Yet Another Morning After

[Niabh]

The raven gave a dismissive grawk and twisted his head to jab his beak at an insistent itch on his wing joint. “When are you two not fighting? Everything up to now was practice. This was inevitable. Eventually one of you was going to cross a line the other couldn’t tolerate, and since she’s the scheming one and you’re the boring one, it was bound to be her. I’m kinda glad I’m on your end rather than hers, since I happen to agree with you.” He flipped his head around again, now sounding much less flippant. “I’ll be fine. She’s way less perilous than some folks I’ve been sent to.”

Juniper slid the child off her hip to the bottom of the bed, forcing the raven to move out of range of little fingers. As Fionn had in Razasan, Juniper wore tultharian garb—a rather matronly lavender-and-gold sacque, with her dark hair folded under a knitted cap and a rigid stomacher shoved down her front. Like the Queen, she gave the appearance of having been crammed into the costume with some force and left to suffer. When she turned, she did so in a single tight jerk from the waist, like an automaton.

“She?” Juniper gave a quick, confused glance at her daughter, and just as quickly decided that Glenn didn’t give a toss about the child. Her face stiffened. “Best be concerned about thy own self, rather than that one. Herself will get on without thee.”

As if to put a stamp on the argument, Juniper briskly turned her back to him. She went around the room, sweeping heaps of grey ash off the windowsills and replacing them with small green cones. With a tap, they began to smolder, sending up drizzles of scented smoke. The raven sneezed. At the foot of the bed, the child drummed her heels, her head turning to follow her mother.

“Dreaming is dreaming,” Juniper went on, without looking at him. “Must deal with time in this world, Sionnach. It’s nine day tha’s lost, no more than that. Tha’rt young and strong. I’d like thee up and walking by day’s end.” She paused to regard him a moment, cool eyes narrowing in speculation. “There’s no stopping thee, e’en though I say it nay, anyhow.”

She ended her circuit of the room back at the foot of the bed, in front of her daughter. “Arms up.”

The child squirmed. “I hate it.”

“Hate all you please, an tha doesn’t put it on, tha may sit behind the door.”

Acorn had spent a great deal of time pouting behind doors in the past few days. It was dull back there, with nothing to do but pick up dust puffs, and with her mother about, there was a dearth of dust in the house. She held up her arms, though it would be a wonder if Juniper could work the shift past Acorn’s pooched-out bottom lip.

“Hey, Acorn,” the raven said in a throaty, conspiratorial whisper. “Remember what I told you to say?”

Juniper wriggled a pair of tiny canvas stays over the child’s head. Her face popped out, and she brightened, grinning at Glenn with a mouthful of sharp baby teeth and chirping, in perfectly intelligible Common, “Hallo, wanker.”

[Glenn]

Lines that one will not cross and things one cannot endure. It was Myrken but it was likely life as well. Here, though, the stakes tended to be more ... more what? More visceral? More personal? More ghastly, certainly. There was little greater meaning to be found in that though. "I've not asked you about your previous postings, Benedict. It's been so much about her. I'm not saying we can get all the way past that, but perhaps a little."

He did not much help his case by asking Juniper about the queen so soon after. It was hardly surprising though. "You've found a way to deal with the fascination with Catch then." It certainly wasn't a statement, one that assumed success. It wasn't a question either. It was instead, a challenge. Speaking of challenges, it was time for him to challenge himself by speaking. He laid back as he did so, as if to let the healer know that there were certain priorities to all of this. "There's another thing too. Everything she's faced over the last few years, save for her most severe plotting and scheming, she faced with me a breath away, my words if not the rest of me. Now she faces the self-inflicted loss of me without me to help her through it. In some ways, I'm less alone than before," and he'd very freely glance to Benedict at that. "She's left with nothing but her obsessions stubbornly reinforced and her plans tragically deferred."

