“This is all happening so fast!” breathes Cinda, and she reaches out across the space between us and plucks at my arm. I glance over my shoulder at her and can’t help but return the smile that blossoms on that lovely face. Cinda takes my arm, and she holds tightly onto it, squeezing it to her chest like she’s embracing someone with gusto. Her breasts squish with tightness against my arm, and I can’t help but deepen my grin. Fane, also, appears to be watching this, and when I glance her way again, her brows are raised, and her smile is as toothy as can be.
“You’re ready, I take it?” asks Fane blandly, and when we nod, she salutes us, a fingertip to her forehead before her arms fall against her sides again. “Just let me use the watercloset, and we’ll get this show on the road!”
“Perhaps that’s something we should all do?” asks Lellie, who has apparently turned into the mother of the group as she places a hand at the small of my back.
“Sure, sure,” I reply distractedly, glancing down at Cinda again, who’s looking up at me with a blush rushing over her cheeks. It seems that adventure very much agrees with the lovely lady.
I know my way around the place, and, apparently, so does Fane. We all make our way toward the back of the Nymph Tree. I’m lost in thought as I try to figure out what, exactly, is going to happen to us, if I should be worried about Cinda coming along on this trip (I’m not that worried about Lellie, because she fairly knows what she’s signing up for. I’ve told her stories. But Cinda’s an innocent—she has no idea what my sister and I are capable of, as daughters of the Fox Queen, and…oh…this trail of thought is just making me more worried).
“It’ll take an hour to get there, by dragon flight,” says Tahlia, sneaking up beside me and murmuring into my ear. “We have an hour to figure out our attack plan.”
“Oh, there’s going to be no attacking, mark my words. I’ve been too long out of this game, and we have civilians with us,” I tell her firmly, my voice soft, too, pitched so that only my sister can hear it. “I have my reservations about taking along Lellie—this could implicate her, she could lose her knighthood if this got out, and she’s my friend and I don’t want to worry about her so much. And Cinda…” I sigh. “She’s never done anything like this. I don’t want her to get hurt, Tahlia.”
“Obviously, I’ll look out for her, too,” Tahlia snorts, as if I’ve underestimated her. “But what about you? Aren’t you worried about losing your knighthood, too?”
I blink, and then take a deep, ragged breath. “Well. It’s a little more complicated than all that. This is clearly not the time and place to get into it, but…” I reach out, wrap an arm around my sister and squeeze her shoulders tightly. “But…I have a story to tell you. I hope we have enough time that I can tell it.”
A shadow passes over her face, and she nods. “Me, too. We have a lot of catching up to do. I’ve missed you.” There’s a wistful look on her face, now, and I return her smile.
“Yes. I missed you, too.”
We’ve reached the back corridor by now, and there’s a long line for the watercloset that’s positioned in the back of the tavern. The line wraps along the back of the trunk of the tree (inside, of course, and far beneath the ground, there’s magic used to make the tree look much larger than it actually is, magic used for all sorts of things within this place).
“We need to get moving right away, we have much to finish before dawn comes,” my sister tells me, pursing her mouth into a thin line, “so we won’t be able to stop and talk to Rowan.”
I think of the nymph, and I sigh. “She’ll be sad we’ve left without saying goodbye.”
“We’ll come back. Won’t we?” asks my sister, and her words are plaintive. I nod, working my jaw.
“I see no reason not to. Tahlia, I’m…I’m sorry.” My jaw clenches. “It’s just…when Ma died—”
“I know,” Tahlia says quickly, and there’s a stiffness to her, and she won’t look at me as we take our place at the tail of the line. “I…know. It pained me, too, and we all grieve in our own ways. It just hurt, and deeply, when it seemed that you wanted to put everything behind you. That you wanted to put me behind you.”
I glance at her in surprise. “That’s not…that’s not what I ever intended on doing.”
