Page 90 of When the Sky Breaks

Etienne wrung his hands and glanced over at me apologetically. Ansel pinched the bridge of his nose and sighed before replying, “He is from the Inner Court. And he has come bearing letters from Iksura—yes plural, four of them—still encouraging annulment and remarriage, still encouraging doing away with your baby, and strongly suggesting you accept either a marriage proposal or a regency with vague but clearly threatening consequences.”

The envoy stepped forward. His hair was starting to grey at his temples, showing wrinkles on his forehead—likely past five hundred.

“We’d deeply appreciate your compliance,” he said, voice eerily smooth and even. “I’m a surgeon and a healer. I can take care of the little . . . indiscretion with your servant boy . . . and then bring you back to Europe to select a more suitable partner. We’d like to avoid any continued . . . corrupting influence from MacCairn and O’Faelen. Or, of course, I can write back to find a suitable regent. Though that is not our most esteemed High Lady Iksura’s preference, it does remain an option if you insist on continuing in your current domestic affairs.”

Anger swept through me like a physical force. Warmth blossomed in my belly and spread up to my chest, my cheeks. Not flush from upset or embarrassment—magic—summoned without any conscious thought.

I fought down the urge to scream. Then I felt something soft and strange pull at the edge of my power. I latched onto it, and suddenly a wolf spider the size of my hand tumbled out of the kitchen rafters onto the man’s head. The shriek he emitted bordered on inhuman, and I suppressed a chuckle at his distress.

Neal sprinted down from our bedroom, drawn by the scream, and stopped dead.

“I didn’t think we’d have a visitor,” he said from the bottom of the stairs.

“We don’t,” I replied. “He’s just leaving.”

The surgeon brushed frantically at the spider on his face. It didn’t move.

“Unless you’d like me to see what else I can summon from the rafters?” I suggested.

The surgeon frantically shook his head, bobbed a bow, and immediately stammered, “I w-will be g-going n-now. Right now. No need for escalation, Lady Sorcha. None at all.”

Ansel spent the better part of that day sending telegrams back and forth to our base in New York, telling them what Iksura had done—here, on the boat in the Gulf, in Houston, at the mission out in the Texas desert—and to start searching legal precedent ahead of our arrival. I sent notes checking in with our field operatives that morning, asking after any complex supernatural upset that needed my input and then took the afternoon to sit in the quiet yard behind the printshop with the basset hounds and a stack of books. The next morning Neal was up before me, and I balked when I got downstairs and saw what Ansel had laid out on the breakfast table.

“I said no.”

“And here we go,” Neal muttered, rubbing his temples.

Six pistols lay on the table. And none of them was Neal’s or Ansel’s. They had to be for me.

“I said no.”

“And it’s my literal job to make sure you don’t die,” Neal said. “So I overruled that decision.”

“Excuse me?”

Henri, Claude, and Etienne ducked out, muttering something about ink and a new customer.

“I’m not doing this,” I said.

“You are, lass,” Ansel insisted. “We’ve even brought options.”

“No,” I snapped.

“Iksura is not playing games,” Ansel said sharply. “You don’t get to put yourself and the Court at risk out of petty disagreement, lass.”

“It’s not petty disagreement,” I protested, hands starting to shake now. “I won’t do it.”

“Yes you will,” Neal said, tone gentler now, catching my wrists. “You’re going to eat breakfast. And then we’re going out back and we’re finding one of these that you don’t hate. Because you are not dying out of spite. Understood?”

I shook him off.

“Fine,” I muttered, sitting down and shoving the guns out of the way, “but do not mistake my compliance for genuine agreement.”

Thirty-Eight

Neal

We’d been out back for hours. And everyone’s patience was wearing thin. Sorcha was an abysmal shot, and belligerent too. She’d tried every conceivable variation of mechanism and caliber, complained the entire time, and failed to hit a target with any of them.