Frederica suspected they would be using that argument a good deal.
She had envied the love Darcy and Elizabeth had shared, and she grieved the lost potential when Roderick had refused her. Watching Elizabeth now, she wondered if she had been the lucky one.
Then she went downstairs and informed the butler that Mrs. Darcy had just received news from home of the death of a dear friend, and that she would likely not be herself for a few days. He would spread the news, and no one would remark on her behavior.
It was a good thing being a truth-caster did not preclude telling lies.
Chapter 24
The throbbing in hisshoulder yanked Darcy out of sleep. He opened his eyes, blinked, and closed them again. This had to be a dream. Why else would there be the tree roots over his head? And surrounding him, too, forming the rounded walls of small chamber. A room filled with child-sized wooden furniture.
He dug his fingernails into his palms, willing the dream to fade. But when he looked again, nothing had changed. A fire burned merrily in an undersized hearth, with a tiny pot over it giving off an appetizing aroma. His stomach rumbled. When had he last eaten warm food?
A squeaky voice said, “Ah. You are awake; good.” The voice came from the middle of this empty underground chamber, where no one stood.
An invisible speaker in a strange burrow where everything was too small for a human. There was only one answer, and it terrified him. “Am I in Faerie?” he choked out.
Faerie had cost him his mother for over a decade. Faerie could steal a dozen years from his life. His baby would be nearly grown by the time he returned. Elizabeth might have remarried, thinking him dead…
A rusty chuckle. “Nay, we are still in your mortal world.”
Relief washed over him. Anything was better than Faerie. He tried to sit up, but a vicious stab of pain in his shoulder made him collapse back down.
“Allow me to help you.” Invisible hands slid behind his back. “Let me do the work.” The hands pressed upwards.
Darcy still grunted with pain, but this time he managed to reach a sitting position. “Who are you?”
“Names can be dangerous. I am a friend of a friend.”
He was not about to trust a fae with vague answers. “Are you a friend of Napoleon?”
A tsking sound. “I care nothing for mortal rulers.” A bowl wafted through the air and was set in front of him.
“A neat evasion, as Napoleon is not a mortal.” Devil take it, would this pain never ease?
“Then no, I am no friend to Napoleon.”
The smell of the food, the aroma of meat and roasted vegetables, almost made him dizzy. “Will this food have any magical effect on me? Or otherwise harm me?” He was so hungry he might eat it anyway.
“How sensibly distrustful you are! It is plain mortal food, without any spells, potions, poisons, or traps. It will not hurt you.”
He could not help himself. He shoveled it into his mouth as quickly as he could with the tiny spoon. It tasted better than anything he had ever eaten. A second bowl appeared, and he demolished that, too.
It almost made him feel like himself again, despite the pain in his shoulder. Still, something nagged at him. “Napoleon’s men are hunting me, and they have a tool that will lead them to me. Even here.”
“Not to you, but to this.” The leather pouch holding his dragon scale suddenly pressed against his chest as if a finger was pushing into it. Then the pressure eased, and the voice became annoyed. “Horrid iron bullet. It stings, even from this distance.” A spitting sound.
“They are tracking what I have in the pouch?” The one thing he could not bear to give up.
“That bit of dragon, yes. They have a dragon lodestone.”
He had never heard of such a thing, but it might explain how Napoleon had found the dragon Nests. “You are certain?”
“I overheard them speaking of it. They are close, even now.”
Damnation. That would explain why they found him at night. When the scale became active at sunset, it would lead them to him again.
Perhaps he could hide it somewhere. But then the soldiers would find it and take it for themselves. They would do that eventually, no matter how well he hid it.
