Chapter Eleven
The air grew clearer as she rose, the green leaves of the canopy fading into brightness and height.
She found Derran in a long open gallery at the edge of the western towers, speaking to a cluster of raven fairies who stood in travel gear with little satchels slung across their shoulders and translucent yellow wings half spread in readiness.
He had not wasted a moment.
By the time she landed, one group had already transformed into raven shape and gone.
The next was departing as she came in. Derran gave directions briskly, much as he had when the tornado struck his court, and the raven fairies listened with the sharp, intent look of creatures who loved both speed and useful gossip.
“One necklace,” he was saying. “Large diamonds, impossible to miss, marsh make. Do not touch it if you find it. Do not steal it for yourselves. Do not bring me any sparkling spoon and call it a triumph.”
One of the raven fairies looked affronted. “I would never do that.”
“You’ve done worse.”
“That’s slander.”
“It’s memory. Go.”
The raven launched herself from the open gallery with a mutter and a beat of black wings.
Derran turned and saw Ina. The set of his face eased into relief.
“You should be lying down,” he said, though with less of a grin than she expected.
“You should mind your own business.”
“You are my business.” He came to her and touched her face lightly, confirming that she was, in fact, well enough to be flying about.
The earlier cold fear that had run through him, when a canopy court fairy had half-dropped, half-rolled into the sky court palace and shouted that the queen was injured, had long faded.
But the soreness of that feeling stayed with him, and he could not force out a teasing joke when all he wanted was to hold her safely.
Instead he kissed her, once and then once more, warm and quick and full of all the things there was no time to stop for.
Ina held him a heartbeat longer than she meant to, then stepped back. “I can’t stay.”
“I noticed,” he said, though he did not sound cross. “You have that look.”
“What look?”
“The look of someone carrying ten problems and pretending they weigh one.”
She sighed. “I’m going to the burrow court. Karai’s waiting on word from the foxes.”
Derran nodded. “Go. I’ll come to you the moment I hear anything.”
She kissed him once in return and left before the temptation to do otherwise became too great.
---
The burrow court received her with its usual enclosed steadiness, all rooted stone and carved wood and the cool certainty of a place built under earth rather than in sky.
She found Karai in the library exactly where she expected him, standing by the long central table with two maps open and a page of illegible notes already set out beside them.
He looked up when he heard the door and stifled a sigh. “You shouldn’t be flying so much today. Being healed requires rest. Push it and your body might spite you and faint, which won’t help anything.”
“I’m the queen. I’m allowed poor decisions.”
“I’ve never heard that as being one of the privileges of the crown.”
He had already sent out the fox fairies.
They were searching the site of the attack and the routes away from it, following whatever scent might remain of beasts, handlers, or magic.
Karai himself was waiting, standing at that table behind a leather chair, because waiting in one place where messages came quickly was better than roaming uselessly through halls with nothing to do but think.
Ina came to the table and looked down at the maps without seeing much of them.
“Any word?”
“Not yet.”
They spoke first of facts, reviewing what they knew together. The attack. The note Jasenka had received. The necklace. Lugomir’s danger if the diamond were broken.
Then, because fear often needs some other shape to wear, the talk turned.
Ina said, with more edge than she intended, “It was a bad idea from the start.”
Karai raised an eyebrow. “What was?”
“The necklace. The whole thing. A piece of one’s heart in a jewel at a public ball. It’s absolute madness.”
“It’s tradition.”
“It’s a reckless tradition, then.”
His face cooled. “There’s no need to be rude.”
“I’m not being rude. If a tradition gives your enemies an easy way to kill you, perhaps it deserves to be questioned.”
Karai’s hand flattened on the map. “Bad actors will always act badly. You do not answer that by stripping away every custom worth keeping.”
“No,” said Ina, “but one might answer it by not putting vital organs into polished boxes.”
He gave her a look that could have cut if it were a knife. “You’re oversimplifying it.”
“And you’re defending nonsense because it’s old.”
“I’m defending a people’s right to keep what is theirs without having every court crisis used as an excuse to remake them into something intended to be safer while only being smaller.”
Ina straightened. “No one said smaller.”
“You didn’t need to. That’s always the direction of such arguments.”
