Page 57 of A Beastly Court

“Wrong enough for you not to marry him anymore?” Shari ventured. “That’s a ruby engagement ring on your finger, isn’t it?”

“Oh!” Daphne cried. “Congra—” She cut herself off, blustering with embarrassment.

Curse her hyper-detail-oriented brain, I thought of Shari, though I truly wasn’t angry with her. I hadn’t known what I was going to do, so I hadn’t taken the ring off. Something niggled at me, something persuading me never to remove the ruby jewelry he’d given me. The fated mate bond and its conviction we could get through anything, no doubt.

“I haven’t decided,” I mumbled.

The mare nuzzled my shoulder. “Well, nothing a little communication can’t fix, I’m sure.”

“‘Communication?’ Oh, we’re well past that and deep in throat-chewing territory!” Flora blustered, slamming her paws down on the table and spearing four pasties under her claws. They exploded gravy-coated beef onto the stone floor and splattered salmon and leek all over Shari’s quills, narrowly missing her crochet project and the yarn stuck there. The porcupine sighed, and I leaned forward, wiping her face clear with a napkin before sneaking that napkin onto my lap for Sawyer to pick clean.

“Flora,” Daphne admonished yet again.

“No! He hurt our cider witch, and I am not going to let that go without getting a pound of flesh. Maybe two! How can you just stand there and—”

The mare stamped her hoof. “Cernunnos is the King of Beasts. The king. Any action must be from careful consideration, not from a brash impulse. And don’t you dare accuse me of not having Meadow’s back! Why, if it weren’t for my distraction, yesterday could have turned out quite different. I took this for the both of you.” She swiveled her hindquarters around for us to see a long nasty scratch along her left flank. It had been stitched up carefully and with a precision that none other than Shari possessed.

Daphne snapped her teeth at the honey badger again and then chomped down on another tart, this one strawberry. “Now you’ve got me stress eating.”

“Oh, Daphne.” I stood, reaching out a hand. I hadn’t had enough of my core freed to even consider healing anything before now, but with only the canopy under the cursed net, I could at least take away some of her pain. “Let me help.”

“Save your magic for yourself,” she told me, not unkindly. “I’ll heal up just fine.”

“And the scar will be thin,” Shari pointed out with a note of pride. Finally, she started eating, her bulbous nose wiggling with delight as she tasted her first bite of lemon tart.

Flora tore free one of the pasties still impaled on her nail and chomped down. “So the king proposed, did he?” she mused, crumbs cascading from her mouth and landing on her plate with soft tink-tink-tinks. “You both going to stay in Elfame, then?”

“I don’t know,” I answered, fiddling with the ruby engagement. My need to go to Elfame had never felt like something permanent.

“So what happens to us?”

Startled, I asked, “What do you mean?”

“Well, we’re his court. Are we all expected to go with you? A lot of us grew up in Redbud, have our homes and families and businesses here. And if we don’t, what then? What happens to us?”

“She’s talking about infrastructure,” Shari clarified, quickly returning to her lemon tart.

“There’ll be a power gap, to be sure, and no one to defend us against the mallaithe and sluagh and all the rest.” Daphne shivered, her white coat rippling and catching the light. Fleeting rainbows scattered across the stone floor.

“Whatever happens, you will not be defenseless,” I promised. “He asked me to be his queen, and I’ll have the power to—”

“Meadow.”

All four of us froze at the sound of that deep, velvety voice.

Shari spat out the bit of lemon tart she’d been chewing onto her plate and ducked down in her seat, just her quills sticking above the table top.

“Cernunnos,” Daphne said, bowing her head as I swiveled around in my seat, careful to keep Sawyer hidden under the napkins and table cloth.

“Yes?” I asked icily, refusing to budge.

The fae king stood under the archway whose passageway led to the rose courtyard, his posture impeccable but relaxed. Barefooted and dressed in those tight buckskin trousers and loose linen shirt, the V open enough to reveal a tantalizing amount of sculpted muscle, he looked like one of the heroes on the covers of Lilac’s romance novels. He oozed the calm and arrogant confidence all gorgeous males seemed to possess, and despite the seducing touch of the golden haze at the edge of my mind, I chose to remain immune to his influence.

“It’s time for training.”

“I’m not done visiting with my friends.”

Ossian wet his lips at my defiance, but his shoulders remained loose, unburdened by angry tension. “We have a schedule to keep, Meadow. As well as a bargain.”