The Queen's Librarian (5 page)

“Oh, you know you don’t mean it.” Laurie grinned. Bramble was happily rolling in the grass at Laurie’s feet, so Laurie crouched down to scratch at the optimistically exposed belly. “You’ve no tea at yours,” Laurie informed Lucas. “No actual food, either, now that you mention it.”

“I don’t think I did,” Lucas retorted. “And what were you doing poking about my house when I wasn’t there?”

As if that was something new. It had nothing to do with Laurie’s prince-of-the-land-ness, and everything to do with his why-not-ness. He didn’t seem to understand the meaning of words like
can’t
or
boundaries
.

“It isn’t a house.” Laurie sniffed then stood and patted at his thigh for Bramble to follow as he turned down the lane. “It’s a carriage house. People weren’t meant to live in it, and certainly not my favorite cousin.”

They were if by
people
Laurie meant
young men who desperately needed to live someplace other than down the hall from their mothers
. But he probably didn’t.

Laurie set off for Lucas’s little house, whipping a stick ahead for Bramble. Lucas and Alex just sort of followed along. Most people did.

“Why is it I’m only your favorite cousin when you want something?” Lucas asked with a lift of an eyebrow.

Laurie looked affronted. “Lucas! I’m wounded to the core! That you would even
think
I’d—”

“Save it,” said Lucas. “You forget that I’ve actually met you.”

Alex was still swiping at his lapels with Lucas’s handkerchief as they ambled along. “Why d’you even ask, Lucas? You know what he wants. It’s autumn, after all.”

“Of course he knows,” Laurie agreed, dropping the indignant offense in favor of a smirk as he wrestled the stick from Bramble and threw it again. “He just doesn’t want to do it.”

“No one in his right mind would want to do it,” Lucas put in.

“Ah!” said Laurie with a grin that was far too bright. “Then you’d be—”

“
Don’t
say it,” Alex warned. He turned to Lucas. “You can’t just
hand
him straight lines like that.”

“Oh, come on now,” Laurie said breezily as he shooed Bramble out of the way so he could open the door to Lucas’s carriage-house-cum-sanctuary. “You’ve very nearly built up a rapport with old Cráwa. He didn’t even try to crisp you last time. Aaaaaaaand,
there’s
the evil death glare.”

Lucas had no doubt it looked somewhat evil; it felt pretty evil, pounding at the backs of his eyes the way it was doing. When Laurie’s head failed to explode in a messy shower of goo, Lucas turned the glare on Alex.

“Right,” said Alex, grabbing hold of Laurie’s collar and pulling him back and away from Lucas’s front door. “C’mon, then,
Majesty
, why don’t we go and do the pretty with your auntie and leave Lucas to… uh….”

“Focus on not killing the Queen’s only son with the fiery rage held within the power of my eyes,” Lucas said through his teeth.

Alex reared back with a wary frown. “You do know you can’t
actually
kill someone with your eyes, right?” When Lucas only tightened his teeth, Alex cleared his throat. He nodded. “Right,” he said again. “Since I have no desire to test the theory on myself, we’ll just be going.” Laurie’s arms windmilled a bit as Alex dragged him out of the way and rather flung him inelegantly up the path toward the main house. “I’ll tell your mother you’ll want tea, then, shall I?”

“I’m
not
presenting him to Cráwa again,” Lucas growled.

“Of course you’re not, love.” Alex was making what he obviously thought were surreptitious shooing motions at Laurie behind his back. “You’ve already said ‘no’.”

He very kindly—or very wisely—neglected to add that Lucas had said “no” every year, and every year, he somehow found himself making the trek up the winding stairs of the castle tower with Laurie, hopeful, on his heels. The fact that, for his own unfathomable reasons, Cráwa refused to accept the presentation and subsequent formal request from anyone other than “Addison Tripp’s youngest child” did nothing to assuage Lucas’s pissed-off-ed-ness about it.

“He’d make a terrible student in the first place,” Lucas said, with a wave at the retreating Laurie, “and can you even
imagine
him with magic?”

