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Surrounded by humans, our weapons hidden from view, without backup.
This was going to go wrong.
“I am a foot taller than the tallest man.Youare taller than the tallest man. We are never going toblend in.”
She poked me in the side—hard.
I didn’t let myself respond. Cyara had helped her pin the hood of her cloak in place over her hair, which her handmaiden had braided along the crown of her head and then knotted at the nape of her neck, the most they could manage with her shorn locks. Not as ornate as her long plait in Baylaur, but much easier to conceal.
The humans would know that we were fae. But if they realized which fae we were, we’d be mobbed. Or attacked.
I didn’t care to find out which.
“But everyone is here to have fun. The least you can do is smile.”
I shot her a baleful look that told her everything I needed to about that proposition.
Veyka rolled her eyes. “I’d settle for anything other than glower.”
I gnashed my teeth, long canines showing.
“Ancestors help me.” She looped her arm through mine and dragged me forward, to where the strangest looking human I’d ever seen stood beneath a floral archway that reached well above even my head.
The woman was completely naked.
She’d pasted exactly three leaves to her body. Large leaves, and she was a small woman, but the effect was still ridiculous. The parts of her body that weren’t covered by leaves were painted bright green.
And she had the audacity to look straight up at me and smile.
“Come to pass the night away, make a wish and you may stay,” she sang in a painfully high-pitched voice.
I felt Veyka twitch against me.
“We wish to enter the festival,” I said. I heard the roughness of my own voice. I could try to tamp it down—but there had to be other men dragged here by their wives against their will. That was an experience universal to human and fae.
“Come to pass the night away, make a wish and you may stay.” This time, the notes were a little more strained.
She swayed on her feet.
Ah—she was inebriated.
That, at least, made a bit more sense.
“Enough of this,” I grumbled, steering Veyka around the woman.
She threw out an arm. Not Veyka—the human. The tiny, ridiculous woman painted bright green, whose head barely reached Veyka’s shoulder, put out her arm to stop us from entering.
Veyka twitched again. I cut my eyes to her, searching for—
She was laughing. My Ancestors-damned mate was laughing at me.
“You have to make a wish,” she said between gasping for breath.
The woman perked up. “Come to pass the night away, make a wish and you may stay.”
“I wish for this to stop,” I bit out.
The woman frowned. Was she actually going to say something other than her ridiculous little rhyme?
