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It was a while before I was called from banishment in my room to sit at the table in our dining room to account for my sins. The remains of Lord Juul’s hat were sitting in the middle of the tabletop, accusingly, a stained shadow of its former magnificent self. Pavel’s face was still shocked and white as he wrung his hands and kept glancing over at Lord Juul.

“Stop looking at him like that, Pavel. You didn’t do anything,” I said, suddenly angry on his behalf. Juul raised his eyebrows in response. I flushed but kept going. “Pavel only came to help me when I called him. So don’t you dare be mad at him!”

Juul shook his head and put a hand over Pavel’s to cover them, like he’d done for me not so long ago. “Of course, I’m not angry at Pavel. I know he did nothing wrong. Indeed, Pavel,” he said, shifting his gaze back to his husband. “I don’t understand why you’ve been apologizing. This is all Sergey’s doing.” He fixed me with a gimlet gaze.

“And by the way, Sergey, if you ever shout at me like that again, I will have your mouth stuffed with rabbit fur, tie you up with ropes, and toss you in the dungeon until you learn better manners.”

I felt a little faint because I knew he’d do it without a second thought. Pavel shot me a glance of frightened commiseration, and I shrugged. “I-I beg your pardon, sir. I shouldn’t have shouted at you. But you’re right,” I reminded him stubbornly, “Pavel didn’t do anything . It was all my fault.”

“As I believe I said.”

“Oh. Uh…yes, yes sir.”

Juul cleared his throat and began again. “There are two issues here, I think. One of them is the fact that you felt you somehow had the right to come into the private quarters I share with Pavel and take something that belonged to me.”

I felt myself flushing to the roots of my hair. “I-I did, sir. I’m very sorry for doing that. It was wrong of me.”

“Indeed, it was. How do you account for it?”

“Temporary insanity?”

“I see,” he said after a long moment of consideration.

“What I would like to know,” Juul continued softly, “is how you will atone for it?”

“I, uh, don’t suppose you would allow Pavel to give me the money to buy you a new hat?”

None of this seemed real, but the most unreal thing of all was this glorious being, his skin almost translucently pale, regarding me so carefully with his icy blue eyes. “Pavel is free to do whatever he wishes,” Juul finally said. “A grown man , however, like yourself, would probably never expect his big brother to pay his way out of the trouble that he made. You owe me a debt of honor, don’t you agree?”

“Yes, Lord Juul,” I said miserably, my face flaming hot. “Would you allow me then to work for the money to buy you a replacement hat?”

He seemed to consider it for a moment. “Yes, I believe that offer might be acceptable. What exactly do you propose?”

“I’ll do anything to make up for it, sir. Anything you say.”

“It’s your bargain to make, Sergey.”

“Oh. Then-then maybe I could start by cleaning the stables tomorrow?”

He seemed to consider it for a moment and then nodded. “Be there at dawn. See one of the stablemen and tell him I sent you. He’ll tell you what needs to be done. I think a month’s worth of working there should bring enough wages to buy me the hat. Barely enough, but I’ll give you a family rate.”

I gulped, but what could I say? “Yes, Lord Juul. Thank you.”

“Am I to understand we have a bargain then? Freely offered and freely accepted?”

“I hope so, Lord Juul.”

“Another month to compensate the servants for the extra work you caused them seems more than fair to me as well.”

“But-but they’re servants ! It’s their job! You said I shouldn’t care what they think, so how is that fair?”

He looked down his long, elegant nose at me and shook his head. “Sergey, because of your relationship to my spouse, you’re allowed not to care what they think. However, you are not allowed to make them a great deal of extra, unpaid work. And by the way, if you expect the world to be fair to you just because you yourself are fair, you're fooling yourself. That's like expecting a bear not to eat you because you didn't eat him first.”

“Yes, sir.” I wished the floor could open up and swallow me whole. “I’ll pay you back every penny.”

“Yes, I know you will. We have a bargain.”

I sighed in relief, but it was short lived.