As if to offer a bit of compromise, the tiniest twig of peace, he worked to force one leg around. With effort and the blissful silence that went along with it, his left leg found itself dangling off the side of the bed; no more than that though.

So it was with an additional grunt that he responded to Benedict's own efforts. "Truly you and yours are the most appropriate caretakers for children both lost and found."

[Niabh]

“Oh, come on,” said the raven, dismayed. “I thought it would cheer you up.”

Juniper slid the little girl off the edge of the bed, since it made more sense to get her shift on while she was standing. She raised a dispassionate face to Glenn. “Herself did live a good long while before thee. Can do without long enough to get thy feet under thee.”

She turned Acorn around by the shoulder to lace up the pinny, ignoring but secretly sympathizing with the child’s whining. When the Acorn was already fighting three layers in full summer, stockings and shoes were a battle that could be put off until later. The energy would be better spent corralling the tultharian, whose singlemindedness belied just how close he had come to the hills beyond—or wherever tultharian went when they went.

Her ear twitched toward his grunt as he slid a leg off the bed, but she calmly let him go about his own efforts, finished tying up the laces, and dismissed Acorn with a kiss atop the head. With the stubborn ones, she’d found that letting them see how far they could get on their own quickly convinced them that they needed a helping hand. She had a nasty, foreboding sense of this one, though. The truly obstinate ones—much as she hated to say it, the ones like His Lordship—would break their own legs trying to walk, and when they couldn’t walk, they’d crawl. After the couple close calls he’d had, she didn’t want to dose him to keep him passive, plus he’d need to build his strength back.

“Herself do say, tha has a weakness for the glamourie.” Lavender gown scraping the floor, she came along to his bedside and offered a sturdy elbow to help him pull himself out. Though a good head smaller than Glenn, she was built solid, like a badger. “Will try not to glam with thee. Unless a’ must.” Her tone, while conversational, held the subtle heft of a threat.

[Glenn]

"I'm cheered enough," or at least he was cheered enough to make little under his breath comments, albeit careful ones. This wasn't the time to offend Juniper by doubting her ability to raise children. He did not seem overly glum. There were things to be dealt with but it was generally nice to hear he'd only lost nine days and not nine years, no matter how worn down he felt from the ordeal. When there was time, there was hope. There was always something that could be done, though often the more desperate one was, the higher the cost and the higher the cost, the more chance what you did would only make things worse. His most recent action had been quite desperate indeed, effective to a degree, but with reverberations.

His inquiry about Finn was quickly shut down. "I'll ask again when I have feet under me then. You came for her, not for me yet you tend to me now, for her. Did you come alone?" It was an question innocently asked. He was concerned. He had told her what he did in the dream out of concern. That led to her arrival here. Now that she was here, despite his concern, she was with him and not the Queen. The question was as innocent as could be. Yet to answer it would be tell him so much more.

A weakness for the glamourie, she said. Others might say it in other ways. Wynsee had her own way to explain things, an unquenchable thirst to brush up against power. Even he might put it differently. "This sort of thing has happened to me often. It leaves a mark. A rawness. For a time, as I was still recovering from the last such mishap, it triggered a mania within me. That seems abated now. We'll see what effect this new experience has wrought. Unless it's common practice for either Tuatha or Tulthurian to spend months ambling about your Hoard?" Effect should have been damage and experience should have been trauma but he wished to soften it for Benedict's sake.

[Niabh]

“Not alone,” Juniper replied calmly. “Did bring the Acorn, see?” She turned a fond smile on her daughter and flicked at the child’s curls, which made Acorn wrinkle her nose and playfully swat the hand away. Even if the lady had not already warned her, Juniper already had the sneaking suspicion that there were no innocent questions with this one. She shrugged a shoulder, adding with carefully cultivated blandness, “Agus Bo. We’ll not need Bo, an thou behaves thyself, I hope.”

