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CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

The snow had finally started to fall.

The flakes were small and infrequent, but from the darkness of the clouds overhead, more were coming. Even though Shari had lined the satin dress with fleece and I had a fire element to keep me warm, I still shivered. Shuddered .

Tonight was the one night I couldn’t lose my nerve, yet that’s all I seemed to want to do. Everything—my entire life—had been leading me to this moment, the day Violet Ní Dara’s spirit joined with the Stag Man and returned home to the immortal lands.

Or not.

Something warm and a little too skinny brushed my leg—Sawyer. Even with our bond stymied, he could sense my jitters and wanted to give me what solace he could.

I looked down past the bouquet of winterberries at my familiar and met his encouraging smile with a small one of my own. Have courage, little cat. It wasn’t lost on me that I needed to take my own advice.

“Shoo,” Shari scolded Sawyer from where she sat on Daphne’s back, frantically finishing the intricate braid in the mare’s mane. She’s been working on it for most of the evening, after she’d finished with my hair. “You’ll get fur all over that dress.”

“You do know this is a fake wedding, right? Totally bogus?” Flora asked her. Though, that didn’t stop the honey-badger-turned-flower-girl from shining her fur with coconut oil she’d filched from the kitchen earlier today.

Ossian hadn’t returned to the castle until sundown—wholly male except for his antlers—which had allowed us quick forays to finish our preparations during his absence. Alec had been the only Brother in the castle—Shane still recharging—but since he’d spent most of the day unconscious on the floor, there’d been no one to discover us. That hadn’t stopped us from taking every precaution, however.

After exchanging the cloch na wight in the atrium, Emmett and Cody took what they called a Senile Stroll. They would snoop around to better learn their escape route, and if they were caught, pretend to be confused as to their whereabouts due to their advanced age. Sawyer showed Flora how to access the dungeon and snuck in himself to steal a vial each of Caer powder and pokeweed juice from Brandi’s worktable.

When they returned, Sawyer urged me to follow him to the fireplace. In the soot, he began to scratch out one letter after another.

“I don’t mean to be nosy, dears,” Daphne said, “but that looks like it will take a while and we haven’t the time. Why don’t you tell me, Sawyer, and I’ll translate to Meadow?”

The two of us gave her identical slack-jawed looks. But of course. If she could understand Gertrude’s twitterings, she could understand Sawyer’s cat language.

The mare tossed her mane. “I am the game warden for a reason, you know. Druidess blood for the win.”

In a series of yowls, mews, and trills, Sawyer relayed to me through Daphne all about his adventures in the dungeon. Brandi was still sabotaging away, as was the ward-dissolving fungus, and Ricky was still threatening to chew off ears or toes or other tender bits if anyone so much as looked at him.

And, Wystan had not yet healed Lewellyn. The Nemean wolf wouldn’t let the hobgoblin go anywhere near the wound on his side, lest he discover the knife I’d left there. And Wystan was no Ossian, so he wasn’t able to subdue the beast with magic. He had to rely on potions and elixirs hidden in the wolf’s food and water to knock him out, but Lewellyn was too clever for that. Lewellyn was biding his time, acting weaker every hour to deceive the hobgoblin into thinking he was making progress, but in truth, he was just waiting on the fungus and a signal from me.

The more Daphne translated, the more the smile grew on her face. Her lover was alive and wily and virile and—

“I’m going to sabotage something myself,” she declared, emboldened, and whisked herself away.

The mare took herself to the kitchen on my behalf to get in the way under the guise of requesting a light lunch and used the commotion to pluck up a jar of lavender concentrate. She returned it to me in the great hall where I contaminated it with the pokeweed juice and a spell to render it inactive if anyone other than a human tasted it. Daphne returned to the kitchen to make herself a nuisance again, depositing the contaminated jar next to the frosting ingredients for the wedding cake.

Flora disappeared for over an hour and reappeared with a thick brown vine covered in hairy roots. With the dormant vine still pinched between her teeth, she demanded of me, “Give ’is a ’oost!”

What kind of boost she wanted, she didn’t explain, so I just injected it with green magic and hoped for the best. Grinning, she trotted off to the trestle table with her tail held high. I watched, curious, as she rubbed the vine all over the table, including the edges, really mashing it in there. The oils bludgeoned free of the vine did a marvelous job of polishing the table, but somehow I knew this wasn’t an attempt at beautification. When she was done, she flung the spent vine into the fireplace for the blue flames to gnaw on. Then she curled up on a sunny patch on the floor and fell asleep with a smile on her face.

Though she hadn’t wanted one, Shari had received her own side quest. Probably the most important one of them all: returning to her hut for all the cobwebs. I would’ve taken them from the castle, except the spiders were too scared of Ossian to make their webs here. The cobwebs were the last thing I needed for the Mabian bindings, and only she wouldn’t seem suspicious trekking to her hut for more material for my dress.

The porcupine returned in a tizzy, all the cobwebs bundled in her fist. She attempted to dispel her anxiety by putting her hands to work and embellishing my dress. She’d sewn hidden pockets in the bodice for the Hunting Spell monocle and the bleached tourmaline crystals—the big black tourmaline still hid in plain sight in the censer—and added fur trim to all the edges. Only the skirt had pockets in the hem, and there I hid the Illuminate matches, the vial of pokeweed juice, the shrouding powder, and the Caer powder.

An Illuminate match did not prove as helpful as I would’ve liked in my hopes to sabotage Faebane, and I was forced to give up my tampering to finish layering the last of the spells needed for the Mabian bindings. The finished hickory nuts glowed the faintest green, and thankfully their light was muted when I tucked them away in my wedding sleeve pocket. Four disappeared into my boot as backup.