Juul cleared his throat. “Now, as for the rabbits…”

“The rabbits? My brother led them all into the woods.”

“Yes, he did. Where many of them will soon starve to death because there won’t be enough vegetation for them to eat. Nature can be cruel, and it depends on balance. Your actions upset that balance.”

I dropped my head into my hands, feeling miserable at the thought of those rabbits I’d doomed to a harsh death.

“What can I do to fix it?”

“Oh Sergey,” Pavel spoke up at last. “I don’t think you can. You just have to learn from it and move on.”

“Which leads me to my next question,” Juul said. “What on earth were you doing to cause this latest catastrophe?”

My face went up in actual flames then, or so it felt. “I was trying to make magic.”

“Like you did with the ointment that grew hair all over your body and on the furniture and even the curtains when you first came here as a boy?”

I nodded miserably. Juul and Pavel glanced at each other again before Juul finally spoke.

“I think you may need a teacher.”

That was the last thing I thought he would say, but I still shook my head miserably. “No, please sir. I just can’t do magic. Every time I try, I make a mess. I think I must be hopeless.”

“Perhaps. Or perhaps you simply need someone to show you how to tame the magic. How to make it less…extravagant.”

I turned wide-eyed to Pavel. “Do you think I can?”

“I don’t know, but I think we should find out. For now, I believe you should go to bed. Dawn will come very early, you know.”

“Yes,” I said, getting up but not meeting his gaze. “I really am sorry. I got…carried away.”

“A family trait, I believe,” Lord Juul said.

Pavel made a sound of outrage and hit Juul’s arm with his fist, but not very hard.

“I’ll go to bed now.”

“I’ll tell the servants to wake you early in the morning.”

I nodded to Lord Juul and as I left, I heard him and Pavel as they murmured to each other. When I glanced back, Juul had pulled my brother over into his lap and was kissing him. It was definitely time for me to go to bed.

****

I loved working with the stags, as it turned out, and didn’t want to leave when my two months were up. The stags were so much smarter than I’d ever credited them as being, and much fiercer too, especially during their rutting seasons. Stags would fight, frequently inflicting serious injuries on each other, when gathering their harems of hinds, as the females were called. I arrived to work at the stables just as rutting season began. I thought they’d put me to work mucking out the stalls, but instead I was sent with some other hands to observe the matings and watch over the animals, trying not to get in their way. I suspected my brother Pavel might have had a hand in my work assignment because from the very first day, it was perfect for me.

I loved being outside all day roaming around the Quendi forests and hillsides. Even though I’d been there at the palace for years, I hadn’t seen much of the forest beyond the grounds nearby since I’d arrived. Juul had taken me on a few hunting expeditions, but this was my first chance to really explore on my own. I traveled as far as the Ice Pole borders in a couple of directions, but the northern and far eastern borders were too far away for a day trip, and anyway, the stags didn’t roam quite so far from the stables in search of their hinds.

The Elves had released the younger breeding stags from the stables during their rutting season because once it began, they weren’t much good for anything else, becoming restless and getting into fights with each other. The stags didn’t rut until their fourth year, in the fall, and the rut lasted only about ten or eleven days. Afterward, we had to round them all back up. The most perfect thing for me was that I could spend those days outside where I loved to be, wrapped in warm furs and riding through the beautiful Elven Forest.

I got up before light each morning, ate the hearty breakfast the servants served me, and set out with the other stable hands, though we soon separated and went our own ways so we could cover as much ground as possible. The Elves allowed the young stags to roam freely in their territory, gathering their harems during the season, and my job was to try to be on hand to break up any fights between them that seemed as if they might get so violent they would result in the death of one of the valuable creatures. This meant keeping my distance, though, because if a stag, which was a wild thing at heart, noticed me or thought I was encroaching on his harem, he’d have gone for me right away. If I ran, he'd chase; if I curled up, he'd attack me on the ground. Climbing a tree was the best bet, and I got really good at climbing trees quickly if or when one spotted me and charged toward me, shaking his huge rack and bellowing at me to get away.

