Sons (Book 2) (32 page)

“That looks good enough,” I said as I sat down again.  “You should be able to make new clothes for the Claiming with plenty left over for a couple of good sized quilts for winter and maybe even a couple of good thick shirts, too.”  I didn’t give them the time to object or thank or anything.  I just moved all of us back to the lakeside, letting the sprites adjust to the transition on their own.  “Gentlemen, you’ll have to help with some of the sewing, I think, but you can do that while you help your son and daughter plan their new home on the river.  Call for Shrank or the Deas if you need anything, but you should find plenty to eat.

“Y’all have a good day, now,” I said, smiling down at them.  Then I got the hell out before they drove me nuts.

“Ooh, bacon!” Jimmy said, sniffing the air outside Peter’s door as he pushed it open and walked in.

“Jimmy!” I whispered harshly.  “At least knock first.”

“They wouldn’t hear it from up here anyway,” he said walking down the front hall and through the living room to the kitchen.  Richard breezed through on his way to the balcony where everyone was gathering for breakfast.  He stopped short when he saw us, sending a plate of fried bacon and sausages sliding forward off the stack of plates precariously settled on his arms to the floor.

Jimmy lurched forward to grab it before it hit the ground with a sweeping motion that kept the sausages from hitting the floor, too.

“Good morning, boys,” Richard said, staring at Jimmy and the plate, more than a little shocked that Jimmy moved
that
fast.  All three of us were.  I hadn’t seen anybody move that fast since, well, okay, a few minutes ago when I was selecting cloth for the sprites, but still.  “Hungry this morning, Jimmy?” Richard asked, a huge smile splitting his face.  “Everybody’s out on the balcony.  Could you guys grab what’s left on the counter, please?”

“Thank you, something normal to do,” I said, turning into the kitchen.

“What, you don’t think what we did today is normal?” Jimmy asked following me into the kitchen and chewing on a piece of bacon.

“I hope not,” I said.  Peter stood at the stove turning an omelet in a pan while something slightly sweet and floury baked in the oven behind him.  “Morning, Pete.  Sleep well?”

After stopping for a second to think about it, he said, “Yes, I did, come to think about it, and I didn’t think I would.  Thought I’d have nightmares all night after seeing…
that crap
last night.”  He shivered at the memory of Dieter and his friends.  As he went back to his omelet, he said, “You two were up early.  Problems?”

“I’m a problem magnet now,” I said, pulling a tray down from a cabinet next to Peter while Jimmy tried to balance two large serving trays of biscuits and scrambled eggs along his arm so he could pick up a third.  Putting the tray in front of Jimmy, I said, “Let’s not try that and just say we did.”  Peter snickered as he plated his last omelet, turning off the stove.

“The Palace woke us at dawn,” I said, hopping up on the center island and snatching a piece of bacon as Jimmy walked past with his heavily-laden tray.  “So I figured we’d go for a walk while y’all were still asleep.  Shrank found us a smith but he developed a problem exercising his ability.  I didn’t even think it was possible but apparently faery metalsmiths can work their magic without benefit of a forge or tools or anything.  Problem is, doing that tears them up from the inside out.  And I do mean literally tears them to shreds.  If it weren’t so pitiful, I would have slapped the dumbasses from here to the South Pole and back.”

“What was he making?” Peter asked, reaching back to the oven to pull open the door.  Cinnamon burst into the room as he pulled a large pan of sweet rolls out quickly and set them on the counter behind me.

“A gift for me,” I said, shaking my head.  “That’s why I couldn’t get mad at them, but what do I need or want? 
They
both need and want for everything!  Priorities, people!  Then Braedon tells Jimmy this real tearjerker of a story and when you add the fact that these people are aliens—I mean, truly alien people to us; they don’t
even think
like us—all I could do was patch everything up and say ‘don’t do that again.’  I’m hoping that since they can at least see Jimmy’s aura that they’ll have an easier time with him.”

“Who’s Braedon?” Peter asked as he drizzled white icing from a mixing bowl across the sweet rolls with practiced ease.

“The clan head that the smith belonged to,” I answered.  “Ilan yi Braedon.  The entire clan was sharing his pain as much as possible, but…” I shook my head warily.  “There are only two things worse to the Fae: Iron poisoning and what the Rat Bastard did.  Nothing tops that.  They still did it, though.  And he crawled out of his hole afterward, just to get a look at Jimmy and me.  He could barely move, he was in so much pain, but we came to see him, so damn it, he was gonna make it happen.”

