Chapter Seventeen
Seventeen
For a moment, Juniper stared at the tavern full of people—some human, some bruggane, some sidhe—and they stared back at him.
And then everyone looked at the prince, and waited.
Prince Edward smoothed some golden blond hair away from his face and then placed a hand on his chiseled jaw, considering. Was there a rule that princes had to look so pretty while contemplating the fate of the realm (or in this case, the fate of your most important person and very best bro)?
“I have something you want,” Juniper said. His voice cracked as he said it, something he would lie awake thinking about for the next six business moons, but he continued, “And you have something I want.”
“Very well,” the prince said. “All of you, leave us.”
“Leave…the public tavern?” Bill asked. He turned to Phteven and whispered rather loudly, “Can he do that?”
Phteven patted his arm gently.
It looked like a Mo gesture, a Shh, I got this gesture, which Juniper didn’t want to think any more about. Not while he was here, doing this.
It was a good thing that mortal danger had presented itself just now, or Juniper might have been stuck thinking about his feelings.
“Yes, let’s stay in the tavern,” the prince decided. “Everyone else can go.”
Oh, the tavern. Bless the tavern.
Juniper could have cried (if he hadn’t sworn off crying only hours ago).
“All right!” he said, a little too jubilantly.
Tone was hard.
Little by little, people cleared out of the space, someone knocking over the sign that read, in the common tongue, Nameless Inn.
A placard that had been attached to the sign clattered across the floor toward Juniper’s feet, boasting The fanciest around!
and beneath that: Rooms with up to one bed available now.
The prince gestured toward the bar, and Juniper followed him, his stomach tight with dread.
Not Mo, that little voice said again. Juniper forced his feet to keep moving.
The prince cleared a few sidhe at the bar with a wave of his hand, ordered drinks with a second, and then gestured to Juniper with a third wave.
“You must have magic hands,” Juniper said.
“You…you brought me here to talk about my hands?” the prince asked, his impeccable brow furrowing with confusion.
Mo would have just rolled with it.
“No.” Juniper cleared his throat. “No, I came here to talk about your sword.”
Divona help him. How was he supposed to do this without Mo?
But there was no way to do it with Mo, either, not when Mo refused to even have a conversation with him about the danger they were in.
“My sword?”
“And what to do with it.” Juniper plunged on bravely despite it all. “I don’t want you to kill Mo.”
The lobby of the inn, which had been bustling a moment ago, was unnervingly quiet now that the guests had emptied back out into the streets.
The fire still crackled warmly in the hearth, there was a bit of mead splashed in a puddle near Juniper’s feet (at least he hoped it was mead), and the clink of glasses behind the bar was beautifully familiar.
But the rest, the rest was—
“Mo. Is that his name?” The prince leaned back in the booth. “And why shouldn’t I throw Mo in jail, or worse? You were harboring a dragon.”
“And that was a terrible misunderstanding,” Juniper said.
“We are so sorry, and I am taking a step back to listen and learn.” He took a step backward from the bar, shaking his head at himself in what he could only hope was a convincing expression of dismay.
“But you have to understand—you can’t kill Mo. ”
Prince Edward arched an eyebrow (Just one! Just one at a time! Princes really weren’t like the rest of us) and then leaned forward, resting his elbows on the table between them.
“You have to understand something,” he said. “I want that dragon, before my sister comes to town and tries to steal all my glory.”
“But it’s just a little girl,” Juniper blurted.
“My sister?” The prince looked taken aback. “Have you met her? Is she here?”
“Not your sister,” Juniper said. “She—”
“Yes, she is a normal-size human woman, though she has a mean ax swing,” the prince said bitterly. “Who is just a little girl, then? Your friend Mo?”
It was, indeed, time for another sigh.
So Juniper sighed, but softly enough that hopefully it would not be noticeable to the prince, and then said, “No, Your Highness. The dragon is just a little girl. And—and we didn’t know until the moment you did,” he plunged bravely onward.
“Have you found her?” Edward fixed that piercing blue gaze on Juniper.
Juniper had never really fallen for blue eyes—brown eyes had to be the prettiest in all the realm—but there was no denying that Edward was…striking. Juniper thought for a moment about the sharpness in Mo’s voice when he’d asked if Juniper had a crush. He shook off the thought.
“We—we’re close to finding her,” Juniper said. “But we don’t want her to get hurt. We’ve met her and talked to her a little bit. Her name is Bear, and she’s very small, and she likes cheese, and she doesn’t deserve to be hunted.” That last part came out all in a rush.
The prince looked at Juniper for a long, long moment.
Something shifted in his blue eyes, something Juniper couldn’t quite keep up with, and then he nodded slowly.
“I don’t think we understood each other, then,” he said.
“I don’t want to hurt this little girl. Of course not.
I just didn’t know these dragons were shifters, not to begin with.
You know there are some, a very dangerous breed of them, that don’t shift at all?
And those dragons are just beasts. In fact, they’re the reason we have so few shifters left at all.
In my father’s time, the beasts hunted the shifters almost to extinction. ”
Juniper’s chest ached. Mo knew the stories of the old days better, before a new king had come across the sea.
