Why was the floor covered in dried peas?
“Are you injured?” A woman knelt beside me, placing a cool hand on my shoulder. Long blue-black hair brushed against my cheek.
I looked up into a gentle smile and a wide-set pair of warm brown eyes. “I…My arm. I don’t know if it’s broken or only bruised.”
For a simple fracture,I thought,manipulate the ends of the broken bone until they line up properly. This will hurt. A lot. Splint the arm to hold the bone in place. Allow six to twelve weeks for the injury to heal.
The woman’s forehead knitted with concern. “Can you wiggle your fingers?” She ran her hand down my sleeve. “Maybe you should stay on the floor for the moment.”
“That doesn’t sound like a bad idea,” I replied.
“Who are you? From your accent, I’m guessing you’re from Skalla?”
The tromp of heavy footfalls sounded behind me, and I looked back to see one of the hunters entering the room.
“Her name is Clover,” he said.
Blood on his breeches. Jack.
“She’s come to see to the wedding arrangements on behalf of the Skallan princess,” he added. “Monsters attacked her in the woods.”
“Did they?” The woman examining my arm narrowed her eyes. “And your merry band just happened to be there to rescue her, I take it? That’s rather a coincidence.”
“A very fortuitous one,” he agreed. “I can’t imagine Skalla would have taken her death well. They might have gone so far as to call off the marriage.”
The woman was poised to say more, but before she could, the nobles watching the exchange melted away as fast as a herd of antelope fleeing from a predator. And in their wake, the predator stepped forward.
If you have ever seen a lion up close, you know they are big. Bigger than you would expect, even if you are expecting something big. And the kingdom’s talking lion was larger than that.
He was easily ten feet long from his nose to the tip of his tail. Most of that was solid muscle. His head overtopped the height of the tallest people in the crowd. His shaggy mane shaded from tawny at the forehead to a dark brown around his powerful shoulders. An incongruous set of spectacles perched precariously on his nose.
The lion looked at Jack and frowned. Lion mouths are not human mouths and do not readily shape themselves into human expressions. When you spend time with a cat, though, which having a sister like Calla makes inevitable, you quickly find out they have their own ways of expressing pleasure, or anger, or disdain. And the feline expression he wore at that moment was, unmistakably, a frown.
“You did not disturb the peas when you walked,” the lion rumbled.
“Peas? What peas?” Jack asked, glancing down. “Oh, are there peas on the floor? How odd.”
“You have altered your behavior. But when your fellow conspirators enter the room—”
As if on cue, eleven more masked men in green poured through the door, walking with a heavy, deliberate tread, stamping on the peas. One of them frowned in puzzlement when he saw me on the floor. Sam, I guessed, the moment before I confirmed it by checking his claw-torn shirt. If they’d stopped to change their clothes, I’d no doubt have been at a complete loss.
“You must have been warned about the test!” the lion said. “Who warned you?”
“Or perhaps,” someone new cut in, stepping out from behind the great cat, “your ridiculous test has failed, Lion. Admit you were wrong, and leave it be.”
“I was not wrong!” the lion protested. “I will find a better test!”
The man walking around the lion wore clothes no finer than those of the other nobles. But my attention was drawn to the gold circlet, studded with jewels, making a dent in his curly black hair.
My first view of King Gervase, my intended husband, was from the floor. I could see up his nose.
His gaze locked with Jack’s. “You’re back.”
“Yes.” Jack seemed likewise unable to tear his eyes from Gervase. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine. There were no incidents here.” The king glanced at the bloodstains spotting Jack’s breeches. “But you’re hurt.”
“Just a scratch.”
