“No. I’m going back with Jubilee. You haven’t gotten rid of me yet. I left because I have a feeling.”
Terandis leaned forward, interest sharpening his face. “A feeling.”
“You know when something isn’t right, but you’re not sure what, but you can’t leave it alone?”
“Yes. Is it serious?”
Saeldian’s shrug turned into a shiver. “Maybe. I don’t know. Something doesn’t add up. I feel like—” Saeldian laughed. “I feel like I got sent off.”
Terandis cocked one ear toward them. “What’s that now?”
“Con artist talk,” Saeldian said. “It’s probably nothing. But it’s like an itch. I have to go back and make sure it’s nothing, or it will eat at me.”
“And then you’ll come back?”
Saeldian hesitated. “I don’t know. Yes. I will.”
Terandis smirked. “I didn’t think you’d be off-balance at parties.”
“I know how to look like I’m not off-balance at parties,” Saeldian said. “I’ll come back and show you.”
Terandis nodded and spun his chair in a tight circle. “Be quick, or I’ll send a search party.”
Saeldian kept smiling until Terandis was out of sight and they could run back to the cabin, where the Kiss of Enduring Love rested in Kell’s pack.
Dad signaled Kellwith the excuse of a mug of beer, and Kell, for one, was grateful. Bowing every tune with a band of satyrs at a fey party pushed his wrists and fingers to the limit. But Kell had kept at it because he hadn’t had a chance to sit in with any kind of band in too long. Besides, it helped him hold back the feeling of wondering exactly when Saeldian would slip out of his life.
He’d never regret the dream the two of them had shared. He was glad that he had it to remember, even if the loss of it had already started burning. It ached in his heart, and it had been getting into his fingers—sweet, and already vanishing.
That wasn’t party music, and the band let him pack his fiddle and join Terandis at a table on the edge of the noise and gaiety to drink a malty beer that smelled like a meadow in the sunshine.
“Boy, what does being sent off mean?”
Kell set the mug down in a coughing hurry.
Dad smirked. “Not the question you expected? Is it salacious?”
Someone started a jig, and Kell tapped his toes in time. “No. It’s when you send the mark off to get the goods.”
“I know whatthe markmeans, at least.” Dad put his elbows on the armrests. “So it’s how you fool someone into giving you money?”
“Close. There’s a thing we’d do, when we were really going to rob someone blind. We’d let a crack show. We’d let something odd happen. A little failure, a risk that it would all go wrong.”
“You’d let it,” Terandis said. “So it was a test.”
“Exactly. If they walked out of the game then, well, we wasted a bit of time, but it was safer to give them that chance to wiggleout, because if they stuck with us after a problem, we knew we could get it all.”
Terandis nodded along to the fast-bowing tune and the drums rushing around each other. “And that’s being sent off?”
“No. That’s the breakdown. It’s what you do before you send them off.”
Terandis’s eyebrows came together. “So the send-off is when you can trust them to stay fooled long enough to rob them.”
The music held its breath. Then one fiddle’s voice soared into the air, accompanied by one person clapping the tempo. “Right. But I don’t do this stuff anymore, Dad. I gave it up ten years ago.”
The fiddle reeled around to the start, and one drummer joined in, rolling and striking like thunder could dance. Terandis folded his arms.
“I quit, Dad.”
