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A group of giggling pages of indeterminate sex danced around me for a moment singing an ethereally high-pitched song, presented me with a flower and scampered off. In the varied light of the moon, campfires and flickering pillows, it reminded me of a rose. Smelled like a rose, too. I spun it in my fingertips as I followed Larch’s proclamations of my progress, and felt nothing more than flower in it. Green plant energy.
Sometimes a flower was just a flower, I supposed.
“Lady Gwynn.” Falcon swept a bow to me when I entered his tent.
“Falcon.” I nodded at him.
He raised an eyebrow on the clear side of his face. “Are you my superior, then, to neglect my title?”
“I’m not all that interested in titles,” I answered with a careless air, tossing my rose down onto the small square dinner table. Intimate and set for two, with the place settings on two adjoining sides, rather than across from each other. “Is this a date?”
“You refused Rogue’s offer. I assumed you had come to certain…decisions.” Falcon wore buff leather tonight, which clung to the long sinewy lines of him, the color one eerie shade lighter than his eyes.
“Did you now?” I flicked a glance at Larch, who stared steadily out the tent flaps, undoubtedly watching for marauding barbarians. Then I slid out the chair at my chosen place-setting and sat, crossing my legs, gathering my thoughts.
Falcon sat in the other chair, brushing my foot as he slid past. He filled my crystal goblet from a carafe, then filled his own. He held his goblet up, the faceted lines of it reflecting bloodred in the candlelight. “To us.”
“Happy days,” I answered with my grandmother’s traditional toast, lifting my own sanguine goblet and clinking it lightly to his. I waited for him to sip first before I tasted mine, and grimaced at it. Even sweeter than the white stuff. It didn’t seem possible. And I’d thought the Manischewitz wine at my college roommate’s Passover dinner was bad.
I leaned back in my chair, bringing my wineglass with me, and toyed with the rose lying by my plate, admiring its creamy warmth against the dark red cloth of Falcon’s table. I thought back to my first dinner here and the bargains I’d made that night.
“So, do you have a proposal for me?”
“You already belong to me. I’m willing to take you in, now that Rogue has discarded you.”
“Take me in?” I raised my eyebrows. Falcon leaned in, running his fingers down the inside of my wrist, his fingers long like Rogue’s but the nails a hard and pointed aged-ivory. The wine in my glass shivered with my trepidation.
“I don’t mind the filthy source of your power.” Falcon chuckled. “We can play games, you and I, that will keep you fully charged for battle. I know how to keep a woman like you on edge without draining the magic away.”
“I don’t believe my agreement with Rogue is void at this point,” I said with care. I sipped from my glass so I could slip out of Falcon’s touch. “What about his baby?”
Falcon waved a negligent hand. “You can pleasure me, pet, without danger of impregnation. And if Rogue survives until then, he can still claim you at the appointed time. As if that will save him.”
“Save him?”
“You were wise to refuse him.” Falcon laid his hand on my knee, inching the hem of my dress up a bit higher. “Even now the Black Dog escapes his control. The odds are against him surviving until your contract is up with me. You’ll be far better off as my pet than his.”
I studied the flaring triumph in Falcon’s yellow eyes. “You know, where I come from, sometimes people try to make pets of the wrong animals. They bring home a bobcat kitten or a part-wolf pup. At first everything is fine. Then they grow up and things change. One day, without warning, their cute little tamed pet is a vicious, savage beast.”
I held his eyes a moment, then shrugged and lifted my wine again and sat back, uncrossing my legs and recrossing them the other direction, again shaking off that clawed touch.
“Sadly, it often takes a serious injury or even death to open their eyes to the fact that Mittens the kitten is a wild and dangerous beast, with all the deadly power a true predator possesses.”
“Do you have a point, Lady Gwynn?” Falcon asked. I was pleased to see him drain his wine and refill the glass from the carafe.
“I thought you might enjoy debating the difference between a pet and a wild animal that is caged—” I touched my fingertips to my throat, “—and what happens when it is no longer restrained.”
Falcon seized my wrist, yanking me so the wine in my glass sloshed over the faceted rim, spilling down my arm in bloody rivulets. His pointed nails, nearly talons, dug in, drawing my own dark blood to the surface to join the mix. “Have a care, pet. Restraint can be immediately arranged.”
“I’m sick of your threats, Falcon,” I whispered, a sweet smile curving my lips. “I’ve endured more pain than this—thanks for that, by the way—and dealt with department chairs more malicious than you. With more power.”
I hurled a brief and pointed desire his way, connecting it to all that dull rage I’d accumulated over the years, from every totalitarian senior professor, every smug condescension from Clive, each of Falcon’s maneuvers to cow me. With a shriek, Falcon yanked his hand away as if burned, clutching his hand to his chest.
Burned he was. The hand that had touched me sizzled charcoal, visibly smoking. The smell of cooked flesh filled the air.
It turned my stomach. Too much like that poor dead page—should have thought of that. But I clamped down on my own horror. Sometimes power lay in seeming not to care. No weeping during major magical power struggles.
I sat back in my chair, poured myself some wine. At least the cough-syrupy scent of it was thick enough to screen the smell of burning fae.
