“How?”Cha held up her palms in helpless resignation.“There’s no ambrosia station here.Everyone’s waited for the cheaper one just on the other side.The carriages will run out of juice and revert to animal form, then you’ll have real chaos on your hands.”She shook her head.“I feel for you.I really do.”
The Obsidian fae studied Cha.“Do you propose a solution?”
“Open the border,” Cha answered promptly.“You and all your colleagues.Let us through and out of your gorgeous hair.It’s really something, by the way—do you do something special to grow it so long and keep it so shiny?”
She put a hand to her hair, her claws long and polished with a moonstone color the same hue as her dramatic locks, starting to answer before she narrowed her eyes and dropped the hand.“If we let you through, we’ll all be fired.”
Cha had figured that.“I’m on a tight deadline and my own bosses are real jerks about it.However, theyareinvested in me and my partner delivering this shipment.How about a pretty for each of you to open the border?Then you quit and take a little sabbatical.”She opened the case, flashing her considerable supply of gems.
The fae woman’s gaze turned calculating.“Let me call the others over and we’ll talk numbers.”
~22~
Wings
“Ican’t believethat worked,” Azul commented, as Katu shot out of the border gates, the cat softly roaring his delight to be cruising in the lead.
“Why not?”After reassuring herself that no obstacles lay ahead, she surveyed the contents of Phin’s bribery chest.They’d taken a hit, though not as bad as it could have been.Fortunately—thanks to Giant Jo’s—Katu didn’t need to be topped off with ambrosia yet.Better to make up the time now.She opened the gold channel.“Bandit on the far side of the big black line,” she announced.“All clear to proceed.Our boxed-up friends made it possible, so if you have the means to be generous, it would be a nice thank you.”
A chorus of cheers and thanks jumbled from the path-box for a bit and Cha pumped her fists in the air, as if to a shouting stadium audience.
“I suppose you see yourself as some sort of folk hero,” Azul commented sourly.
“Nah.I’m as selfish as they come, but I do love the rush of the win.”She grinned at him, which he didn’t return, naturally.
“The reason I can’t believe that worked is that all of those agents, possibly the guards, too, will now be out of a job.Just to do you a favor.”
“For a financial windfall,” she corrected.“Those gems will give them a buffer, time not living hand to mouth, to find better jobs.”
“How could you possibly know they want that?”
“All people are essentially the same,” she explained.“Fae or human, we all have the same motivations—we need coin or jewels or your preferred item of exchange to obtain the stuff we really want.The people who have most of the stuff expect the people with less of it to grub along, taking whatever shit they’re doled out.And the workers do take it, because if they’re in a crap job already—and believe me, border agent is bottom rung—that’s the best they can get.So they grit it out, waiting for the moment they can leave for the day and go live the part of their life they actually enjoy.”
He was quiet a moment.“I never thought of it that way.”
“My darling sulky blueberry, that’s because you’re a prince.I bet you’ve never worked a tedious, low-wage job your entire life.”She cocked a brow at him.“Or any job at all?”
“I have a job,” he answered stiffly.
“I don’t think marrying psychotic bitches with a kennel full of fell wolves counts as an actual job.”
“Perhaps not, but itisa considerable amount of work,” he countered.
“Did you just make a joke?”She laughed for him, since he didn’t.“Answer me this—if you can,” she amended, remembering the geas.“What did they have on you, to make you go through with this marriage?”
“What makes you think this undefined ‘they’ had ‘something on me,’ which I perceive is some sort of hu—” He abruptly looked off to the side.“—peasant colloquialism for extortion?”
“Did you almost say ‘human’ and substituted ‘peasant’ at the last second?”
He stabbed a finger at the path-box.Yeah, yeah.He still hadn’t told her the truth when he’d had it encased in a cone of silence.Too bad the mystery only made him more interesting.She’d bet one of those gems she’d just used to bribe their way across the Obsidian border that the blue hair went all the way down to his nethers.Mmm.
“Here’s what I think: you weren’t marrying this chick for love,” she answered his original question.
“As I’m not a superstitious idiot, correct,” he replied drily.
“You regard love as a superstition?”
“Don’t you?”he countered with a note of surprise.“The infamous Bandit, who’s bedded every available male on the Thirteen and beyond, surely doesn’t believe in anything so sentimental as romance.”