“Bo’s one of the house guard,” the raven explained. “She’s creepy. That’s…” Without even looking her way, the raven felt Meg’s hot glare boring into him. He shuffled away awkwardly over the humped bedclothes. “Ah…well, I was hoping you’d be more awake before I had to start laying into you, but that’s the other problem. They sent a full rustin’ patrol after her—plus the bard, plus Meg, plus I guess Acorn. There’s like thirty of ’em. All hiding out in your Woods.”

Juniper made a tiny exasperated huff and a click of her tongue, rolling her eyes upward. “And that. Raven has no rein on his waggling tongue, I see. Small wonder Herself be out of sorts with thee. A poor trait it is for a raven to gossip.”

“It ain’t gossiping if it’s important. He’s gonner find out sooner or later,” the raven pointed out. “There’s a pikehand in his rustin’ sitting room, for Lugh's sake.”

“Did not learn it from me,” Juniper replied coolly. “Tha’s one step up from a spy, and that’s the truth of’t.” She fixed her gaze back on Glenn. “Herself did do thee injury. She wished that thou would be tended, so I come. And so I stay, till thou art mended. It’s a kindness she’s done thee. Herself is a good lady.” And she bowed her head a moment, in reverence, or perhaps for patience; there was a tension to her closed lids that marked of a barely checked temper. When she opened her eyes, however, they were as placid as ever.

“No man can live long in the Hoard, no more than man may live under water. It is…” She frowned, licked her lips, sought the word. “It is its own el-e-ment,” she finished slowly, with some uncertainty. The unpleasant, creeping sensation of borrowing the word made her arms prickle. “Be older than glamourie, the Hoard. And not of us. The Hoard be gift from the gods themselves.” In spite of her best efforts for coolness and distance, she could not but help regard him with some curiosity, a traveller to a place she herself had not been and could never go, though it be no further away than her own right hand. “Belike thou art some changed. But not in years off thy face, never fear it.”

[Glenn]

What did behaving himself even mean at this point? He wasn't about to rush off to see Fionn, not when he couldn't even get one foot in front of the other. Anyway, letters or messages through Benedict were always more his speed anyway. The former put her off guard still, which mattered when every advantage counted, when it was life and death even if it wasn't necessarily his life and death. "You can't fault Benedict for telling me things when he was released from her service without the common care and decency to lay down some terms. There is, I'd add, a severe lack of terms between she and I."

He was wonderful at ignoring Acorn, though, given his recent, surprisingly violent, encounter with a young girl that might be defined as one of those gods Juniper was mentioning, he was ready at any moment to defend himself in whatever way he could (probably a headbutt), if she went for his jugular suddenly. For a moment, he ignored the healer as well. "Do you remember everything? Do you think she's properly bound by that? By Elliot's fool modification of the deal. Five years?"

There was talk, then, of the Hoard. She said he couldn't live long there, but he had, of he had the perception of it. The body was just a vessel after all. If he was changed only by experience (which was also how the queen primarily changed him, through sharing of ideas and sensation and nothing preternatural in the least), then that would be a mercy. He'd left part of himself under ground, once upon a time (or at least became disconnected with part of himself that rattled about inside of him). There was no saying what he might have left in the Hoard or even worse, what he might have picked up there. "It would be good if we might be able to examine just how I was changed, Juniper. That would be best for everyone, though I might ask that you keep it between the three of us, if such a privilege as discretion exists between physician and patient where you are from."

[Niabh]

Glenn might ignore Acorn, but Acorn was wide-eyed with dread fascination over this fellow who had been so silent and sick, but was now awake and full of words. She clung to a fistful of her mother’s skirts for safety, but couldn’t take her eyes off him. Then, too, Acorn was far too used to being the center of all attention—as a child among the Tuatha, she could not but be—charming the guards and the Queen herself. In her mind, it was a matter of time before the tultharian came around and noticed her too, perhaps when he was well enough to get out of bed, a prospect that both frightened and consumed her. Tultharian were Bad. He had been safer when he was sick. Sensing the tension in the child’s fist, Juniper gave a slight smile and led Acorn’s head to safety against her own thigh.