She stared at him. “That’s not what I meant. I’m not trying to outlaw the practice.”
“It may not be what you meant right now,” he snapped, “but outlawing is where contempt for other courts’ customs usually ends.”
That stung because there was enough truth near it to make denial clumsy.
“I don’t have contempt,” she tried to protest.
“You mocked the tradition last night.”
“I was unsettled by it.”
“You were smug about it.”
“And you are very eager, Karai, to be offended for no reason I can understand.”
Karai stepped around the chair then, too quickly for measured debate. “Because you keep talking as though the answer to danger is to flatten every court into the shape you find least alarming. Again.”
That stung worse. It was cruel of him to bring up how she had cursed them all into animal form.
Ina’s hands balled into fists, her anger boiling over.
Across the room, a bookshelf cracked, a few books tumbling off it while the others fell together in a slapping heap.
He did not seem to notice, or if he did, it did not alter the storm in his eyes.
Ina took one step toward him for good measure, no longer biting back her tongue. “And you keep talking as though age alone makes a decision wise, which we’ve both learned is not the case.”
She could be cruel too. Reminding him that the old promise made to the burrow court of the barley corn girl had not done any of them any favors.
By then they were too close for civility to fit properly between them. The table was behind him. The chair too. The map corners fluttered in the small draft their movement made. Neither of them had raised a voice much, but heat had entered the room all the same.
Karai’s voice came lower now. “You’re afraid, and instead of admitting that and dealing with it, you’d prefer something easy to blame.”
Ina’s voice had just as much danger in it. “And you’d rather waste your energy defending principle than just admit this particular principle is absurd.”
Their faces were near enough that she could see the fine tension at the corner of his mouth. The control in his eyes had spiked into something furious. Or something intent. Or something built of both, a mirror to hers.
A few sharp breaths shifted the air between them. It happened quickly, a crossing where anger and want took too much from the same fire. She saw him realize it the same moment she did. Neither of them stepped back.
Karai’s gaze dropped, only for the briefest instant, to Ina’s pouting mouth before returning to her eyes.
That gave her opportunity.
She shoved him backward into the leather chair behind him.
He fell into it with more grace than surprise ought to have allowed, though surprise was there all the same.
She was on him in the next breath, one knee to either side of him, pulling off his shirt and tossing it away.
Her hands caught his face as she kissed him hard.
Surprise became heat.
His hand went into her hair. He pulled her into him and kissed her back with all the force he had kept leashed through the whole argument.
Wind flicked from his fingers, and the ribbon at the back of her dress loosened and fell away.
The bodice slipped under his hands. He kissed the bared skin with a careless hunger, and the roughness of it made her catch her breath.
She tried once to push him away, startled by the sensation of gentle biting following his lips. “You’ll leave marks – ”
“I know,” he half-growled.
He caught her wrist and kept it there, refusing her the retreat she did not truly mean, continuing to draw her curves and points into his mouth, leading her to a new tingling.
She gasped and answered the only way she could, leaning her mouth on his neck and pulling the skin against her teeth until it left a bruise. With a groan, he pulled her hair to tip her head back and away.
The argument still burned between them, only now it had no words left to spend itself on.
She could feel the arousal in him, straining for release from the confines of his clothing, and shifted just enough to reach between them, finding him already halfway undone by want.
Her eyes met his again and this time she smirked, caressing him through cloth and not at all helping him the other halfway.
A small punishment for the nipping marks he had left on her breasts.
“Damn it, Ina,” he swore at her then, and with another flick of wind, his belt unbuckled and his trousers came loose, letting him spring free at last. “You think you’re in control?”
“I am the – ” she started to say.
He didn’t let her finish. He lifted her with reckless, swift ease, firm tension brushing against soft folds.
And then he pulled her back down, something between a glare and a smirk on his own face now.
She sank onto him, moaning desperately at the feeling of him hitting deep inside her, her hands gripping his neck and his shoulder.
There she leaned into him, and they moved, thrusting against each other with wanton abandon.
The anger and argument between them had lit a fire that was finding a new shape, pouring through both of them, channeled into unyielding bliss.
It could not have been said that what passed between them was love.