Then, I practiced illusion magic ad nauseam with Ame’s single offhanded instruction as my only guide. Just because I had the ability to manipulate air and water to bend light and create illusions didn’t mean I was any good at it. Working with those elements wasn’t second nature yet, but necessity and desperation were good motivators. When I took breaks to purge my frustration, I monitored everyone’s side quests through some carefully controlled Scouting Spells. When everything was as prepared as we could make it, I healed the sizeable lumps on Alec’s head and encouraged him to wake up. After dosing him with Caer powder, of course.

Blinking rapidly and muttering something about cats and skillets, the magic hunter swept his venomous glare from me to the windows to the porcupine, honey badger, mare, raccoon, and beaver all enjoying a demure afternoon tea and back again. He could tell he’d been out long enough for some hinkery to have taken place, but what, he’d never know, and from the necklace of bruises he’d seen in his reflection, he had second-thoughts of whether or not he could survive another one of Ossian’s reprimands.

He thrust a finger into my face and hissed, “Not a word.”

The magic hunter hadn’t bothered us for the rest of the day, standing vigil and fighting back the occasional panic-induced cold sweat. Now he and the rest of the Brotherhood waited inside the great hall with my bridegroom-to-be.

“I think that’ll do it.” Shari tied off the end of the macramé-like design she’d created in the Arabian mare’s mane and used Daphne’s braided tail as a kind of fire pole to slide back to the ground.

She scooted over to pick a few of Sawyer’s hairs from my dress and then made shooing motions with her paws for me to mount up. I did, sitting as if I were riding side-saddle, and waited patiently for Shari to arrange my dress just so.

“Enough already,” Flora said, shoving the porcupine away with her snout. “I’m about as jittery as a June bug in a hen house. Let’s get this over with. ”

“I’m not doing this for looks,” the quiet crafter huffed. “Everything’s been arranged for maximum utility in case of emergency, thank you very much.” With her nose in the air, she collected her basket which held the fruit I was to offer Ossian in marriage.

“I just wished you looked this fine for a real wedding,” Daphne muttered. “You do look lovely, dear, if that matters.”

“No one said I couldn’t look elegant while kicking a little ass,” I replied, smoothing a hand down her neck.

“I’ll say,” Flora agreed. She twisted this way and that to show off the oiled shine of her fur. “We look incredible. Daphne’s working this whole fancy warhorse thing with her braids and Shari actually looks formidable for once without all that stuff stuck to her quills.”

The porcupine’s quills were almost bare, save a few essentials. We’d all agreed that the myriad balls of yarn and spools of thread and fabric swatches could pose a threat to her safety during their escape tonight—too many things that could get caught on everything else—but we’d also agreed that if she came to the wedding without some crochet project to keep her hands busy, it would be beyond suspicious.

“Crafting supplies,” she corrected. “Not stuff . And I feel naked.” She was in the middle of running her paws self-consciously down her underbelly fur when she suddenly looked up and exclaimed, “ Charlie? ”

The black Labrador retriever had approached us as a gentle trot, his nails hardly clicking as he hugged the far wall. Away from the windows, as if he didn’t want to be seen.

“Shhh,” the Labrador said, swinging a look behind him. He slunk forward, ears and tail lowered, and sat hunched beside the porcupine. Conveniently used Daphne’s bulk to block him from view from anyone milling about in the foyer too .

Shari reached out and touched his shoulder. “You’re trembling.”

Unlike his chatty brother Cohen would’ve done, Charlie got straight to the point. “Mrs. Bilberry told us we’re all to stay in the kitchen tonight. And do as we’re told, which may include getting into the supplies wagon and keeping our mouths shut. But you don’t ask the whole staff to do such a thing unless you’re planning on leaving through the back exit.

“Thing is, the courtyard’s packed with his servants, milady. Deer, coyotes, vultures, dogs, the bears—they’re all over the estate too. Saw them all when I was bringing beer up for the feast.”

That would explain why my wedding party and I weren’t chaperoned in the hallway. Ossian and his magic hunters were at one end and his minions at the other.

My teeth ground together as my mind whirled. “Thistle thorns.”

At the sound of panpipe music, we all collectively froze and held our breaths.

The first to recover, I whispered, “Charlie!”

The Labrador’s head snapped away from the doors, ears swinging.

“Take this.” I fished the black tourmaline crystal out of the censer and dropped it into his mouth. “Mrs. Bilberry is going to make an appearance at dinner, and when she returns to the kitchen, you all are to leave immediately. If that mule gives you any trouble, abandon the wagon. And if anyone stops you, claim you’re on your way back to the Magic Brewery for more beer. If they don’t let you pass, use that crystal. All you need to do is roll it at your enemy’s feet. Understand?”

Before he could nod, the double doors swung open and a voice boomed from within, “The moon has risen. Come forth, bride. ”

“Ugh,” Flora muttered. “Pass.”

“Go on, Charlie,” Shari whispered, giving him a little push. “Do as she says. And . . . see you later.”

The Labrador rose and took a step down the hallway for the safety of the kitchen when he thought better of it. He whipped around, swiped his tongue against Shari’s cheek, and whispered, “See you later.”

As the porcupine’s gray cheeks turned bright red, the Labrador bounded off.

Sucking in a deep breath, I let it out slowly and cinched down on the stolen bond, stifling its effects. “Y’all ready for this?”

My friends shared a glance and nodded. Sawyer sprang up and seated himself firmly in my lap, his gaze fixed straight ahead.

“More like, is he ready for us?” the honey badger growled. Then she put on a toothy smile, snatched up her wicker basket full of rose petals, and flung a fistful of them into the air as the music of panpipes started. “Go get ’im, cider witch.”