“Can be quiet,” she told him, too amused over his lack of tact to be rightly offended at the implied insult. “’Tis Raven tha must worry over.”

“Yeah, yeah, I get it, the raven’s a blabbermouth, good neighbor,” the raven grumbled. “Aye, I remember everything.” Part of the raven’s job was to remember everything—every word, every nuance—a talent that held true even through the slippery realm of dreaming. He wished he remembered a little less, come to think about it, or at least that he could lie about what he knew. “And I don’t know how bound she is. I didn’t talk to her. I couldn’t talk to her; she wouldn’t speak to me. Just told me to get.” He made a small, sad warbling noise, more like a pigeon than a rough raven. Acorn, entranced, left off staring at Glenn long enough to roll her tongue and try to imitate it. “There was no exchange that I could tell, no vow. She’s about as obliged as she is with that arrangement she made with you, only I think the kid really means to hold her to it.”

He glanced over to Meg, who appeared to be doing her best to follow the conversation. No idea if she would simply turn around and tell the Queen everything, except that she’d given her word. Unlike the Queen, the raven would trust Meg with holding it. “I’d say if she wants to carry on with the plan, she’d better go along with him, but there’s nothin’ stopping her from going around behind his back, particularly since she’s got a goodly swatch of backup now.”

[Glenn]

"I trust Benedict completely." Glenn said, though he said it as if it was hardly in doubt and hardly in question. It was an easy statement with a still raspy voice. It was also entirely consistent with what he'd just indicated about the three of them being the ones to know about whatever diagnosis he had. There was a possibility that she had ordered the raven to spy on him, had even glamoured him to not show any remorse or not even be away, but Glenn was well past the point of doubting every aspect of his life. To do so would be madness. If she crossed such a line, then there would hardly be any point to it anyway. It would no longer be about winning or finding an ideal solution for all but instead about seeking out both necessity and finality. Best to lean into fraternal fidelity instead.

And Benedict, just a bit later would report back more fully (even as Glenn continued to ignore the child). "See," he made no effort to hide slight amusement, "I learn. I am capable. Finn should be worried not that he'll hold her to it but that he'll force her hand. He's still under the onus to bring them together. She may have some interesting sleeps upcoming."

Still, it left him in a precarious spot. "Juniper, another day for my voice to recover, but then I have to send a message to her. An exchange between the two of us in the name of peace. If she refuses, I'll have to go to the mother. In that case, things will get messy. Avoiding bloodshed is reason enough to try terms first, but it's not reason enough to stay my hand completely considering what I know. And if she means to hinder me, I will make her consciously decide to cross each and every line knowing the consequences and that there are other options. Heaviest is the crown of a selfish queen with an open heart."

[Niabh]

One look told the raven that Glenn was too much for Meg; her eyes darted back and forth as if trying to scan the words out of the air, and unconsciously she nibbled the dried skin around her thumbnail. It seemed his role had expanded from messenger to interpreter. He relayed Glenn’s words back to her as best he could, only he might have leaned too heavily into the idea of bloodshed; Meg’s eyes darkened and narrowed with resolve.

“Matter between you and Herself be none of mine own,” she said, though her voice quavered at the unexpected determination. Still, he was her patient, no more and no less, and she bore down hard on that relationship, both to assure him and remind herself. “I come to tend thee, and will do.”

The lady was all but grown, and Queen to boot. No fear that she could not hold her own against a tultharian, if that be her wish and her will. Still the man’s casual assurance—that he would make the Queen go against herself if she tried to deny him—brought out an unexpected surliness in Juniper, in spite of what she had just assured. She wanted to laugh in his face, and to slap it. The desire burned in her eyes, but she quelled it. It would not do to be riled—nay, be riled, if she must, but never let him see it. She found her center, her calming place, gathered her hands before her, and gave Acorn a quick squeeze both for the child’s reassurance and her own.