“You dealt with them that closely and you didn’t peek at the present?” he asked, dropping the bowl into a sink of steaming water.  “Birthdays and Christmas are going to be easy shopping for you then.”

“Don’t go there,” I said, starting to laugh at the absurdity.

“Come on,” he said, picking up the platter of rolls and the plate of omelets.  “Was that going on in the back gardens?”

“No, different issue.  Similar problem, though,” I said as we passed into the dining room.  We heard Jimmy talking, which I thought was a little odd.  I figured there would be several small conversations going on.

“…Braedon was like this teary-eyed two-year-old,” he said.  “He gave us a beautiful and passionate speech about why they would go through such massive pain and loss, but we’re both standing there going, ‘You’re idiots’.”  He shoveled a forkful of scrambled eggs in his mouth as we came out onto the balcony.

“You didn’t… say that, did you?” Richard asked Jimmy cautiously.

“No-oo-oo,” I answered for him, taking a plate from the buffet table just outside the doorway.  “They are far too fragile for anything like that right now.  Maybe when my children’s children are running the realm.”

“So what did you tell them?” Peter asked.

“That what Daybreak wanted from them was that they keep their families fed, healthy, and happy,” Jimmy said.  “Which, now that I think about it, probably oversteps my bounds since you haven’t told me what you expect out of them.  Or me, either for that matter.”

“Good morning all,” Kieran said as he appeared directly onto the balcony.  Salutations echoed across the balcony.

“Good morning, Free Lord,” I said, hiding my grin in my plate.

“Free Lord?” Kieran asked, his face a mask of confusion as he took a plate from the buffet and helped himself.  Shrank slipped off his shoulder in a lazy roll and took to wing at waist height, stretching out his arms and legs at strange angles.

“Lord Daybreak’s Fae often refer to me as ‘the Free Lord’s Pixie’ or ‘the Regent’,” Shrank squealed to Kieran as he bobbed up to shoulder level. 

“And what makes me ‘the Free Lord’?” Kieran asked, lowering the title into a false bass.  He leaned against the balcony railing casually and started eating.

“The fact that you are capable of committing a geas yet have no realm to rely on makes you a free lord, Lord Kieran,” Shrank said.  “We had not thought it possible.  Neither did we think it possible that a man could hold a Faery realm and your brother did that.  I had actually assumed that the geas would have dissolved already.”

Kieran shrugged as he chewed.  “We can do that anytime you’d like.  I had assumed it would continue to be useful.”

“While I thank you for that consideration, Lord,” the pixie squealed quite seriously in the Fae common tongue and not English.  He hovered steadily in front of Kieran in a very formal stance.  “I have never thought the possibility under your seal.”  Shrank pushed a slight wave of emotional energy through the link of the geas as he spoke that turned into a torrent as he finished.  It was a focused burst but Daybreak still read it plainly as well as Kieran’s reaction.

Now I felt like crap.  For no good reason, either, other than I snooped into a private and intimate moment unintentionally.  Shrank, either intentionally or not, initiated a communion with his Lord.  Kieran accepted.  Peter or Ethan probably noticed something, but nobody else saw anything.

“May I ask a question?” David asked from the far end of the table.  The first I’d heard from him today, actually. We all turned to find him with sudden stage fright as eight faces with eight pairs of eyes staring at him.  A chuckle ran through us as Mike said, “Of course, David, ask.  They’re wonderfully obtuse when they don’t want to answer something.”  This created another brief wave of laughs but it confused me.  I thought I told people it was none of their business.

“Shrank said ‘capable of committing a geas’, but I thought a geas was nothing but a long-term compulsion,” David said.  “Any wizard can create a compulsion spell and if he’s strong enough or recharges it periodically can create a long-term one.  Does that mean any wizard is a potential Fae Lord?”  Shrank fell off the balcony railing in fits of laughter.  Kieran leaned casually back to check on him, raising an eyebrow of amused concern as he watched the pixie fall a few dozen feet.

“Something tells me it’s not quite that simple,” Mike said leaning back in his chair with his hands laced behind his head.

