3
Maeve couldn’t help but remember the strange afternoon on the walk back to her family’s estate. She should be thinking about the next day’s lesson, as well as formulating a convincing letter to Lady Aislinn—she couldn’t rely on Sorcha to convey the gravity of her situation—yet instead, all Maeve could think about was how the manticore had recoiled from her.
Men didn’t usually run away from her. At least not until she broke things off.
She couldn’t recall saying anything biting, just a mere greeting, but that’d been enough to send him hurtling into the sky—sans one long primary feather.
Stranger still had been how everyone reacted to it.
Kiri, her best student, had snatched up the feather and pushed it into her hands.“Please keep it safe, Miss Maeve,”he’d implored, darling rounded ears pinned back and his tail swishing agitatedly behind him.“I’ll explain everything—please don’t be—I’ll explain.”And with that promise, he too had taken off into the sky in pursuit of his brother.
A flustered Briseis had tried to smile it away, though it was perhaps the most painful expression she’d ever seen the dragoness make.“Those brothers can be quite rambunctious,”she’d said with false levity.“Please don’t be too offended. Soren is…shy.”
The way Briseis said Soren’s name, and the troubled way she peered up into the sky after the manticores, had Maeve’s curiosity itching.So muchhad just happened in that one moment.
Maeve ran her fingers over the feather, admiring the interesting colors and softness. Brown at the base and speckled with gray nearer the tip, it reminded her of the tawny owls that flew on silent wings through the forest. The feather was far too big to put in her pocket, longer than her own arm, and so she carried it with her empty basket on the path home.
Such a strange,strangeafternoon.
To be honest, she’d been looking forward to meeting a manticore, especially one so highly spoken of. Briseis, Kiri, and the other children positively gushed about their Mister Soren—how handy he was, how strong, how he always had time to play with them.
With her elder sister mated to a half-orc, Maeve had gotten used to the sight of orcs around the Brádaigh estate. However, she’d been away for the most part when more otherly folk began arriving to live in the Darrowlands. She’d spied the manticores—and the dragons and harpies, too—at her sister and Lady Aislinn’s weddings, but she hadn’t had the opportunity to speak with them until being introduced to Briseis.
To be even more honest, she hadn’t supported the idea of Sorcha marrying Orek at first. The idea of a human and an otherly had been…too fantastical to Maeve. All she’d seen were his green skin and the small tusks peeking from between his lips. When Sorcha had first brought him home, clad in his leathersand furs, there was a wildness about him, an intrinsic brutality that made Maeve shiver.
Of course, she knew better now. There weren’t many souls in this world gentler than Orek—he turned away no orphan, no matter the species, and had come to be one of their best horse handlers, if only because he could talk them into anything.
Maeve understood now how wrong she’d been, and watching how seamlessly Orek blended into their family and supported Sorcha had been pleasing. Devoted to each other almost to the point of nauseum.
A half-orc for a brother-in-law and half-dragoness for a colleague hadn’t prepared her for a manticore, though.
In the moments before he buffeted her with his wings in his hasty retreat, Maeve had watched his green eyes flare, those slitted predator’s pupils narrowing. His feline nose, flatter and broader than a human’s, with its brown nose-leather, had twitched, sending his many long whiskers into a waving cascade.
A dark mane haloed his broad face, with two triangular ears poking out, brown tufts decorating the tips. His bifurcated upper lip had risen, showing off his sets of fangs, and drawing attention to the wicked scars that bisected his face. Maeve’s attention had snagged on those—there was no other choice.
Stark and cruel, they were four lines of pale skin set against his otherwise tawny fur. They split one of his brows and pulled the lid of his eye a little lower than the other.
Fates, who could have done that to someone as big as him?
Wasn’t he the largest predator in the savannah?
For the few moments she’d had to take him in, Maeve found their Mister Soren to be the muscular, bruiser type of man that Sorcha and so many other human women had taken to. There was a harsh beauty to him, of course, the way any predator was beautiful. Sleek, powerful.
She hadn’t missed the claws on his fingers, even as she’doffered her hand.
He looked likethat, and he was scared ofher?Little old her?
Maeve might’ve chuckled smugly had it not been so entirely strange. She might’ve even liked it a little had it not been so…ridiculous.
Those thoughts followed her home and must have shown on her face, for Sorcha asked over her expression the moment Maeve walked into the kitchen.
Setting the feather carefully on the kitchen table, Maeve recounted for Sorcha, Blaire, and their mother what had happened without sparing a detail.
“Then Kiriken, his brother and my student, put this in my hands and insisted I take care of it,” Maeve said, waving at the feather.
“It’s a wonder he could fly away at all,” Aoife remarked, picking it up to examine. “This is a primary feather.”
Maeve didn’t like the idea of a big manticore doddering dangerously in the wind. Did manticores molt? Was it the time for that?
