“I wasn’t worried about safe.” I was worried about lonely. I was worried about sitting on the fence at the training grounds without anyone whose chain I was on, existing in a place where I fit only because one specific person had decided I belonged in his orbit. Take that person away, and what was I? I was a human accessory; a strange, small, loud thing in short shorts with no job, no purpose, and no friends.
Aeldryc set down his teacup. “Come with me.”
“To Clovertown?”
“Clovermere. But no, that’s not what I meant.” He stood and held out his hand. “I’m taking you somewhere better. Or, I suspect you’ll find it better than riding horseback.”
“Is it possible to be horseback with your cock inside me? That could change my opinion of it considerably.”
Aeldryc laughed and looped my chain around my waist, letting it settle on my hips just how I liked it. He kissed me lightly before taking my hand and leading me down a corridor through halls I hadn’t explored yet, to the Queen’s portion of the palace, and up a flight of stairs to the third floor of the eastern wing.
Or the western wing? My sense of direction had never been great.
“What is—”
He opened the doors.
The room was high-ceilinged, sun-drenched, with arched windows running the full length of one wall. Bolts of fabric lined the opposite wall on floor-to-ceiling shelves: silks, cottons, linens, wools, and things I didn’t have names for, in every color I could imagine and several I couldn’t. A massive cutting table dominated the center, its surface scarred with decades of blade marks. Spinning wheels, two of them, sat in the corner near a stone hearth. A loom the size of my entire San Jose bedroom took up the far end, its threads glinting with something thatwasn’t quite light and wasn’t quite magic and was absolutely, devastatingly beautiful.
There were baskets of yarn, thread, buttons and clasps, hooks and pins, and ribbons and trims. The room was filled with every single thing that had ever made my hands itch to create something.
My breath caught somewhere between my throat and my lungs, and for a second I just stood there, blinking, because this was a sewing room. A real one.
“Commander!”
A small, slim female elf popped up from behind the cutting table like a jack-in-the-box. She was about my height, with dark brown skin, bright green eyes, and a measuring tape draped around her neck and five or six pins stuck in her left sleeve. Her hair was in a bun that was losing its battle with gravity, brown curls escaping in every direction, and she had a smear of something blue on her cheek.
“Mistress Gossamer,” Aeldryc said, his tone marked by a deep, formal respect. “This is Pippin Crane, the man I told you about. Pip, Lyriel Gossamer, head seamstress and the Queen’s personal modiste.”
“Oh!” Her eyes went wide. She hurried around the table, her eagerness barely restrained. “Oh, this is Pip? Everyone’s been telling me about your creations! The stitching on that waistcoat, that’s—”
She was already reaching for the hem of my crop-top waistcoat, turning it up to examine the seams, and her fingers traced the line of a dart, and her green eyes went from wide to enormous.
“This is hand-stitched. Without magic. You did this with just your hands?”
“And a needle,” I said. “I had a needle. It was the thread that was the problem, actually, because I couldn’t find anything the right weight so I pulled some from the hem of a curtain in Aeldryc’s quarters.”