“I think the point is rather that he already has a bit, yeah? Hence the whole presenting-him-for-magical-training thing?”

Lucas paused with a dark scowl. “Do you
ever
want to have sex with me again?”

“I really really do,” Alex answered without even missing a beat or losing his slight smile. “And so I therefore thoroughly support you in your endeavor to avoid Cráwa and requests on behalf of His Royal Twitness.”

Lucas was somewhat mollified. Somewhat. “Cráwa hates me, anyway,” he grumbled. “He hates Laurie, and every time I step into his ‘study’, I wonder if I’m going to be hopping back out with tentacles and a sudden craving for flies.”

“It’s settled, then,” Alex agreed. “You won’t be coaxed into it this year.” He pulled the ribbon from Lucas’s hair and wound his fingers through, then kneaded at Lucas’s nape. Any other time, the condescension and obvious attempt to divert him would have had Lucas growling; now, he only just stopped himself from slumping and purring. “Relax. Have yourself a wash, change into something fresh—you’ll feel worlds better. I’ll herd the delinquent prince into your mother’s tender care, and Miss Emma will have tea and a headache powder waiting for you when you’re ready to join us. All right?”

Lucas did slump now, right into Alex’s chest. He avoided the muddy jacket and stuck his face into the silk of the waistcoat. “I love you so much,” he mumbled.

He felt the chuckle rumble through Alex’s chest as much as heard it. “That,” Alex said with a rough kiss to the crown of Lucas’s head, “is what makes life perfect.”

T
HERE
was a bit of a scuffle, with Bramble assuming he and his muddy paws would be welcome in the house and Lucas begging to differ. Lucas won. Just barely. And Cat seemed a little
too
pleased with it all, so much so that she deigned to greet Lucas with a stretch and a serpentine saunter over to her milk bowl—on the shelf over the stove to deter Bramble from slurping it—rather than her usual slow blink and yawn. Or, in Bramble’s case, her usual glare of death and warning extension of claws. Lucas obligingly fetched her the last of the milk and let the reverberating contented purr that rumbled through the quiet of the little house soothe him as he stripped and changed. His clothes smelled of pub. He hadn’t noticed it when he’d dragged them back on this morning, or when he and Alex had been walking home, but now… drat it all, had he spilled ale all over his shirt? Or maybe taken a swim in it?

He tossed the shirt into the growing pile in the corner. There was a basket under there somewhere, he was sure of it, that he was going to have to gather up one of these days and present to Miss Emma. The anticipated oh-whatever-are-we-going-to-do-with-you
look that always came along with the occasion was what held him back. He should learn to wash his own clothes… someday. He should also learn to cook. Toast and cheese and the occasional egg did not a satisfying diet make. And if he learned to cook, he wouldn’t have to spend so much time up at the main house, suffering through yet another not-quite-lecture about Why Certain Young Men Should Have Already Given Their Mothers Grandchildren. As if there weren’t enough of the little creatures about the place for supper every Sun’s Day. Sometimes Lucas wondered if Pippa and Nan weren’t actually in some kind of competition for who could produce the most children in the shortest amount of time.

Thank God they weren’t Lucas’s problem anymore.

He was going to have to dump his wages from the Library into the estate’s coffers again, he could see it coming now. He’d been hoping to at least buy Clara’s handfasting dress for her, but he wasn’t as optimistic now as he’d been only a week or so ago. Slade had taken the news of his prospective wife’s poverty extraordinarily well, almost weirdly enthusiastically, actually, nearly doing backflips to assure Lucas that he was in love with Clara and not her supposed dowry. And he hadn’t even been drunk yet. It endeared him almost instantly to Lucas, and even Alex had been soppily charmed. Of course, there was still the meeting with Slade’s parents to get through before everything was official, and the Queen had to approve, if Lucas ever got the chance to put the request to her, but Clara wanted this, and it was a love match, not a contract of convenience, so Lucas would make it happen.