Tahlia holds my gaze, and though her face is so strong—there’s always been so much strength to it—there’s a bit of pain that passes, just beneath her features. “It seemed like it.”
The line moves forward, and I take a step backward, not wanting to look away from Tahlia. “Tahlia, I’m so sorry—that’s not what I—” but before I can get the rest out, I run into someone.
I was taking a step backward to keep up with the line—I was hardly moving quickly, and there was no force behind the step. But when my body hits the softness of another, there’s a growl of anger that emanates from the other person.
“I’m sorry,” I murmur absent-mindedly, and I turn back to Tahlia. “I want you to know that—” I begin, but I don’t get much further. For there’s a strong hand that grips my elbow, where there is no armor—only leather. A strong enough hand that turns me around quickly. Or it would, at least, but I’m standing firmly. So it only results in pulling me a little off balance. I take a step backward, catching myself, turning to look at the woman in question.
The woman I ran into.
I was paying attention to my sister, and though I apologized to this lady for stepping into her, I didn’t really think about it. But now that she’s caught my attention—and my arm—I blink.
The woman I ran into is one of the fair folk.
The fair folk are…well, it’s unfair to call them all intimidating, powerful and deadly, but most of them have earned that reputation. They are the most magical of all peoples here on Agrotera. Some have migrated to other worlds, and there, they’re known as fairies. But people have ideas about fairies. They think they’re sweet and small, granters of wishes and full of pixie dust.
But that’s…not true.
Fair folk are deadly. They’re magical, yes, but they often use a deep, primeval magic that is so old and ancient that it moves beyond ideas of good and evil. The fair folk move through the world as beautiful as a dream, but they are selfish and cruel, and take great delight in harming other creatures. The knights of Arktos avoid them at all cost. They’re rare—you don’t often see one of the fair folk these days in Arktos at all, actually—but that does not make the few here any less deadly.
I appear to have angered this fair folk, here and now, for though she’s shorter than me, the top of her pretty, silver-haired head only reaching the top of my shoulder, and much lither, and wispy-seeming, almost, she’s glancing up at me now with dark eyes that reflect the sharpness of a dagger.
“You bumped into me,” she whispers, and her voice is so soft and pretty. It reminds me of chimes or bells, tolling brightly in the distance, but there’s an undercurrent of rage beneath it.
This fair folk appears to be fairly inebriated. Whereas Draco can apparently hold their drink quite well, fair folk cannot. I’ve only ever seen one other fair folk drunk, and that was many years ago, and also here, at the Nymph Tree.
She caused a pretty terrible fight, if I remember correctly.
“I’m sorry. Truly. May I buy you a drink?” I ask her, deepening a smile. My words come out smoothly, but though I keep my gaze on her, my entire body is on high alert, tense and at the ready.
“I don’t want you to buy me a drink. I’m here with her,” says the fair folk, jerking over her shoulder with her thumb at…really, any number of women. I’m not exactly certain who she’s pointing to.
“I’m so sorry I bumped into you—my apologies,” I croon to her, but there’s a blush rising into her face as she stares past me, her eyes narrowing into hard, dark points.
“Is that a Draco?” she asks, and she lets go of my elbow, shoving past me. She’s surprisingly strong for someone so small. I say “surprisingly strong,” because it wasn’t just a simple shove.
The shove she gave me was strong enough to push me back onto a table.
I was standing firmly, and I have more than a bit of strength to me, but she has superhuman strength, it appears, for one moment, I’m standing, and the next I’m flying through the air. My shoulders and hips take most of the hit, as I land on the table, and I groan as I roll over into someone’s soup, my shoulder armor upending the bowl of green stuff onto the woman’s lap.
“Sorry,” I murmur, and I’m pushing off the table, standing, just in time to see the diminutive fair folk punch Fane.
That superhuman strength of hers is apparently quite potent.
For Fane flies backwards into the wall of the Nymph Tree.
