Page 84 of The Filigree Key

“Pervert,” I called out to them.

Ossian chuckled and waved for Alec and the others to continue. This was his culture, after all, taking delight in humiliating and degrading his enemies. While the exhibition of this more private part of my life did embarrass me, especially when they started jeering at the size of my clothes, I wasn’t a thin-skinned bimbo. I took the opportunity given me by sitting on the Stag Man’s lap to do two things: confirm my previous suspicions that the big blue jewel on Ossian’s necklace was indeed a cloch and scheme with my familiar.

“How did he find you?” I asked Sawyer, my eyes lowered and my bottom lip pinched between my teeth—the very appearance of embarrassment.

“It was actually Flora who set the wards off, not me,” he answered, a proud note in his voice that was quickly sobered when I started to panic. “No, no! She’s fine. You were right about my catness being an asset. We used the glitter you made and got in through the drainage tunnel. I think it was dumb luck she hadn’t tripped anything until we got halfway down the other tunnel. But she was right. It leads to that hanging shed. We could smell it.”

“But she escaped?”

Sawyer was careful not to nod, and I took a moment to flush and turn my head away when a female Brother exclaimed over the girth of my spare leather corset. Body shaming. How thoroughly unoriginal.

“I caused a distraction so she could escape,” Sawyer continued. “It’s one thing to find me snooping. It’d be something else entirely if we were both caught.”

“You’re kind of awesome, little cat.”

The tabby tomcat enjoyed the praise only for a moment before he deflated. “Not awesome enough to break through these wards, though. Maybe if I’d finished at Grimalkin University, I’d be a better familiar.”

“You’d only be more educated. Your best comes from your heart, and yours is the size of a lion’s.”

Sawyer didn’t reply with words, but a wave of gratitude radiated through me.

“Found this hidden in her room,” Alec sneered, shattering our moment of respite from both our prisons.

I paled, thinking he’d found my secret spot in the chimney, but he held out the moonstone collar. The jewel caught the blue light of the fireplace and twinkled with a pearlescent luster.

“It was wedged under her mattress.”

“Bring it here,” Ossian said.

Smirking at me, Alec climbed the dais to deposit the collar into Ossian’s outstretched hand. He inspected the gold-and-moonstone collar as if it were a fine bracelet. With a jerk, he ripped the moonstone free.

“Up you get,” he told me, squeezing my backside.

I complied so quickly, he snapped, “Don’t go anywhere.”

So I stood beside the armrest and tried to glare a hole through his beautiful copper hair and into his skull. Ignoring me, Ossian extracted a coil of silver wire and a small pair of needle-nose pliers from one of his pouches and got to work. He murmured in Faerish as he deftly cut wire to length and wove it into a simple open-stranded braid. After connecting it to the moonstone, he held it out to me.

“Put this on your cat.”

While gold was inert to magic, silver most definitely was not. And you did not mutter while working with metal unless it was on purpose, lest you accidentally imbue it with something you did not intend.

My hands remained at my sides. “No.”

“You’ll put this on your cat,” he said calmly, “or that blade tastes another inch of the bear’s flesh.”

Scowling, I snatched the collar. “What did you do to it?”

“Think of it as a mobile cage. He’ll be able to move around, but he’ll be restricted to the castle. And of course, no magic.”

Sawyer hunched into a small ball as I approached, giving his head a fearful shake.

I paused halfway to the cage on its pedestal and threw a look over my shoulder. “What’s the catch?”

“No catch.”

The bald tip of Sawyer’s tail flicked. “Sure, and I’m an orange tabby cat. What else are we going to lie about today?”

“Why are you being . . . nice? Ish,” I asked the Stag Man.