Shrank flew back up and onto the railing, stifling his laughs and wiping the tears from his eyes, but when he saw David, he fell again, forward this time and hit the floor. 

“The answer to your question, David, is yes, but no,” Kieran said.  “Yes, a geas is a compulsion spell and, yes, many wizards and magicians are strong enough to place one, but not on the Fae.  A compulsion, perhaps, but not a geas, and certainly not one strong enough to override any existing geas.  The nature of the Faery creates an almost symbiotic link between both parties that the human wizard’s mind just can’t cope with.  The feedback from the linkages snaps instantly.”

“But you and your brother both survived the experience,” David pointed out.

“We haven’t ascertained how Seth managed that particular feat just yet, especially on such a massive scale,” Kieran said, waving his fork around us at the Palace on the last.  “That is not something I could manage.”

“Don’t look so glum,” Peter said with a chuckle.  “I couldn’t do it either.”

“Yes, you can,” Kieran and I said at the same time, causing him to look back and forth between us confused.

“I mean, you could lay a geas on a Wylde Fae,” I said.  “You can’t have Gilán.  It’s mine, but you can lay a geas.  And you could possibly lay a geas on one of mine but you couldn’t break mine and I could override yours.”  Kieran nodded in agreement, biting into a sweet roll.

“How do you figure that?” Peter asked, leaning into the table on his elbows.

I rolled my eyes.  I know, not nice, but really?  How dense can you be?  “You saw Kieran putting his geas on Shrank, right?” I asked him and got a nod.  “You didn’t see the actual magic wrap around him, though, right?  I did.  It was right after that when I realized I was seeing Kieran’s aura, too.  Well, look at Shrank now?  Can’t you see the bindings on him?  Look closely now.  Shrank, hold still for a second.”

Peter stared hard at the pixie as Shrank hovered over a small dish of blueberries on the buffet.  “Well, I can see it, but I don’t claim to understand it,” Peter said.

“That’s a language issue,” I said, dismissing it as a problem.  “Easy to fix.”

“What about Jimmy’s?  Can you see how his is different?” Kieran asked Peter, which actually surprised me because I hadn’t written the spell on Jimmy as a geas, but as a compulsion.  Claiming him to throw off the blood spell created the linkages that mimicked the Fae geas.  It was Jimmy’s turn to get eight pairs of eyes on him, but if he was the slightest uncomfortable with it, he didn’t show it.  Shrank was the first to lose interest.

“I don’t see anything but Gilán’s First,” he squealed and flew happily away to the buffet table, still eyeing the blueberries.  Everyone else drew away almost as quickly with remarks of not seeing anything at all.  Peter and I were the last two.

“They don’t look similar at all, really,” Peter mumbled, glancing over at me quickly.  “The bindings at the middle are a little alike, but overall, Jimmy’s look more… dense, thick.  Less verbose, maybe?”

That description was apt, I thought.  Then there was the matter of the two additional rings that Shrank didn’t have, giving Jimmy five instead of three, and those two outer rings weren’t golden but blue.  When I turned to ask Peter about those rings, I found myself unable to imagine how to communicate that thought for a second.  The Twice-Dead God’s weird Babel worm had loosed his spell again.  Frustrating.

So was Jimmy a special case?

“Oh, before I forget,” I said loud enough for everyone to hear and completely changing the subject.  “As Ethan discovered, we have young, naked guests in the lake out back.  She helped you with the jet of water, ya’ know?”  I got a little of my smile back at that memory.

“I figured that’s how he got me that far!” Ethan cried, half-standing at the table to see over the railing.  He might have seen one more treetop from this angle.  “She did it, too?  Cool!  They may
need
a strong river.”

“Who’s in the back gardens?” Shrank asked, hovering over the railing.

“The nymphs and their families,” I said.  “I took the nymphs to see the freshwater ocean. That’s when I realized she was pregnant and they’d need a real home soon so we found one along the river.  Jimmy went to get her parents while I got his so they could spread the good news and that’s when the second problem of the day reared its ugly head.  Her mother was extremely worried and afraid of the ramifications of having a Changed child, not for herself or the Changed child, but for her
other
children and
their
children.”

“That you might prune that entire branch of their family tree,” Peter said grimly.  I nodded, taking a bite out of one of Peter’s sweet rolls.