“And bringing a couple of heavies with her, too,” Nelda noted. She slid around the table and headed for the two men who were still flanking Wilona. The men, who were already looking uncomfortable, shifted on their feet as the petite, elderly witch approached them. Nelda wrapped her arms around the first one,staring up into his face. “You know better, don’t you, lad? Your mother raised you right. You don’t like going into other people’s houses and causing harm.”
The man didn’t reply, his face turning bright red, but Nelda was already moving on to the other man. She repeated the move, wrapping her arms around him, staring into his face. “Not sure about you, though? I think you like a bit of violence, don’t you? Is that why the Magravine brought you here?”
“Ma’am,” the man said, voice low and rough, with only the barest hint of anything that might be respect. He lifted his hands, taking hold of Nelda’s elbows. “Step back.”
Hallie’s whole body tensed, ready to leap forward to the witch’s defence. Never mind that Nelda didn’t seem to be at all worried by the man who was easily three times her size, Hallie had seen the damage his kind could do.
“Lady Cotovatre is on her way,” Rosalia said, startling Hallie into looking back at her. She was standing in the kitchen, Hallie’s phone on the counter-top in front of her. “She will be here shortly.”
“Hiding behind her skirts again, are you?” Wilona asked, sneering, as she looked at Hallie.
“You give me no other choice. You will not listen to me, or to your lawyers. Lady Cotovatre may be the only person who can make you see sense.” Hallie kept her voice calm with effort even as the accusation of hiding stung. She had only once been able to meet her mother on equal terms, when they had reached the agreement as to how Hallie could buy her freedom from the family vine. But then Wilona had broken that contract and Hallie’s freedom had only been secured with Cotovatre’s intervention, and the lady’s vast wealth. Wilona seemed to respect only money and power, and Hallie didn’t have enough of either to meet her mother on even terms.
Tension crackled in the air along with Wilona’s fury. She was not used to being defied. With some relief, Hallie noticed that Nelda had moved away from the thugs that Wilona had brought and tucked herself next to her sister. The witch was looking quite pleased with herself, which made Hallie wonder just what she’d stolen from the men as she’d hugged them. When Nelda had first met Girard, she’d taken his wallet, phone and keys from him without Girard noticing. It put Hallie in a difficulty. She didn’t like the idea of Nelda stealing from guests in her and Rosalia’s house. And the men were here at Wilona’s command, no doubt bound by their ties to the Talbot vine to obey the Magravine. At the same time, Hallie’s anger with her mother meant she didn’t particularly care that Nelda might have picked the men clean of any valuables.
“Wait outside,” Wilona told the two men, even while Hallie debated what she should do. When one of the men would have protested, Wilona snapped at them. “Do what I tell you.”
With a brief exchange of glances, the two men turned and left, and Hallie heard the front door close behind them. Wilona moved further into the room and cast a scowl around the table. “You can leave as well. All of you.”
“I don’t think so,” Kaherdin said, in his normal gentle voice. “We will be here as long as Hallie or Rosalia need us to be.”
“Perhaps you’d like to move through to the living room for a while? We can have a pause before the cake. How about some coffee?” Rosalia suggested, her glance around the table making it clear that the offer was for her guests and not Wilona. Hallie wanted to hug her roommate for trying to defuse the tension, and also make it clear that she was mistress in her own home. Rosalia’s family was not connected with the Talbot vine, and Rosalia had been disowned by her own family so owed nothing to the Magravine. “Or there’s more wine? And didn’t Magnus bring some liqueur?”
“I did,” Magnus confirmed. “If you point me to the glasses, I can open and pour?”
“Good idea,” Kendra said.
Hallie had to bite her lip to hide a smile as everyone around the table picked up on Rosalia’s cue to work around Wilona. Aneta lifted the platter with the cake off the table and set it onto the kitchen counter, along with the knife Rosalia had been about to use to cut it. Kendra and Nelda helped Magnus with opening the bottle of liqueur and handing around glasses, then making sure everyone had a comfortable seat in the living area. Hallie hoped that Magnus would remember to check his pockets before Nelda left the house, but saw by the quick look exchanged between him and Morgana that he was alive to the danger.
Almost everyone took seats at Kendra and Nelda’s direction, leaving Wilona and Hallie still standing in the kitchen. Morgana refused to sit down, but somehow persuaded Magnus to leave her. Along with Morgana, Rosalia took up a post in the open doorway, a glass of deep red liqueur in her hand. It made Hallie want to smile, pride filling her. She had never thought of her friend as a warrior before, but that’s what Rosalia was just then. Guarding her people.
