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“Fleetfoot.”
I felt him follow my gaze to the corner of the garden patch, where the humans were flowing in from their duties in the fields and gardens that fed the Warrens.
“Thinking about plowing one of the garden gnomes? I tried one once. Nice and tight—muscular, too. He sounded so fucking hot pounding into me. Fucked me into the potting table so hard I had splinters in my hips for weeks. Tried one of their women, too—more my speed, to be honest. The big tits bouncing as I fucked her really heightened the experience. Different from the Fae, though. Not as passionate. She just sort of took it, even though she was the one that initiated it.”
I let my gaze slide to him, my head never moving but my brow raising. “I assume that this tale of you violating the Ard Rí’s servants has a purpose, Fleetfoot.”
“Oh. Uh. Mostly just talking to hear myself speak, Captain.”
“I recommend in the future, soldier, you might sound better silent.”
I felt him turn to look at me full on, and I grunted. It wasn’t that I disliked my guards, but they liked to poke and prod in business that didn’t involve them. And I suspected Fleetfoot was about to do the exact same thing.
His boot toed at a convenient rock.
“Is it true, then, that you haven’t taken a lover since the war?”
“I’m testing out the human custom of keeping their lovers a secret, soldier. I suspect that your honor greatly appreciates their discretion. I would advise you do so as well.”
The words were a bald threat, but as ever, I masked it with the even, flat tone that kept everyone around me from being on edge. I wanted to snarl. I wanted to bite. Always. She and I had that in common.
It was her savagery, her indomitable spirit, and her refusal to be subdued that drew me. A kindred spirit.
An itch started in the back of my mind. Like the sensation of a bug crawling up the inner wall of my skull.
“Are you now?”
The sly look he gave me was not lost on me, but the insistent itch drew my attention away from him, drowning out anything he said.
It grew, rumbling down the corridors of my mind, until my entire body was seized by a thousand daggers piercing me. A high-pitched, insistent ringing took hold of my awareness, and drowned all sound and sight as pain racked me.
I rocked on my feet, my balance shifting left and right, like I was on a boat in the middle of a raging storm as every one of my battle-hardened muscles strained against their anchors on my bones.
Bile rose up in the back of my throat and spread across my tongue in an acrid, bitter taste.
Gravel bit into my hands, knees and the left side of my face. The plate guards on my ears scattered across the pathway, and I groaned as burning cold lanced through me.
“Captain! Captain!”
It sounded like Fleetfoot, but it was so far away and so soft compared to the shrieking banshee in my ear.
I tried to push the gravel pathway away from me, tried to rock back to sitting on my heels, but the colossal weight of the ice that tore at me from within my very body prevented it.
Thoughts fled my head like scattering birds driven from their hiding places by braying hounds. All I could feel or see was blackness and haunting flashes of pale-blue light.
Cricket.
Something was wrong. Something was very, very wrong.
I clamped down on the storm of magic within me, which fought my flesh to riot out into the world around me to find her before my cells could follow. I leashed it and pulled it back under my control like a herd of wild stallions thundering across the hills, fleeing from a dirge hound.
“What’s wrong with him?” demanded a feminine voice.
“I don’t know. We were just talking and then . . . now he’s like this.”
It was Fleetfoot. I was sure of it. Still fucking talking.
Hands were on me, grasping and pulling my bulk up from the ground. Everywhere their hands touched me felt like my skin peeled away in their grip, and I bellowed in pain. Pain and rage.