“Let’s just stop this before it starts,” I’m saying, my voice loud, pitched to carry through a room that’s going quite silent, but there’s no time for my words to register, because Fane is getting up to her feet, dusting off her arms.
“I’m sorry, mates,” says Fane, standing up a little straighter, her grin wicked, “but I’m not a fan of fairies.”
“What did you just call me?” roars the fair folk lady at the same time that Tahlia runs a hand over her face and murmurs: “well, shit.”
“You heard me, fairy!” Fane growls.
It’s actually so quiet in the Nymph Tree right now that you could hear the tolling of a death bell on a distant mountaintop, if one happened to start ringing.
Because that’s about the mood of the Nymph Tree at the moment.
“Fane, we don’t have any time for this,” I murmur, stepping forward between the fair folk and the Draco, but I’m just not fast enough. Either that, or the other two women are much, much faster than I am, for they rush across the space between them and smack into one another, and then there’s the shing of swords and daggers and other weapons being drawn, and then…
Well.
That’s when the fight breaks out.
The fight in the Nymph Tree does not, of course, involve every patron. A lot of the women around, human or no, keep on with their conversations, their laughter and their drinks, occasionally lifting a pint of ale to keep it from being knocked off their table. But many of the people start fighting all at once. Like magic, I suppose, if magic was made of women, alcohol, expletives and flying fists.
In the maelstrom of mayhem that follows, I do my best to avoid the women slugging at one another and try to find Cinda in all of this. I don’t want her to get hurt, and I certainly don’t want her involved in a fight—this is all my fault that she’s here, after all, and it’s my duty to keep her safe.
But I shouldn’t have worried.
Cinda’s standing on a table in a matter of heartbeats, and she’s got a chair in her hands. If anyone comes near her, she wallops them with the chair with a beaming smile on her face.
Well, Cinda’s all right then. Let me see, where’s my sister...
Ah. She is also standing on a table, but she’s added a bit of pizzazz to the entire affair, because she’s got her hook and rope around a wooden chandelier hanging from the ceiling, full of cool-to-the-touch magelamps, and when she goes for the fair folk that’s still accosting Fane, she flies through the air, gripping the rope, with her boots aimed for the fair folk’s head.
I don’t see if she makes impact, though, because the last person I need to make certain is all right is Lellie. But I needn’t have worried. She, also, seems to be in her element, and she’s not even drawn her sword yet. Lellie’s only a little ways from me, and every time a woman comes toward her, running or rambling or even flying through the air, Lellie steps smartly sideways and avoids being touched. She picks up a flagon of ale from a server’s tray who walks past (this server, also, appears oblivious to the fight, which she’d probably have to be, working at the Nymph Tree and all), and she toasts me with the flagon before starting to drink (and, also, neatly sidestepping another woman who happened to be thrown through the air in her general direction).
I make my way through the fray toward Cinda, and when I reach her table, I leap up to join her.
“You seem to be doing just fine!” I yell toward her as I pick up a chair leg from the top of the table—a chair leg that Cinda appears to have broken off her chair as she whaled it against someone.
“I work in a bakery!” Cinda shouts back as she lets the chair fly again against the giantess, who seems to have woken from her slumber and is blithely trying to flatten every tavern-goer with her bare hands. Cinda downs her with that single hit from the chair, and I can’t help but be vastly impressed.
“Are bakeries really that dangerous?” I ask her, clocking a warrior woman upside the head as she tries to reach for Cinda’s leg to yank her down from the table.
“You’d be surprised!” is Cinda’s reply as she steps neatly away from the warrior woman’s grasp, and also clocks her on the side of her head with the chair. She’s tempered her hit to be much, much gentler than she used on the giantess, and this means that the warrior woman is still coming for her. “Oh, really,” sighs Cinda, and then she tries again, this time swinging the chair with a bit more gusto.
The chair’s seat breaks as it connects with the warrior woman, but the hit also knocks the woman unconscious, thank the stars.