One day, when I’d been working for about a week, I was riding near the Ice Poles closest to the palace, the ones that marked the eastern border of Elven land, when I heard bellowing sounds booming through the trees. I’d observed a few stags near the Poles the day before, running after some hinds in the area and trying to take them into their harems. When the sounds of antlers clashing between rivals echoed through the air, I started riding faster toward the place I’d last seen them. Weighing up to four hundred pounds, with fully branched antlers, the young breeding males could, and sometimes did, fight to the death without intervention.

My stag was an older male, named Briar, already gelded and much calmer than one of these younger ones whose hormones made them difficult to manage and unsuitable as a working animal. The sounds and smells made him restless though, and he tossed his huge head, making the bells on his rack jingle. He snorted and pawed the snow, letting me know he didn’t approve of any of this, as I tied his reins to a tree and approached on foot into the clearing where I thought the young males might be.

I wasn’t completely sure what I’d do when I got there, but the sounds of bellowing were getting louder as I burst through the shrubs into a large opening in the trees. There, two stags, their antlers locked, squared up to each other in battle. Their antlers were designed so they could push against each other and interlock, and it became mostly a battle of strength. The intention wasn’t to kill each other, but in the slippery snow and sloping wet rocks, accidents could easily happen. It had been snowing all morning, the flakes pelting down hard, but the weather began to turn even wilder as I ran toward the sounds, with the wind suddenly blowing through the trees and making them shake their branches at me, dislodging snow that fell in big, wet clumps in my path. It was also blowing the big heavy snowflakes in the air around so hard it made it difficult to even see. The two stags were in front of me, pushing their racks against each other, bawling out dire threats to each other. I circled around them, trying to figure out what to do to distract them. They kept struggling, their antlers locked together, until the next thing I knew, the smaller one seemed to slip on an outcropping of rock.

He fell on his back with all four legs in the air, and the other big deer backed up to charge, its head down and facing toward the fallen stag’s vulnerable belly as he struggled to get up. I knew what would happen if I didn’t do something quickly—the stag still on his feet would charge and eviscerate the one on its back right in front of me. I had to think of something. Instinctively, I ran toward them, raising my hands in the air to make myself appear larger, waving my arms and shouting to get its attention. At first the one on its feet ignored me, but then incredibly, it began to work. He stopped and turned his shaggy head toward me. His small eyes narrowed and focused on me and then he began to paw the ground. It was only then that I realized I had come way too close to him. Before I could gather my wits enough to move away, he put down his head and charged. I backed up so fast I fell on my ass and could only watch as more than four hundred pounds of sheer muscle and bone came roaring straight at me. I thought I was surely dead.

Suddenly, from behind me, I heard a loud voice cry out, “ Lár! Pusta! ”

It was the old Elven language, and I recognized the words for “stop,” wh ich I sincerely hoped the stag would understand.

As a matter of fact, the huge stag froze so abruptly, locking his forelegs, that he slid several feet toward me, close enough that when he finally stopped, only inches away, I could feel his hot, fetid breath gusting over my face, and we were left staring into each other’s eyes, both of us probably looking shocked and amazed. I knew I was, anyway. He was literally unable to move, so I registered in one part of my mind that the strange Elven words had to have been infused with some kind of magic.

The other part of my mind was still consumed with fear. I scrambled to my feet and fell backward again, picked myself up, and ran for my life, vaguely aware, as I ran, of the newcomers who had arrived in the clearing behind me. Still, I was too busy scrambling up the nearest tree to pay them the attention they warranted for saving my life. It wasn’t until I heard the mocking, tinkling laughter of one of them that I gathered myself enough to turn and look.

