Page 48 of A Beastly Court

“I’m not going to stab her in the eye,” came a condescending reply. “I’m just going to see how she’s getting on. Now finish your bath.”

“You’re covered in soot too!”

“Sawyer,” that second voice—clearly female—snapped. “I don’t have time for your attitude. She’s still out of it; probably will be for a while yet.”

Were they talking about me? Thistle thorns, my head felt like it’d been sat on by an elephant. I was ghastly cold, and why did everything sound like I had cotton wool stuffed into my ears? Maybe that was the resulting pulp of my brain after getting sat on by an elephant clogging everything up.

“Has she said anything else, besides Emmett and Cody’s names?” the female continued.

“Nothing specific, just a lot of mumbling. It was so slurred I couldn’t read her lips. You got to Emmett and Cody, though, right?”

“They’ve been warned that she was concerned about them, but with nothing else to tell them, it’s in their hands now.” A sigh, then sternly: “You can’t let her out of your sight again, do you understand? With your memories back, you know what’s at stake. But don’t push her, especially about those rubies. Unlike everything else, those are tied to her emotions. Her mind needs to heal, so she has to discover things for herself. If you just flat-out tell her, she’ll get confused and angry and we’ll be right back here with her drooling into her bed. Meadow has a job to do, and she can’t do that if she’s in a tizzy. You both need to be patient.”

Okay, they were definitely talking about me. Rude. It was even ruder because as clearly as I heard her, my muddled brain whisked the conversation away. How dare she say something important when I couldn’t concentrate?

“But Arthur,” the first one whined.

“What did I just say?”

There was an exchange of muted yowls and a staccato bap-bap-bap, then something soft and velvety touched my face. Peeled back the lids of my right eye. Six shapes, three black and three striped, swam across my vision.

“Hmm,” the black ones grunted. “Looks like your spell took, but it won’t last. She wasn’t exactly able to consent.” All three turned back to the striped ones and popped them on the heads with a solid bap. The three striped ones flattened their ears with a mild hiss. “Don’t you hiss at me, Sawyer Blackfoot.”

Sawyer. I knew that name. I clung to it, clawing myself to the surface of consciousness.

“Had you not already forged some kind of bond,” the black ones continued, “the Soul-Bonding Spell would’ve backfired and I’d be scraping your fur and maybe your guts off the wall! And after all the work I put into you too.”

“It was the only thing I could think of,” the Sawyers whined, becoming small. “She needed more help than I could give her otherwise. Bonded witches and familiars have more resistance against fae magic. She needed me, and… I love her. She was worth the risk. I’m—” The three Sawyers stood up tall, chins lifted. “I’m not sorry, Ame.”

Ame. I knew that name too.

“You,” I croaked, forcing open my other eye. A sluggish blink condensed the six cats down to four, then two.

“She’s alive!” Sawyer cried, flinging himself into my lap.

“We already knew that,” Ame replied tartly, retreating to the side and leaving black pawprints in her wake.

As the half striped, half black tomcat wormed under my hands for snuggles, his lower half smearing soot all over my dress, I fought for clarity through… everything. At the recesses of my mind were the familiar golden haze, a retreating white fog, and something else. Something like an amber-colored shadow that was pouncing around and swatting at the haze and fog. “What happened to me?”

Sawyer stopped wriggling and cast a worried look at the other cat. Something told me she wasn’t normally black, but she was making no move to clean her fur. She just sat there like a guardian of the underworld who’d abandoned her post, her yellow eyes drilling me with a judgmental stare.

“What do you remember?” she asked, her tone light. “Let’s start there and work our way forward, shall we?”

“I… I was yelling at him.” My brow furrowed at the tomcat, at the black smearing his flanks and tail. I couldn’t tell where it ended and his black feet began. “Though I don’t remember what about. Why are you gross?”

“I, uh, was hiding in the chimney?”

“Why?”

“That fae came in here,” Ame answered for him.

“What? Why?” Ossian never came into the east wing, not unless I’d gotten drunk on fairy wine.

“You were not yourself, so he put you on the bed and left.”

Curse that fairy wine. Glancing down at myself, I found the foraging bag and the censer right where I left them—on my person—along with yesterday’s clothes, but the white fur coat was hanging up neatly in the open wardrobe. “You’d think he would’ve taken this all off to make me more comfortable,” I muttered.

“Be glad he can’t,” came Ame’s flat reply. Then, lightly: “How’s your head?”