Chapter 17
Pip
I was still sore two days later when Aeldryc put on his serious face at breakfast and my appetite left immediately.
His regular face was already serious by any reasonable human standard—stone jaw tense, violet eyes narrowed.
The serious face added a crease between his eyebrows and a particular tightness at the corner of his mouth that meant he was about to say something I wouldn’t like.
“There has been another sighting,” he said.
I stopped chewing as the bread turned to chalk in my mouth.
“Another sighting of what?”
“Another twink.”
A laugh almost escaped me. They were still convinced ‘twink’ was a magical species, and nothing I said could change their minds.
And even worse, the palace rumor mill insisted I’d enchanted Aeldryc, because the idea that a 750-year-old fae commander could just be into a guy like me was apparently less believable than dark magic. It was, frankly, insulting.
“Where?”
“The same place we found you, different old lady, this one with a horse and cart.”
“Wasn’t my old lady on a horse and cart?”
Aeldryc snorted. “That was a pony.”
I made a mental note to ask someone what the difference between a horse and a pony was, preferably when I wouldn’t sound like a complete idiot. “So someone else got yanked through my mirror.”
“Possibly. I need to investigate. Hopefully, we can find the evidence we need to understand what happened to you.”
I put my bread down, appetite gone. Not because I was worried about some poor twink, but because of the other question at the back of my mind. What would happen if they could understand how the mirror worked? Would I be sent back to San Jose?
I could almost smell the mildew from the leaking sink in my crappy apartment.
I could feel the sticky floor of Club Vortex, the cage pressing against my back, the uniform shorts a constant reminder of what I was selling.
Flunking out of community college because every practical major felt like a life sentence.
It was a world without Aeldryc, without magic, and the thought was suffocating.
I didn’t want to go back.
The thought landed with a physical jolt, even though it shouldn’t have been a surprise. I had been here over three weeks, and already it felt like home. His bed felt like my bed. Three weeks didn’t seem like much, but it was enough for me to know.
There was nothing in San Jose worth going back to.
“How long will you be gone?”
“A day. Perhaps two. Thyren will remain with you, and we’ll have a guard on you at all times. You will be safe.”
“I wasn’t worried about safe.” I was worried about lonely.
I was worried about sitting on the fence at the training grounds without anyone whose chain I was on, existing in a place where I fit only because one specific person had decided I belonged in his orbit.
Take that person away, and what was I? I was a human accessory; a strange, small, loud thing in short shorts with no job, no purpose, and no friends.
Aeldryc set down his teacup. “Come with me.”
“To Clovertown?”
“Clovermere. But no, that’s not what I meant.” He stood and held out his hand. “I’m taking you somewhere better. Or, I suspect you’ll find it better than riding horseback.”
“Is it possible to be horseback with your cock inside me? That could change my opinion of it considerably.”
Aeldryc laughed and looped my chain around my waist, letting it settle on my hips just how I liked it.
He kissed me lightly before taking my hand and leading me down a corridor through halls I hadn’t explored yet, to the Queen’s portion of the palace, and up a flight of stairs to the third floor of the eastern wing.
Or the western wing? My sense of direction had never been great.
“What is—”
He opened the doors.
The room was high-ceilinged, sun-drenched, with arched windows running the full length of one wall.
Bolts of fabric lined the opposite wall on floor-to-ceiling shelves: silks, cottons, linens, wools, and things I didn’t have names for, in every color I could imagine and several I couldn’t.
A massive cutting table dominated the center, its surface scarred with decades of blade marks.
Spinning wheels, two of them, sat in the corner near a stone hearth.
A loom the size of my entire San Jose bedroom took up the far end, its threads glinting with something that wasn’t quite light and wasn’t quite magic and was absolutely, devastatingly beautiful.
There were baskets of yarn, thread, buttons and clasps, hooks and pins, and ribbons and trims. The room was filled with every single thing that had ever made my hands itch to create something.
My breath caught somewhere between my throat and my lungs, and for a second I just stood there, blinking, because this was a sewing room. A real one.
“Commander!”
A small, slim female elf popped up from behind the cutting table like a jack-in-the-box.
She was about my height, with dark brown skin, bright green eyes, and a measuring tape draped around her neck and five or six pins stuck in her left sleeve.
Her hair was in a bun that was losing its battle with gravity, brown curls escaping in every direction, and she had a smear of something blue on her cheek.
