“Oh, pray do not waste your valuable time singing my praises, Your Majesty,” Renata muttered, casting a nervous look at her father.
She knows full well that Prince Fannar will not join me in singing her praises, nor her father’s.
It was a delight to see her flounder.
And that is not how one should feel about one’s wife.
Oh, Cole... you’d better come through.
“THAT IS QUITE THE BRACEof salmon. Enough for a company of Bears.”
Jocasta turned, then stilled.
There was a Bear beside her family’s boat. Oh, he looked like an average man— a smiling mouthful of slightly uneven teeth,kindly brown eyes, skin instead of fur—but she knew he was a polar bear shifter from the size of him, from the sheer width and height of him.
That, and the glint of steel emblazoned with the crest of Caledon peeping from under his fur cloak when he pointed to the strings of fish hung to smoke. “Do you have any already smoked, miss?”
He doesn’t speak like an arrogant royal. But royals do not conduct their own business—at least, not out this way.“In the third shop along, with the red paint.” She waited for him to ask for a royal discount.
“Thank you. I also heard that the daughter of the man who owns this boat is a fine mage, who knows her healing potions?”
Her guarded expression softened a little. “Healing is my easiest task, the one that comes naturally to me. It is fire magic I struggle with. What do you need a potion for, stranger?”
“It’s Cole, and chilblains.”
“Ooh. Those are horrid. Come, pick your string of fish, and then meet me back at the shop. I will make the potion in a trice, and the rate is reasonable.”
“One must always pay well for spells and potions, miss. Who would be fool enough to enrage a mage?”
She laughed at the bit of rhyme he tossed out. “Foxes. Well, some Foxes. To be fair, they dare to trifle with my parents, not me. It’s their shop. Their boat. I just help them.”
“But is your mother or father not a mage? I thought that was usually how it goes.” The man called Cole followed her as she finished securing the boat for the day.
“A great-uncle on my mother’s side was thus blessed, but it has skipped most of my family. For all I know, the magic would have followed his sons and daughters, but the fool got himself killed in a drunken brawl in a tavern in Endymere, and he had no children.”
“Ah.”
With a grunt, Jocasta turned her attention from conversation to force. She had to concentrate hard to master an element like wind, especially out here, this close to the Wylding Sea. She could feel it fighting her, but she had things to do. All of these fish needed to come in for the night, lest hungry animals, thieves, and treacherous waves take them.
Cole gasped behind her as she lifted the bulging net and strings of fish prepped for smoking high in the air, unhooking them from their places on the side and trawler arm of the fishing boat. They floated before her now, hundreds of pounds, maybe thousands, and she pushed them towards her parents’ little shop.
“My God...”
“I’m the only surviving child. I have to do the work of three,” Jo said stiffly, lips set as she kept the nets and strings moving.
“And marvelous well you do it. That’s all one day’s haul?”
“Three days. We supply all the fish for the tavern and the fishmongers in Alban Leigh and Frost Hills,” Jocasta said proudly.
“You prosper, indeed!”
“Thank you.”
But we do not. How could we, with the way that Fox keeps raising the rates on the land?
Cole apparently thought the same thing, for he followed her in and looked around the shop at the shelves that needed repair and the paint that was peeling, at her mother’s threadbare robes and her father’s worn boots.
Bears. Foxes. They look with the eyes of predators, and humans are their prey—even though they do not bite and kill. They all think they are above the weak humans—even though humans far outnumber them. Even though there are human mages.
