“Happily,” Honey said, holding out her hands.
Magda handed Hero to the nymph. He clambered up onto her much narrower shoulder.
Damion grumbled as he followed Honey.
“Cae is right, of course,” Flor said, looking over Kaelan and then Magda, her expression suggesting she was none-too-impressed with what she saw. “First thing, food. You are too thin by far. That armor is rattling around you like a pot full of stock bones. Take it off. You start cleaning and mending it while I take this one with me to the garden. My cousins come by a few times a month to look in on me. They haven’t let the kitchen go to seed the way the rest of this place has, but that’s not their doing. It’s all mine. The training shed has been shut up all these years, but you should find what you need there. Go now. You”—she twitched her finger at Kaelan—“come with me. If you’re going to impersonate my boy, you have too much to learn and no time to do so. What is your name again?”
“Kaelan,” he said.
Flor tilted her head. “That should make it easier for you then. Caden doesn’t sound too different. Starting now, we’ll call you Caden or Cae. Still, you must train yourself to respond to it, understood? My Cae has assured me that you are an honorable young Prince, but is it true that you have been hidden all these years? You have no experience with the ways of our kind?”
“Very little,” Kaelan said.
“At least you were born a Prince. That’s half the battle, I suppose,” Flor said, pucker lines digging in around her lips. She waved him after her, striding out of the dining hall. “We’ll start at the beginning. You were named Caden after my great-great grandfather, warrior-son of the Rae Selene of Twisted-Branch-over-Knollstem, who, as the younger sister of the Radiant, was entitled to...”
Kaelan gave Magda a pleading look, but she merely smiled, waving as he trailed after Flor.
She looked back up at Caden’s portrait. “See you soon.”
THE TRAINING SHED,a tumble-down stone outbuilding behind the house, stood alongside a weedy patch that bore the scars of thousands of sparrings over the centuries. Dirt had seeped in through a broken window, coating the tools arrayed on the walls and lying thick upon the workbench. The busted pane had also allowed sparrows to nest inside. Their splattered mess had built up over the years of grime and neglect.
Propping the wooden doors open, Magda pulled out an old form, swiping at the dust with a fallen branch from a nearby pine tree. She removed her armor and inspected it in the sunlight. The lacing that bound the plates together was worn down to little more than threads.
After some digging in the trunks, she found Pixie-cloth cord coiled under some spare plates. Pulling a stool from the shed out into the sunlight, she began the arduous process of repairing the lacing.
Sometime later, she moved on to polishing the plates. Luckily, the old polish kit she’d found under the workbench was serviceable. Soon, the bronze began to glow a warm saffron-hue in the afternoon light. She lost herself in the work of cleaning, buffing, and polishing.
“Magda.”
She flinched, almost dropping the buffing rag.
“Sorry,” Kaelan said, coming closer. “Mother would like to see you on the garden terrace.”
She stifled a laugh as she packed up the polish kit. “What have you and yourmotherbeen doing all afternoon?”
“Salvaging what’s left of the garden, attempting to scare off the spiders from the bedrooms, opening every window in this damned place, and recounting Cae’s entire life story from his conception to his tragic demise.” He rubbed his temples. “I’m starting to think that bringing him back from the dead would be easier than attempting to assume his identity.”
She left her armor where it was and strode up to him, wiping her hands clean on a rag. She patted his chest. “I’m sure you’ll be fine.”
She started back through the overgrown gnomeberry bushes towards the house.
“She wants to talk about your hair,” Kaelan said, trailing her.
She stopped and turned back, reaching up to touch the back of her head. “What about it?”
“She says it’s scandalous for a Rae to have short hair.”
“In the human world, they call this a pixie-cut,” she said, grinning. But he only gazed at her dully. Her grin faded.
“It’s not like I can grow it back... She doesn’t have a means of growing it back, does she?”
“No, she has a better idea,” he said, pushing aside the bushes, grinning almost as devilishly as Cae used to. “Just wait.”
Flor had laid out a bounty of food upon the pitted stone table situated in the middle of the paved terrace overlooking the lily-choked pond and overgrown gardens.
“Sit,” she ordered Magda, pointing to a wooden chair that appeared to have been brought out from the dining room. Its cherry finish still gleamed under the dust of disuse. “Eat.” She loaded Magda’s plate with huge slices of tomatoes and pears and apples. “I apologize for not having any cheese or bread,” she said. “I did have, but it’s all gone over.”
Kaelan dropped into another chair, his eyes half-open.