“The Hoard…” she began, uncertain of her words. “It is a live thing, in its way. Like your Woods here. A…knowing place. Not a foot stepped in those Woods but they do know of’t. ’Tis the same with the Hoard. An a’ reach a hand in, hand might reach back. They do say, what Hoard is give, Hoard will take back. What is give the Hoard, one will lose to it, sure someday. An cíos a íoc.”

“Means the rent’s gotter be paid,” added the raven.

Juniper touched her throat lightly, clearing it. “But thee, who never set foot in Hoard true, only did dream of it. It holds no claim on thy waking self. Only in dreams.”

[Glenn]

He'd not been asking anything of her. It had been, more than anything else, a hope that his voice would be strong enough to provide Benedict the words that might be needed for the next day. They would be plentiful, if not entirely pointed (for his words so rarely were). So if there was a request, it was to help him along with that. "Whether it is out of a sense of fair play, be she resent me for my interference or adore me for the challenge of it, she sent you nonetheless. I am glad she did, for the sake of your presence and for her meaning behind it." He didn't smile, for it would have been forced and labored, more so than the words. "We enter a new chapter, she and I, but if there is a path forward, we shall find it, perhaps even despite ourselves."

There was an opening to chastise Benedict for his comment, if nothing else. He had put Glenn into that position. But then Glenn had asked. It had been a gambit and the gambit had a cost but the cost might have been maneuvered around if either man or beast had some sense of it. Benedict was his friend and he had done his best, as had Glenn. Still, he needed punctuate such a notion. There was certainly no smile as heard the doom laid upon him. "A problem when it comes to Brown, though as I said, I'm not the one to directly deal with him. It's also a problem if I want to meddle in whatever else she might try to do with him," but that seemed sorted, more or less. There was only so much she could stretch a road that had already been paved. "I suppose, most of all, I'm worried about myself. I held back against temptation last time due to purpose and direction," a literal direction provided by a somewhat metaphorical ring, "but if I'm there every night, I'll give in to it before long. It's only a matter of time before I start to poke about in things not meant for me." There was no point in lying to them or lying to himself about that.

[Niabh]

Juniper was frowning, though it was hard to say if it was in disapproval or simple confusion. For her, the conversation had gaps vast enough to trip over and fall into.

“Lady Dark Bear,” the raven asked her, using her most flattering nickname, “what are the odds of this likely happening?”

Her frown deepened. She hesitated a moment, then spoke. The raven repeated it back as best he could: “She says she’s only heard of things being lost to the Hoard, never people, and never like this. She doesn’t see how you could be lost anyway, since you’ll always wake up, and of course things can’t wake up, they can’t get out on their own, they’re not…ambulatory. Once they’re there, they’re just sort of stuck, but a person wouldn’t be. She will ask the bard, since the baird keep a better record of dream-things so they’ll likely know more about it than she does.” He lowered his head toward Glenn and added, confidentially, “I don’t think she understood the question, really.”

Juniper twisted in impatience, rubbing her teeth against her bottom lip, and wishing very much she could just explain herself in good Tuathailli like a normal person, rather than using the raven as a go-between.

The raven hopped over, then in a brief flutter, transferred himself to the already overcrowded table at Glenn’s side. “Um. I could go with you? I mean. We already know I can find you in dreams. Keep you on the right track, maybe.”

The offer was spontaneous and sincere. The logistics were murky. How did you get into the Hoard when you yourself bore it with you? He had a bad mental image of turning himself inside-out like a jewelweed pod. But it was still only a dream. It wasn’t like the real Hoard, where there was a fixed way in. If you could imagine something in a dream, it could happen; at least that’s the way he understood it worked. But Glenn could figure something out. Glenn always figured something out.

