“Now,” I tell my cousin. “Cup your palms.”
My heart thunders as the bird closes the distance. This is it. The moment we’ve been waiting for. The bird’s almost to Ryals. Just a few more feet and?—
“Oh, that’sgruesome,” declares a raspy voice from behind us. “Didn’t see that one coming.”
I tilt my head to the sky and close my eyes. We were so close. All the falcon had to do was drop the mouse in Ryals’s hands.
Trawick comes into view as the mouse’s tail disappears into the falcon’s beak. “So brutal.”
I roll my eyes. “He almost had it.”
“If you considerplayingwith your prey almost having it, then you’re nearly right,” he says, his gold eyes sparkling as he ribs me.
I pat Ryals’s shoulder. “We’ll keep working on it.”
“It’s okay,” he replies, gazing up at me with eyes that have seen more hurt than I like to think about. He rubs his hands on his jeans and taps his foot impatiently, obviously tired of standing around.
“Go play. We’ll get the falcon put up.”
He runs off and I lift my gloved hand. The bird alights, curling its talons around my forearm.
“Why couldn’t you have obeyed instead of eating the mouse?” I ask it. It blinks in reply.
The menagerie man comes over, and I gently transfer the falcon to its cage and turn to Trawick.
“Trying to teach a falcon not to eat a mouse sounds like thesort of torture that’s best left to others.” My best friend’s long bangs fall into his face as he picks up a branch that’s lying on the grass. He brushes back his hair and prods one end of the wood into the ground, testing it before putting his weight on it. “Your groundskeepers aren’t doing a very good job. You should fire them.”
“And where would I send them?”
He lifts the branch to eye level and aims it like a rifle. “I don’t know, to live with the humans.”
“Very funny.” Once the menagerie man is out of earshot, I say, “Trawick, to what do I owe the pleasure of your company?”
“Come on, Feylin. We both know you’d be lost without me.”
He’s not wrong.
I pivot us toward the castle, and we walk across lush green grass. Everywhere I look there are fae—some trimming hedges, others mowing grass. Two are working on the fountain that decided to quit the other day.
When you buy a castle that was originally built as an old movie set, things tend to break on you more often than not.
“But really, I’ve come to see you.”
“My company’s hard to live without, I know,” I say wryly.
“And hard to livewith,” he adds.
I smirk.
We reach a table, and I pull off my leather gauntlet, dropping it atop the wrought iron. A pitcher of tea and two glasses appear.
“You’re drinking tea?” he says with surprise.
“When in Rome. Sit. Have a glass.” I lift a brow. “You may find you like human things.”
He snorts. “I doubt it. But I will sit.” As I pour him a glass, his gaze roves over the grass and stops on Ryals, who’scoerced a worker into fencing with branches. “You do well with your cousin.”
“He needs a mother, something I can’t be.”