He spared a dark look over at the leaning tower of account books stacked beside the desk as he pulled his shirt on. The approach of Crone’s Night meant the approach of Winter Tithing, and Lucas knew all too well that he’d have to do some serious juggling when it came. The Faulkes’s potatoes had suffered blight, and Lucas knew they’d lost almost a quarter of their harvest; there would have to be adjustments in the rent so the family wouldn’t suffer too terribly over the winter.
Discreet
adjustments, or Mister Faulkes would be too conscientious to accept a lower tithe than some of his neighbors. And the Greenleys had been surprised with twins two months ago, which not only added an unanticipated mouth to feed to their already tight resources, but would take Mistress Greenley out of the fields come Harvest. If they ever got a Harvest.

Lucas peered out the window, scanning the sky—
one more day, please, just one more day
—and reached into the wardrobe for the green jumper. Alex liked him in green, and Mother had knitted it for him, so perhaps he’d make them both smile by wearing it. Anyway, the sleeve of his coat was going to need a bit of mending—stupid thorns—so he’d best take that up to Miss Emma now, instead of wearing it and taking a chance on making the tiny tear into a major unraveling. That and the whole coat-smelling-like-pub thing. That was going to earn him one of Emma’s chiding looks, he was sure, but perhaps she wouldn’t mention it to his mother.

“I’m a grown man,” he muttered to himself, shutting up the wardrobe with a grumpy kick to the door. “Well, all right, maybe a little stunted. But still. As grown as I’m going to get. And I can go to a pub if I want to.” Cat
brupped
at him, eyeing up the jumper with a gimlet gaze as Lucas laid it on the bed.

“That,” he told Cat, pointing at the pile of soft, thick yarn, “is not your bed.” He shooed at her. “Go on, then, off with you.” Cat only stared at him with her
oh look I think that food-fetching minion is trying to communicate
look, which segued directly into her
how annoying
look, and didn’t move. Lucas tried out a glare, but it was very hard to impress Cat. Keeping an eye on her, albeit a fuzzy one once he took off his glasses, he pulled the jumper over his—

“Mathlasa thei scontun.”

Lucas
did
not
shriek in surprise at the voice directly behind him. All right, he shrieked a little. Kind of high-pitched and ten-year-old-girl-ish, but at least it was muffled into the jumper.

Heart suddenly racing, Lucas yanked the jumper down and spun, split right down the middle between outrage and relief. He took in the platinum hair, the grim determination, the… very odd clothes, now that he was looking. Lucas set a hand to his chest, like he was trying to prevent his heart from thumping out through his breastbone.

“Scontun,” said the man, and he cracked a small, friendly smile as Cat leapt from the bed and into his arms. When Cat failed to scratch the man’s eyes out, merely purred and nuzzled and fawned like a slutty kitten, Lucas could do nothing but stare. “Red Libe-aar-in,” the man told Lucas sagely.

Lucas blinked, distractedly reached for his glasses, and shoved them on. Drat, he wasn’t seeing things. “Right,” he said slowly, “Libe-aar-in,” then he shook his head and rubbed at his brow. “Bugger
all
.”

Chapter 3

L
UCAS
couldn’t decide if he was annoyed that it was Mister Scontun, or outraged that this relative stranger was
in his house
. Had he been in here the whole time? No, Laurie would’ve run into him, surely. And Bramble wasn’t exactly a vicious watchdog, but he was pretty good at pretending to be one.

Lucas supposed he ought to be a little bit frightened—what with the whole relative-stranger-
in-his-house
thing—but the man didn’t seem to be dangerous, and he wasn’t armed. Unless one counted Cat. Which Alex certainly did. But the way Cat was snuggling and purring wasn’t exactly inspiring dread at the moment. It was kind of inspiring nausea, though.

“What the
bloody
—” Lucas stopped himself. There was no reason to be completely crude. Well, there was, but Lucas could be the better man. Sometimes. When he tried. “Mister Scontun,” he said, as calmly as he could, “I don’t know what you think you’re doing, but one generally waits until one has been invited into a man’s home before accosting him in his bedroom.”

Um. Right. That hadn’t come out quite the way it had sounded in Lucas’s head. Which was right this second reminding some of Lucas’s more inconvenient bits of all the pleasant accosting that had gone on in this particular bedroom. As it were.