“Merula,” he said as he turned to look at her. “Did you know about this?”
“I… That’s…” Merula stumbled awkwardly over her words. She stopped and pulled herself up to her full height, her shoulders back and chin up. “I knew nothing of that, but so what if there was? It was a prank, and one amongst mortals as mortals are prone to do. What harm is there?”
Caolán slammed his fist on the table. “Do not try to play the innocent. You know well enough what harm,” he snapped. “Your representative overstepped, and thanks to him, now so has Winter in coming here to demand recourse for what turns out to be our own wrongdoing.”
“There were our kind there,” Somerset said. No one was happy with that news. “A redcap. A wolf.”
The other three dignitaries looked at each other in almost perfectly synchronized shock and then leaned forward to mutter insistently at their duke. He tried to listen to them, but the overlapped advice finally made him shrug them off.
“Enough,” he snapped. “Hold your tongues, in your laps if need be. Stekkjarstaur, we acted in ignorance of all the facts, but as Merula says, no harm was done.”
Jars rubbed his jaw. His thumb audibly rasped on stubble. His lean, tanned face was pulled into an expression of practiced diplomacy, but his eyes glittered with enjoyment. Yule served Winter; that arrangement had benefited them all over the years. But just as Winter chafed, sometimes, to be beholden to the human’s love of a holiday; so did Yule to wear that yoke.
“A bold claim,” he said. “When a woman under Yule’s protection was taken, and it was one of Winter’s wolves who drew Sainted blood in the street. The same wolf, Santa?”
Everyone looked at Dylan. He shrank back in the chair and rubbed his arm absently.
“I—” he started to say, then caught himself. “I’m not sure I should answer that without talking to—”
“Answer enough,” Caolán said. “What gelt does Yule ask?”
Jars mugged uncertainty as he leaned back in the heavy carved chair. He rubbed his chin in thought as he glanced from Somerset to Stúfur.
“We—”
Before he could tell them, Merula made a strangled sound of rage and lunged over the table. The skin flayed back from her fingers to reveal bony claws, and her mouth split at the corners to reveal the wet red interior and flat spade teeth.
Somerset unceremoniously shoved Dylan out of the way. The man and chair toppled over and hit the ground with a yelp and a crack. At the head of the table, Jars lurched to his feet—easily enough this time, Somerset noted with a mental snort—and braced one hand on the table.
“You fuckingdare?” he demanded. Angry red color flushed his cheekbones, and the muscles in his shoulders clenched under his shirt. “In our own halls?”
He gritted his teeth and flipped the table lengthwise. Bottles and glasses shattered on the floor, one of the Winter Court dignitaries gave an undignified yelp, and Merula smacked face first into the wooden surface. She went flying and hit one of the neglected stripper poles with a smack. The troll-rated bar caught her right in the middle of the back, and she was the one who folded.
Her face twisted more around the bony jut of her shifted skull as she screamed and slid down onto the ground, her limbs twitching jerkily.
The rest of the Winter Court delegation scattered as the table crashed down where they’d been. Caolán swore furiously at his people as they dragged him backward. None of them paid him any attention.
Somerset bent down, grabbed Dylan by the collar of his coat, and hauled him back onto his feet.
“You OK?” he asked.
He didn’t get an answer right away. Dylan just looked dazed as he blinked at the chaos around him. Blood dripped from his nose. He must have cracked it on the floor as he went down.
“Did you hit your head?” Somerset asked. He palmed the back of Dylan’s skull and worked his fingers through tangled brown hair in search of a head injury.
“What? No. I didn’t,” Dylan protested. He tried to squirm away, but Somerset ignored that.
Stúfur joined them, his knives already out. He gave Dylan a once-over and then Somerset a hard look.
“In the middle of a fight?” he said. “Can you keep your hands off him for five minutes?”
The jibe made Somerset twitch. It didn’t look like anyone had heard, but that was just luck.
“Not the time,” he said as he shoved Dylan at his brother. “Get him somewhere safe.”
“Done,” Stúfur said as he scruffed Dylan by the collar before he could squirm away. Then he hesitated a beat as he glanced toward Jars as their eldest brother smacked a bottle out of his way with the butt of his crutch. “Maybe he’s not—”
“Go.”
