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Tarley backhanded his arm.

“Hello.”

“Ollie has broken ribs, so help me move his pallet, Tai.” She walked to Lachlan. “Hold these.” She shoved linens into his arms.

Then she and Mattias went about setting up a wooden pallet in a corner of the loft, similar to the position of the other boy’s palette. Trevis arrived carrying a lantern and pitched in while Lachlan stood watching, feeling useless. When he tried to help, Tarley scolded him, and the boys snickered, though not at his expense. They both looked at him in commiseration as if they too had been at the other end of her razor-sharp tongue.

Then Tarley was standing before him, her skin tinged pink with exertion, her eyes bright, her hair askew. She was still dressed as a boy, and yet he couldn’t remember ever seeing anyone more beautiful, his mind conjuring her standing in the rain.

“Ollie? The linens.” Her hands were out, waiting.

“Oh. Right.” He handed them to her. “I’ll help.”

When they were done assembling his bed, Tarley stood.

Mattias started for the ladder. “Let’s go. Mother and Father will be relieved to see you.”

“You’re leaving?” Lachlan took a step toward Tarley, feeling as if the rope tethering him to shore was being cut, leaving him adrift. To drown.

Tarley nodded. “I’ll be back tomorrow.”

He took a slight breath of relief, but it didn’t alleviate the root of his panic, though he couldn’t exactly identify what that root was.

“I need to check in with my family. After what happened.” She picked up a pile of fabric Trevis had dropped when he’d arrived. “Here’s some clean clothing.” She handed him the stack. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Lachlan watched her descend after her brother. She glanced at him once more before disappearing, and her look communicated something he couldn’t decipher but he wished he could.

“Would you like that bath?” Trevis asked, his blue eyes assessing what Lachlan figured was his horrific appearance.

He nodded.

“It’ll be this way.”

Lachlan followed, because what else could he do? He was alone in the very kingdom where Jast was going to be framed for the attack on Kaloma’s queen, and the one person he considered an ally had just left him alone.

He had no plan, no way to contact his family, no way to get home. Taking a deep breath, he resolved that a bath might help his perspective. Only he found himself wishing for their tiny tent in the middle of the Whitling Woods once more.

17

“A man?” Scarlett snapped, smacking a wadded-up towel on the counter next to the stove. “Have I not impressed upon you all the danger strangers possess!”

Tarley stood just inside the front door. She’d barely made it over the threshold as Mattias had shared the news:Tarley was alone with a strange man in the woods.

“Tai!”

“Sorry, Tarley,” her brother replied, though the look on his face—the arched brow and grim set of his mouth—told her he was anything but. He wasn’t keeping secrets about her safety.

The rest of her family were in various places in the small space of their cottage. Her father stood near her mother in the kitchen. Brinna was sitting in the living area near the fireplace mending something, and Auri was setting the table for a late dinner. Jessamine, at the inn, was the only one absent.

“A man?” Brinna grinned with a dreamy smile on her face, her mending forgotten in her lap. “Was he handsome?”

“A man?” Auri snorted and set another dish on the table with a touch more force than necessary.

“A man?” Her father, harrumphed the phrase as if he were chopping wood, cutting the words down into bits. He crossed his burly arms over his wide chest. “We agreed on the disguise, Tarley. There shouldn’t have been any strangers. None at all.”

“It was a matter of life and death.”

“Just like having you flee in the first place,” Scarlett scolded. “If you’d been in the cottage like I said in the first place, this wouldn’t–”