“All right—we should probably start plotting our exit,” I tell Cinda, and hop off the table. I offer my arm up to her, and I can’t help but smile as I look up at this woman in her pretty dress, the broken chair in her hands, and a beaming smile making her face light up like the sun. “If you would, milady?”
She drops the broken chair, and she takes my hand. When she touches me, the warmth and softness of her skin, even the little bit of sweat along her palm from fighting valiantly—it ignites a fire inside of me. I help her as she leaps nimbly down to the floor, and then I’m wrapping an arm around her, drawing her close to me as the tavern brawl continues and starts to crescendo around us.
But that’s not all that’s igniting at the moment…
My feelings for Cinda involve a lot of heat, but I blink as I feel too-much-warmth start to rise around us, and I’m suddenly starting to feel much too hot in this armor. And I realize that the low light of the tavern isn’t exactly that low anymore. And then I breathe out, my mouth falling open.
There’s a reason there are magelamps everywhere for light in the Nymph Tree. Magelamps are cool to the touch, and they’re lit with magic, and could never, ever set anything aflame.
They need to use magelamps to light to the Nymph Tree because it is, of course, a tree.
Fire makes trees burn. So fire is, therefore, not allowed anywhere near the Nymph Tree.
But the fire in front of my eyes right now appears not to have received that message.
“Fire,” I whisper, and then I wet my lips, shouting again. “Fire!”
But no one brawling in the tree currently appears to heed me. And then there’s a whooshing sound, and a ray of fire emanates from something, adding more flame to the blaze that’s currently eating a table, some chairs and part of the wall…
I stare in shock at Fane, who’s still brawling with the fair folk lady. Fane is tilting her head back, her chest inflating, and then…
Oh, no.
Oh, no.
Fane breathes fire into the room.
I’ve mentioned before that Draco are capable of breathing fire in their dragon forms, but also in their human forms, a fact that often makes them a little bit more intimidating than being able to transform into dragons (it’s difficult to be more intimidating than that, truly, and yet somehow they manage). And that’s exactly what she’s doing now. I’m not certain what she’s thinking—she knows that the Nymph Tree is entirely made of wood, it being a tree, but she’s chin-deep in the thick of the fight, and I don’t think she’s remembering where she is…
“Oh, shit,” mutters Tahlia, coming up beside me and staring, her mouth open, at the chaos erupting in front of us. “I…we need to stop this.”
I glare witheringly at my sister, an
d then I sigh. “I’ll go for the fair folk, if you take the Draco.”
“How come you get the easy one?” my sister kids, and then she winks, laughing before we both skirt the edge of the perimeter of fighting women…women who have seemingly not noticed that there’s fire in their midst…
As we approach the tussling Draco and fair folk, I edge around them uncertainly. I need to find an opening in their fight where I can grab the fair folk and tear her away from the Draco, but that opening is seemingly impossible to find. For one, these two move very quickly, for another, the flames around both of them are very high at this point.
“What in the world is going on?” comes a voice that’s very familiar and very high pitched with anger, emanating from the entrance to the room.
And there’s Rowan, her hands on her hips, staring with her mouth open at the chaos spread before her.
And the flames.
Lots and lots of flames at this point.
“We’re working on fixing it, Rowan,” yells Tahlia with a frown, and then she dives into the middle of the fighting women and makes a bee-line toward Fane. She manages to wrap an arm around the Draco’s broad shoulders and pulls her back, out of the fray, just as Fane inhales deeply, ready to breathe fire again.
“Not right now, my friend,” says Tahlia, and she claps a hand over Fane’s mouth, but then Tahlia pulls her away from my view, and I’m left to contend with the fair folk.
“She…I have to avenge…my honor,” the fair folk is saying, but she has a bloody nose (fairies bleed blue blood, so it looks a little strange in the shifting light from the fire), and she also looks a little drunk, now that I’m looking at her.
Just One Knight Page 15
