Carlijn squeezed her arm. “Then tomorrow, we visit the harlots.”
Hannalinde nodded, though her throat was too tight to speak. At the corner where their paths diverged, Carlijn kissed her cheek and strode off toward the palace quarter with her chin high and her ringlets bouncing.
Hannalinde turned toward home. The sun slipped a fraction more below the horizon and the Tower’s silhouette darkened against a violet sky. Somewhere up there, stone would soon crack. Wings would stretch. And the creature who had put this thing inside her would wake to hunt.
She clutched her scrap of paper and walked faster.
Chapter 4
Rikard
Three cups of mead to the wind, Lucan launched into a ballad about a she-gargoyle with a long tail. Nearly the whole tavern was singing along by the second verse.
“She swept the hearth, she swept the room;She swept the stars, she swept the moon!”
Rikard nursed his drink at the end of the table, his back against the wall. It meant he could face the door and keep his tattered wings from snagging on chair backs and passing keepers’ trays. The second-tier tavern where he met with hisfriends catered to the rookery crowd. It was loud and reeked of mead and roasted boar. He preferred it to the polite polish of the establishments on higher tiers, where politics played out in excruciatingly dull conversations.
Down here, nobody cared about what tier you were or whether you’d produced an heir. They were too busy watching Lucan make a fool of himself.
“—so long she wrapped it ’round him thrice!” Lucan finished triumphantly, standing on a bench with one clawed foot on the table, his horns scoring the ceiling as he raised his cup in the air. The curly hair that fell rakishly across his forehead had made many in the tavern purr, and not just the females.
The room roared with laughter and applause.
Seated across from Rikard, Bastien shook his head but grinned in spite of himself, his large pointed ears flushed at the tips from the mead. His wingspan took up the space of two gargoyles, and the patron beside him had long since surrendered the perch.
“He’s going to get us thrown out again,” Rikard observed, chuckling.
“He hasn’t started taking off his clothes yet. We have time.”
Drogan, who sat on the short end of the table nearest the bar, brooded into his tankard. He’d been quiet all evening, his broad jaw set and his long, straight horns casting sharp shadows on the wall as he stared at the swirling brew. The air around him thickened, like the pressure before a storm.
“You’re in a mood,” Rikard said, the mead dulling his caution.
Drogan’s lip curled. “Merely thinking.”
“Dangerous pastime.” Drogan growled at him, and Rikard laughed. “Really, what has your tail in such a twist that you can’t even drain your cup?”
“Dirt dwellers,” he snapped. “Worse than the moths. Just a constant natter when I’m trying to guard the gate. You’d thinkthey’d have something more useful to do with their lives than complain, but no. It is endless.”
Rikard snorted. “I catalog their complaints. I’m painfully aware of the pleasure they take in lodging them.”
“Do they think we are their pets? Their servants?” Drogan’s lip curled back from his teeth. “It’s like they’ve forgotten who stood between them and the goblin hordes. Who bled and died for them.”
Rikard took a slow sip of mead. He’d had this conversation with Drogan before, in various forms. Drogan’s hatred of humans ran deeper than the day-to-day. His younger brother Valric was killed in the goblin wars, and many times he’d expressed that he wished it had been him instead. The wound of his loss hadn’t scarred over and become a memory, like Rikard’s wings, but festered.
“They’re a weak species,” Rikard said with a shrug. “If they could defend themselves, they would. But they can’t, so it’s left to us to do it for them.”
It was true, and it would soothe Drogan to agree with him. Bastien, however, did not receive the message, his face pulling into a frown. “I don’t know. They do all right for themselves now that they are allowed to use some tael-forged weapons. It was our laws that kept them helpless.”
“Why should we help them?” Drogan burst out, ignoring Bastien. His mouth twisted. “Why devote our lives to their safety and comfort when they’re useless and cause us nothing but pain?”
Rikard drained his cup before answering the questions that were likely intended to be rhetorical. “The treaty demands it. It’s not for us to break a thousand-year-old agreement.”
A keeper spied the empty cup and paused by their table with a pitcher. “More mead, Nadir?”
Without waiting for Rikard’s answer, she splashed the liquid both into the cup and out of it, soaking the knee of Drogan’s breeches. Drogan’s jaw worked, and Bastien caught Rikard’s eye across the table, asking the silent question:should we haul him out of the tavern before he flips the table?
At the same moment, Lucan reached the chorus of a ballad that required audience participation, and the noise swelled until Rikard felt it rattling his mind walls. He was about to suggest they relocate when a familiar stocky female pushed through the crowd, elbowing past the revelers in a direct path to their table.
