A Fistful of Earth: Chronicles of Marsdenfel #2

Year 532, New Calendar - part II

Prince Aidan stays close by my side as he guides me towards the stables. “Is he troubling you?”

I glance back, but of course he waited to ask until out of earshot of his brother-in-law. “Not exactly. I don’t believe he intends to.”

“So he does.”

I rub my face and summarize my interactions heretofore with King Liathen II of Marsdenfel to Crown Prince Aidan of Salles. Even the succinct version takes us into the stables. Horse stink assaults my nose. I breathe through my mouth.

Evonalé waits for us, petting the muzzle of a horse the color of my Peyton’s coffee after he’d finished adding milk to it, in a plain dress cut from the same fabric as her husband’s. She hears enough to be staring at me by the end of my tale.

“What does he want with you?” she asks, voice wavering as she assumes that her mother’s son wants me for the same reason that her father’s son wanted her. “Not—”

I raise my hands before Pickle freaks out and sets the barn on fire. “Calm down. He’s spent his life a prisoner, and evidently he got a bit more faery blood than anyone gives him credit for. He still be learning how to cope with society.”

“Did that help, when he touched your face?” Aidan asks.

I give him a sour look. He hides his smile. “Mind your tongue, Prince Whimsy. I think a haint might’ve gotten hold of it.”

The twenty-one-year-old crown prince sticks his tongue out at me.

“How adult of you.”

Evonalé missed the gist of that exchange, from her puzzled frown. The stablemaster approaches and takes the coffee-with-milk horse’s halter from Evonalé. “I’ll saddle Rowan for you.”

Evonalé nods. “Thank you.”

The stablemaster leads Rowan past the empty stalls through the door to the tackle room. A warning lurches in my chest. I take a step back and follow my feral side’s prompting to face the stable entrance.

A man with chocolate skin stands there, cloaked and bedecked in supple black armor and knives. Both glitter in the light.

Prince Aidan’s magic feels soothing and cool as he draws it to him. Evonalé’s magic wells up like the dry heat of a campfire.

My magic tugs, wanting to join the fun, but I keep its reins tight. My feral side stretches and tenses, at the ready; it likes threats, and it be n’t picky about if I face them on four feet or two.

I generally prefer sticking to two.

I study the dark man’s glittering knives. “Pretty. Are those obsidian?” My pleasant smile shows my teeth.

The man and Prince Aidan both stare at me, but Evonalé avoids looking my way. My magic swipes for the earth beneath my feet, wanting to cause a tremor, but I snatch it back before it can be noticed.

My skin tingles.

No, there be witnesses. Keep to two feet.

My feral side gives me a mental shrug.

Evonalé grabs a snarl of straw and ignites it with her fire—clever of her, to hide her affinity like that. Fire mages don’t need fuel to start a fire, but any such fire will be purple from the magic that fuels it.

Thanks to the straw she used, orange fire grows and curls into a ball in her palm, rather than her usual purple. She stares at the intruder. “What do you want?”

“You dead, I expect,” Aidan murmurs, a dagger already in his hand from one of his arm sheaths.

I shake my head and speak at normal volume. “Chitterweave armor and obsidian knives are expensive for an amateur, and only an amateur would be this sloppy.”