When the monstrous and the mythic had walked the land as citizens, just the same as humans and bruggane and sidhe.
At best, Juniper only knew bits and pieces in the old language, and some of the songs.
So he had no way to know if this was true—if the beasts had hunted the shifters. If princes could be trusted.
“You…you don’t want to hurt Bear?” Juniper asked, drawing the words out as slow and thoughtful as a summer day. “But you were—you were asking people to fire arrows at her.”
“I thought she was attacking us,” the prince said. “And I’m very sorry. I would never have done that if I realized she was just a child.”
Juniper’s heart lifted for the first time since he’d woken up in a cell with his head on Mo’s lap to the news they were going on a quest. “You just…we just misunderstood each other?”
It hurt to hope this hard.
“Of course,” the prince said. “Juniper, isn’t it?
You have to understand, when this quest started, we thought we were hunting a dangerous beast. But now that we know it’s just a little girl, a small child…
we just want to help her. The palace would be so pleased to welcome the first shifter found in the realm in decades. ”
Juniper shifted uncomfortably. This wasn’t exactly what Mo’s grandmam’s stories had indicated.
Those stories he did still have. But then again, Mo’s grandmam had stayed close to Tús her entire life, so maybe there were secrets to this realm she didn’t know.
“So what would you…what would you do with her?”
“Well, we would muster a whole party to take her into the mountains and find her remaining people,” the prince said. “I’m ambitious, as I’m sure you can tell. And I would love to be able to negotiate peace with the dragon shifters. Bear could help us do that.”
Juniper almost opened his mouth and asked if that meant he and Mo could go home. But Mo—brave, beautiful, heroic Mo—would never do that, and Juniper was realizing he couldn’t ask that, either. No matter how badly he wanted to.
“We would go with you,” Juniper blurted.
This was something. This was better, even, better than a sword leveled at Mo’s throat.
Better than Mo facing down a prince’s blade and telling him he was wrong.
“Bear trusts us. I can track, I can help you find the other dragons, and Mo can take care of Bear, and your party can offer us protection.”
He suppressed a groan as he realized this meant he would be in very close proximity to Bill Bronson until well after Samhain.
“You could both go home, if you wanted,” the prince said.
“Free and safe. I can forgive the little quarrel we had at the barn, and you can forget all this ever happened. I hear that you have a personal rivalry with a member of my party, so we can just…interpret things that way. You were upset with…oh, what’s his name?
The tall, muscular man with the nasally voice? ”
Juniper resented the implication that Bill could be either tall or muscular, but he did have a nasally voice. Maybe from all the times Juniper had punched him in the nose. “Bill Bronson.”
“Ah, yes, Bronson,” the prince said, shaking his head with an expression of mild distaste, a response Juniper could relate to.
“We can’t go home,” Juniper said.
It was the first time saying it out loud, and it was just as depressing as he’d thought it would be. He couldn’t go home, not while Mo wasn’t there. Not while they had something that needed doing.
The prince hesitated. “Very well,” he said. “And you think your friend will go along with this?”
“Give me some time to convince him,” Juniper added miserably. Mo was never going to come home after this. “And meet us north along the river. In exchange…”
He let his voice trail off.
Juniper’s stomach twisted. Bear’s hand had been so small in his. Mo’s laugh had been so vivid and warm when he’d looked at both of them.
“I want your word,” he finished finally. “I want you to give me your word in front of anyone. That you won’t harm Bear, and that Mo and I will be allowed to help Bear get home, and then we will be free to go home.”
After a moment, the prince nodded again. “I will sign something with a recruiter present, as well as a witness from this town, and one from my own mercenary party,” he said. “Bill Bronson is literate, I think. He’ll do.”
At this point, Juniper shouldn’t have even been surprised.
The prince sent someone for a recruiter, an additional witness (a woman named Yana with black curly hair and a sharp curved blade, who said very little), and Bill Bronson, who avoided Juniper’s gaze the entire time.
When it was done—paper signed and witnessed and then stamped with the royal seal (the royal seal!
Juniper had only ever seen knockoffs on those little trinkets sold in the town square)—the prince sent some of his men to bring back more supplies for Juniper.
Food, a skin of water, and even a small bottle of fire ale.
It was a token of appreciation, the prince said, but it sent dread unspooling through Juniper’s stomach—because the prince couldn’t know that Juniper had thrown a fire ale cocktail at him, could he? Surely he wouldn’t let him live if he had?
Finally, when they were finished, Juniper repacked his belongings and set off into the forest to find Bear and Mo.
The prince would muster his men and then meet Juniper and Mo and Bear at a point along the trail the following evening. It all hinged on Juniper convincing Mo this was a good idea—or just convincing him to follow Juniper along the right trail, and convincing him after the fact.
The third option was to take Bill Bronson with him right now as the prince’s emissary, and let Bill explain the plan, but Juniper would rather be trampled by a hundred wild horses or shot out of a cannon.
The sun was beginning to sink toward the horizon when Juniper finally left Filleadh, drawing his cloak tightly around him against the growing chill, praying to old gods who never answered that Morn Elmthorn would listen to him.