A brown Shape pulled itself away from the wall. It had been there the whole time; it had always been there; there was no way to determine when it appeared. Its outlines were distinct, interiors fuzzy, like a smudged charcoal sketch, but it resolved itself the nearer it moved toward them. By the third step it almost had fingers, and a face. Juniper suddenly caught the motion and started, then relaxed and smiled, resting one hand over her heart. The raven nearly had a paroxysm. One flapping wing knocked a smoking cone from the table and sent it rolling under the bed.

[Glenn]

It had been a rather ultimate temptation in a series of temptations. The well had been temptation. He had given in to the simple temptation of the creature that had supped upon him. The hoard had been something even more than the well. The well placed all knowledge before him, placed an easy answer at his finger tips. With the hoard, he would have to work at it, would have to delve into it, would have to spend time and effort to try secrets from each and every corner. Nothing would be organized, neat, or intentional. Anything he discovered would be his discovery. Moreover, it would not be curated for him or meant to lead him one direction or another. One dream could last a lifetime (and this was the conundrum with Elliot Brown, why he was increasingly both man and child, contorting further and further away from any traditional notion of humanity) and he would not become lost through passive wandering but instead through the active decision to search. What he would find would change him. That was the worry.

That she couldn't fully understand this wasn't a worry though. "It's likely something new. That's some small consolation, I suppose. Or it can be if I try to think of it as such," and the offer from the raven was even larger consolation still. "There's much we yet do not know but your company would be welcome. I worry that I'll lose myself in things I find there. I won't lie to you about that. A focused trip with a light to guide me and a deadline to meet is one thing. The knowledge I'll return there each and every night is wholly another," which was about all he could manage (more even) before his throat went hoarse once more. Too much all at once. He had been at least trying to avoid it up until then, but the bird had went and gotten sentimental and he did so, in his own way, in return.

He had been about to ask something else hoarse through or not, because of course he had been, when the shape coalesced into something more tangible. He wasn't about to get up out of bed so there was little he could do in the face of its arrival but stare it down. It seemed, for the near future at least, he'd just have to get used to such things.

[Niabh]

The brown figure darkened and filled out as it braced both arms on the foot of the bed. A Tuatha woman, possessed of a carefully cultivated stillness. She, like Juniper and Acorn, had been stuffed into a set of tultharian clothes—men’s clothes, in her case: a black high-collared doublet over a rose-red blouse, and close-fitted black breeches—but gave every impression that she was wearing them, as opposed to being worn by them, the way Juniper did. She was slender and hard enough to wear them well, but too slight to ever be mistaken for a man, with tall narrow ears swept back from a delicate face, giving the impression of capable of bursting into liquid motion even when she held perfectly still. Her skin was a deep, burnished brown, and her dark hair was cropped to a tight cap of curls at the sides and a long flowing crest down the center, the black tail of it resting over one shoulder. Her green eyes were luminous as fireflies. A thick, crude brown sword, no thing made by men, hung with deadly casualness at her hip.

She jabbed a dirty thumb at the center of her chest. “Bodairlín.”

“Told you she’s creepy,” the raven murmured. “That’s what the lady assigned to look after you. Don’t know what she thinks you’re gonner do—”

Juniper clucked her tongue again and cast her gaze heavenward. “Raven!”

“What, you think he’s not gonner figger it out?” The raven pulled himself tall. With one foot he kicked aside some accoutrements to make himself a small clear ring on the table, bold and indignant on Glenn’s behalf. He looked both ready to take on the world and woefully small in the face of the task, but, as Glenn might know, there were times when all one needed was a healthy dose of confidence. Whether this was one of those times remained debatable. “You’re under house arrest.”

The guard herself shrugged a shoulder, confirming or denying nothing. Juniper sighed again. Acorn, the only practical female in the room, dropped to her belly and crawled back under the bed, emerging rumbled but triumphant with the incense cone pinched between finger and thumb. She deposited it on the table beside the raven, then, realizing her proximity to the tultharian, shot him a frightened look and scurried back to her mother again.