Wilona’s anger had banked down a little with all the moving about, but she was still bristling with temper as she stared at Hallie. “You have forgotten the respect due to your Magravine.”
“By no means,” Hallie said, all at once feeling the weight of the travel and stress of the past days. She moved across to the table and turned a chair sideways, settling on it so she could still keep an eye on her mother and everyone else. “But you are no longer my Magravine. I have no place in your family or your vine. You yourself made that decision, and I accept it.”
“Based on lies,” Wilona spat out, colour rising in her face. “You concealed your abilities from me.”
“You never asked,” Hallie said. It was true, but it wasn’t completely honest. Hallie had actively concealed her truth sense from everyone - not just her mother. She had never actually lied about it. She’d only recently learned that she had other abilities with magic, but the question of whether she had magic or not had never come up in any conversation with her mother, or, it seemed, in any of the negotiations about severing Hallie from the vine.
“What abilities?” Morgana asked, with apparently genuine curiosity. She lifted her brows at Hallie. “This is news to me.”
“She concealed her magic,” Wilona snapped, and turned on Morgana. “And if you had done your job, we wouldn’t be in this mess.”
“I did my job, Magravine,” Morgana said, her voice cool and controlled. “You required me to draft a severance of Hallie from the Talbot vine, much as you required me to draw her severance from the blood family a decade ago. There were no conditions or codicils on that. You didn’t want to discuss any other options, just a simple severance. As I advised you at the time, the only way that Hallie Talbot could rejoin the Talbot vine, or even the Talbot family, was with her express consent.”
“Don’t talk back to me,” Wilona snapped, glaring at Morgana.
“I am speaking in my capacity as your lawyer. Or, at least, that is the capacity I was in when I drew those documents for you,” Morgana said, still cool and outwardly calm. Hallie could see the tension in her half-sister’s shoulders and knew by the set of her jaw that Morgana was battling her own temper. Morgana was in a difficult position, still a member of the vine and subject to Wilona’s control. Hallie admired her half-sister’s self-control. “You have not involved me in the current discussions, so I cannot offer you any advice on those, other than to say that the document I drew up was flawless.”
Whatever Wilona might have said was interrupted by the front door opening again, swiftly followed by two people coming into the kitchen area. Hallie was glad she was sitting down as relief made her legs weak.
Lady Cotovatre swept into the room, dressed in a formal, floor-length dress of what looked like deep ultramarine velvet trimmed with silver thread. Hallie didn’t have the right words to describe the dress other than its overall effect was regal. It was fitted to the lady’s torso, then spilled into a wider skirt that flowed with her as she walked. She’d added a heavy silver necklace that sat in the dipped neckline and a pair of silver earrings to match the necklace. Her hair had grown since Hallie had seen her last, teased into apparently careless curls around her head and she was wearing make-up, which Hallie had never seen on the lady before, making her dark eyes enormous and enhancing her strong bone structure. The overall effect was that Cotovatre looked like the powerful and wealthyhochlenthat she was, self-assured and comfortable in her own skin.
Behind her, Emmet Lowery was in his habitual disguise as one of thehochlen, wearing a formal jacket in deep, midnight blue with narrow lapels embroidered with a sinuous design in the same blue colour. The jacket fell to his knees over narrow trousers of the same fabric and a white shirt and bow tie. Hallie had a moment of confusion when she saw him, as she always did, because she could see both thehochlendisguise he wore and his true form of the green-skinned, white-hairedsinisir. It didn’t matter what face he wore, he brought with him, as always, a deep sense of calm that came from a very long life.
Cotovatre paused, eyes moving around the space, travelling over the group settled in the living room. Hallie saw the tiniest movement she made when her eyes landed on Kaherdin’s face. Cotovatre had borne a half-human son, many years before, who she’d named Kaherdin. The name had been carried downthe line of her descendants. After her son had died, as far as Hallie knew, the lady had not met any of her descendants in person until one night a little over a decade ago when the lady had saved Hallie’s life. Hallie could only imagine the shock the lady felt seeing her many-times-great-grandson. But the lady had spent several lifetimes inhochlenpolitics and moved on at once, hiding her feelings. Cotovatre took in Rosalia and Morgana standing guard in the doorway, Wilona Talbot, and finally looked across at Hallie. Her face softened a little, then she turned to Wilona, expression hardening into displeasure.
“Magravine Talbot. You are in breach of our agreement.”