“Mistress Gossamer,” Aeldryc said, his tone marked by a deep, formal respect. “This is Pippin Crane, the man I told you about. Pip, Lyriel Gossamer, head seamstress and the Queen’s personal modiste.”
“Oh!” Her eyes went wide. She hurried around the table, her eagerness barely restrained. “Oh, this is Pip? Everyone’s been telling me about your creations! The stitching on that waistcoat, that’s—”
She was already reaching for the hem of my crop-top waistcoat, turning it up to examine the seams, and her fingers traced the line of a dart, and her green eyes went from wide to enormous.
“This is hand-stitched. Without magic. You did this with just your hands?”
“And a needle,” I said. “I had a needle. It was the thread that was the problem, actually, because I couldn’t find anything the right weight so I pulled some from the hem of a curtain in Aeldryc’s quarters.”
“I hope you at least asked permission,” Lyriel gasped.
I laughed. “Aeldryc said he wanted to replace those curtains anyway.”
“As we discussed the other day, Pippin has a talent for textile work,” Aeldryc said behind me.
His voice was careful, gentle, the way it got when he was doing something thoughtful and didn’t want me to make a big deal of it.
“He would make an excellent apprentice, and he needs something to do while I’m on assignment.
He will need to have a guard with him at all times, but otherwise, he’d be at your disposal. So, if you are needing—”
“Yes,” Lyriel said, before he finished. “Yes, absolutely yes. Can he start now? Can he start right now?”
I turned to look at Aeldryc. He had planned this in advance? For me?
He was leaning against the doorframe, arms crossed, watching the two of us with an expression that I was going to catalogue and treasure: a faint, real smile.
“You’re leaving me here,” I said.
“I must ride for Clovermere within the hour. I have no need for the distraction of you squirming in my lap, claiming an inability to ride a horse, which I still find difficult to believe.”
“It’s possible! Why do you keep acting like it’s strange?”
“I’ve met gargoyles who can’t ride,” Lyriel said. “Perhaps Pip is like them? Except he can’t fly.”
Aeldryc scoffed. “Anyway, you will be comfortable here. Lyriel is—” He paused, selecting words with the care of a diplomat. “—enthusiastic. I will send one of the guards up to make sure you do not escape.”
“Escape? Why would I leave the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen?” I gasped, spinning around.
Aeldryc crossed the room to me, cupped my face and pressed a kiss to my forehead. It was tender and brief, the kind of kiss that promised he’d be back as soon as he could.
“Be good,” he murmured against my hair.
“When have I ever been bad?”
“Do I need to make you a list?” Another kiss, this time on the lips. Then he dropped his lips to my ear. “And you will not have our special kind of fun without me.”
“Even masturbation?” I blinked. “I mean, does that count? I’d be thinking of you the whole time.”
“Pippin,” he huffed. Outside, the ten-o’clock bell tolled and he groaned. “I must be off. You will behave.”
I waved him off, already turning back to Lyriel, who was pulling bolts of fabric off the shelf while we said our goodbyes. I could sense a kindred spirit from a mile away.
“Tell me what you know about sewing,” she said, beaming at me.
“So where I’m from, everything is mechanical. The machines go really fast, but it’s also really rigid. Like, the stitch is the stitch. You can change the length and the tension, but you can’t make it do anything a lockstitch doesn’t do.”
Behind Lyriel, a few workers bustled past, and Lyriel jumped up. “I shall introduce you around!”
Marta, the head cutter, was a sturdy human woman in her forties who gave me a single, efficient nod before returning to her work.
Near the hearth, a younger woman with dye-stained hands waved from a steaming copper vat that smelled of blackberries; she introduced herself as Nessa.
And in the corner, a troll the size of a refrigerator hand-stitched a cloak lining with impossibly delicate stitches.
His name, Lyriel supplied, was Grukk, a master of men’s tailoring.
He had very large hands for a tailor, and a flower tattoo on his arm.
“You have no magic at all?” Lyriel frowned.
“No magic at all. Just hands and tools and ingenuity, I guess.”
“And you learned without a master? Without an apprenticeship?”
“I learned from YouTube. Which is like—well, I have no idea how to explain YouTube. Um, a sort of classroom, but you watch classes that have already happened, recorded at an earlier time.”
Lyriel looked delighted. “That sounds like magic!”
“We call it technology.”
“You love to sew?”