[Glenn]

Burnie was many things, but two of them took precedence here. The first was more benign than the second. Years drilling daily with Ariane Emory had made him a swordsman, no matter how he tried to hide it as he wielded words and letters instead. One year torturing himself at the end of Jirai's blade so that he could gain revenge upon someone many times faster, stronger, better than him? Well, that had made him something else. Both of those things took in the woman before him silently. As he did, Juniper and Benedict went back and forth.

Only when they were done bantering. Only when Acorn had retreated (a retreat from him outright ignoring her, it should be added), did he speak. "Let's get me walking first, yes? Walking first and then a steady hand." If that was a threat, he hardly thought that anyone in the room save the bird, and maybe not even him, would pick up on it. "I'm not about to crawl for the door," said as if it was the most obvious thing in the world when he was more than capable of it and at least one other being there knew it. Benedict had seen more than enough of that sort of behavior out of him.

"She," a pause would follow as he rested back upon his pillow. He let the word sink in until they were all comfortable with it, or at least accepting of it, before he made it slightly more difficult with clarification, "being the queen, is grasping. Flailing. She hinders my path and sees to my recuperation. She bars my movement and alienates her raven. Banishes him to me, even. She's grown, Juniper, but not enough. Her raven. My friend. Either way, it means no walls can hold back my words, and she's far more apprehensive of my words than my deeds." Then, and only then, did he look to Bodairlín. It hadn't been many words for Glenn Burnie, but it had been enough to force Glenn Burnie to rest his voice once more. "Welcome, Bodairlín. You don't seem the sort for rumcake. Sparring then. In a week's time. I appreciate your patience yet given."

[Niabh]

The heavy swordbelt creaked as Bo’s weight shifted to her other foot, falling subtly back to an en garde. “Sure and I’ll spar you.” Her voice was very soft, shadowy, musing. It was also much less faltering than Juniper’s attempt at tultharian speech. The accent was heavy but the cadence more natural. “But I was told that my sword is not for you.”

The raven knew perfectly well that Glenn was more than capable of actually crawling to the door, out of sheer spite if not with true intent of escaping, but, for once, he managed to keep his beak clamped around that information, though a faint, muffled crrp crept out. He was, however, ill-prepared when Juniper put both hands around his middle and transferred him—at armslength, so that his flapping wings couldn’t beat her in the face—from tableside to bed. He closed his beak on the joint of her thumb, but by then she’d already let go of him and pulled out of range. “Oi! Dinnae pick me up like that!”

“Thou’rt in the way,” Juniper replied pleasantly, already turning away from him to her table. To Glenn she said, “An tha want out of bed this week, much less spar-ring—” the definition slipped up on her belatedly, and she shivered at the thought “—tha’ll want a meal. Herself says thou and food have only a passing company.”

There was barley soup on a tray, and another waxed-hide envelope, which Juniper slit with a thumbnail before dumping the contents into the bowl and stirring the brew with a straw. Whatever his feelings toward food, he’d thank her later for sparing him the taste of it. The effort of trying to stay calm and focused on her tasks with such plain tension in the air, so many unspoken and unanswered questions, wrung her like a rag. Routine was soothing. You knew where you stood with it.

“Let thee and thy raven sort out the doings of the Queen. Herself has her reasons, I’m sure.” Once more her throat closed, leaving the last word a creak that belied certainty, and she cleared it. She cut the raven an amused look, and let her eyes twinkle at him. “Tha will anyhow.”

The raven still bristled from being picked up. “It’s pretty obvious. This is all court protocol, this civility crap. The lady feels responsible for your condition, so she’s responsible for makin’ sure you’re taken care of. But she can’t let you run about willy-nilly interferin’ with her plans, particularly if the clan’s all here, so she’s set you a guard. Oh shit,” he said abruptly, in a much different tone. “She’s treating you like a hostage.”