It was four riders who had come into the clearing behind me unnoticed, as I had stood way too close to the fighting stags. The sound had been muffled by the snow and I had been much too focused on the struggle in front of me to hear them, but they had definitely saved my life. The one in their company who had been laughing—and who was still laughing as he gazed at me perched up in the tree—was the most glorious being I’d ever seen in my life, and I ate breakfast most mornings with a Quendi lord. As everyone knew, the Quendi were by far the most dazzlingly beautiful creatures in the entire Ice Forest. And yet this man’s beauty equaled that.

He was young, though not in the first blushes of his youth, and he had pale blond hair, with the shade of those silken strands cascading around his face more silver than gold. From that alone, along with the unnatural beauty of his face and form, I knew he must be a Fairy. He was glamorously beautiful, simply exquisite, and he wore the clothing of a young prince, which, as I later found out, was exactly what he was. Before I could temper my words, I called out to him.

“Who the hell are you ?”

His stag shifted its feet under him as he glanced up at me, looking amused. “It appears that I’m the one who saved your life, though now that I see you’re mortal, I wonder if I should have bothered. Why are you here on Quendi land, peasant boy? Were you poaching the royal deer? If you were, I think King Tarrak will demand retribution. Maybe even your worthless life.”

“I’m no poacher!” I yelled at him. “My name is Sergey, and I’m brother to the King’s Wizard. As for what I was doing, it should be obvious even to a Fairy,” I said, still smarting a little over that “worthless” remark. “I was trying to stop those two stags from killing each other.”

He looked me up and down curiously, as I roosted there in the tree, my face slowly turning a no doubt interesting shade of red. “Were you?” he asked. “Whatever for?”

“B-because they’re valuable animals, and-and because it was the right thing to do. It’s my job. I work in the king’s stables.”

He still looked amused, shaking his head at my answer. “The brother of Tarrak’s wizard, working as a stable boy? I realize you’re only human, but it seems as if he could have done a bit better for you than that.”

He waved a languid hand in the air to release the young stag, who had been hanging in mid-air frozen in place. The stag fell to the ground, looked around dazedly, and then lumbered to his feet and trotted back toward the hinds. The other stag, who had long since recovered, was already gone from the clearing.

Without another word, the Fairy prince pulled on his reins and he and his attendants spurred their mounts and left the clearing too. In seconds they were all gone, and I could almost believe I had imagined the whole thing. It was only afterward that I figured out he must be the prince who was coming to be a consort to King Tarrak.

By the time I got back to the palace that evening, the servants were all buzzing about him, calling him the King’s Second Consort. Prince Glorfindel wasn’t all Fairy, as I soon found out, but had Elven blood too. Over supper that night, Pavel and Juul discussed him in some detail.

“Have you met him yet?” Pavel asked. “I got a glimpse of him as he arrived with his entourage.”

“Only for a moment, just as they arrived in the courtyard,” Juul replied.

“Well, I have to admit he’s very handsome. Is he nice?”

Juul made a scoffing sound. “He’s half-Fairy. What do you think?”

Prince Glorfindel’s father was King Lorimach of the Woodland Fairies. He had taken an Elven wife years ago, who then bore him a son, and the prince was the stunning result of that union. He was a younger prince, however, with three older brothers ahead of him in line for the throne. He would never be king and was being used instead as a political pawn. A marriage to King Tarrak of the Quendi would form an alliance that would be beneficial to both kingdoms. As for Juul’s comment about him—Fairies weren’t really known for their sparkling personalities.

“What’s he like?” Pavel asked.

“Like all Fairies. Bad tempered. He’s been complaining ever since he arrived.”

That was kind of a lot coming from an Elf, but I knew Juul was right. There were all kinds of rumors about the Fairies, like the rumor that they stole babies from their beds and left changelings in their places. So everyone said, but I never believed it, and especially after meeting the Elves, who were Fae themselves and closely related, though they denied it. Though Juul had been nice to me, for Pavel’s sake I presumed, a less paternal or nurturing bunch than the Elves I never hoped to meet.

People said that all Fae could lead a traveler astray, and Fairies in particular, and if you came across a path where Fairies traveled, you’d be wise to avoid it. One man in our village even knocked a corner from his house because the corner blocked a Fairy path, and often cottages were built with the front and back doors in line, so that the owners could, if they needed to, leave them both open and let the Fairies troop through all night, in case the Fairies suddenly decided, in their own perverse way, to suddenly change their path. People in our old village used to say you could bring a Fae curse down on your head without even trying very hard. Now that I had lived with the Elves, I could easily believe it.

Because of all these legends, many people used wards against the Fae—charms like bells on bridles and four-leaf clovers, not that I believed they did any good. It was also believed that if you knew the name of a particular Fairy, you could summon him by it and force him to do your bidding. I wondered if it were true. It seemed likely to me that Glorfindel would have some other secret name so he didn’t have to answer to that mouthful all the time, though I never heard it mentioned if he did.

All in all, Fairies were dangerous and tricky to deal with. Then again, this prince had saved my life by merely waving his hand and saying a few words. I felt I owed him at least a kind word or two.

“He has magic,” I said, and both of them stopped eating and looked at me. “More than just the usual Fairy magic, I think.”

“How do you know?” Pavel asked, and I shrugged.

“Today in the woods, I was almost attacked by a rutting stag. He charged me and I fell on my ass trying to get away. I think the stag might have got me, but the prince showed up and froze him in mid-air.” I put a forkful of boiled potato in my mouth and started eating, not noticing at first how silent and still both Pavel and Juul had become.

“Sergey…” Pavel finally choked out, his face pale as he grabbed and held my arm.

“Is this true?” Juul asked, looking almost as strained as Pavel. It occurred to me then that if I had been unlucky enough to have been killed that day, Pavel might have blamed Juul for making me work to replace his hat. It wasn’t Juul’s fault at all—I should never have stolen his hat, and he was only trying to teach me responsibility. I knew that. And no one told me I had to get so close to the stags either. In fact, I’d been warned several times against it. I glanced up at Pavel in surprise as I realized how frightened he was, not to mention Juul. His happiness really did revolve around my brother’s. It made me like Juul even more.

“Yes, it’s true, but don’t look like that, Pavel, and don’t tell me I can’t go back to work now either. I love riding out in the forest to care for the deer. In fact, I was going to ask if I could keep working at the stables for a while once all the stags are rounded back up. It gives me something to do and keeps me out of trouble.” I looked up at Juul, shrugged, and smiled. “Well, mostly.”

Lord Juul gave me one of his rare grins and clapped me on the shoulder, even as Pavel glanced back and forth nervously between us. “Pavel, I’ll be fine. Really. I only told you to let you know that the new king’s consort has some magic.”

Juul made a dismissive sound. “Fairy magic. Still, I’ll tell Tarrak. He’s been wondering how Prince Glorfindel can be of service to him. Maybe he can find some use for him now, other than being merely ornamental.”

“I’ll go see him tomorrow to welcome him to the palace,” Pavel said. “And to thank him for what he did for Sergey. Maybe he can come and work with me some days, if Tarrak can spare him. How soon will they be getting married?”

Juul smiled. “I think Tarrak believes in long betrothals. Perhaps a year. Or even a little more. It will give them time to get to know one another and give Prince Glorfindel a chance to become used to living with the Elves. Besides that, the king’s half-brother, Prince Adan, has been causing trouble near the border again. Tarrak might be engaged in battling them for some time.”

Juul had that gleam in his eye that Pavel hated so much. It was the one all the Elves seemed to get when they talked about battles and skirmishes and wars.

“You know how I feel about that,” Pavel said, his voice tight. “All of the flag waving and drum beating you Elves seem to love so much. I hate all of it.”

“I know, love,” Juul said, dropping a kiss on Pavel’s forehead as he stood to leave the table. “That’s why I keep you at the rear of the columns and mostly out of danger. And you’re right about war—battle is a terrible thing. Death hovers over the battlefield, waiting for its victims.” He sighed and then smiled. “Isn’t it glorious?”