Page 33 of Twisting Twilight (Homesteader Hearth Witch #9)

CHAPTER NINETEEN

“Blight me,” Flora grumbled, “I really thought it was going to be Quills who let the cat out of the bag, not me.”

To her credit, Lori didn’t lurch away from the table and draw attention to us. Tight-lipped, her brown eyes drilled us for an explanation.

“We’re visitors, Lori.” Absent a craft, Shari wrung her hands. “That’s all.”

“That’s not all,” Lori snapped. She threw the crochet project she’d mangled with her inexperience onto the table.

Shari didn’t reach for it. “There are other continents across the sea, so you could be from there, except nobody has come to these shores since the Blight. So if you’re not from there, and you’re not from here, then where are you from? ”

“I think you know, dear,” Daphne replied.

Lori leaned back in her chair, stunned. The golden cigarette holder went to her mouth on reflex. She didn’t puff, instead lurched forward. “But how? Changelings were banned, the portals closed, and?—”

“I… made my own,” I answered. “Sort of.”

“So you’re not a wielder, you’re a wi?—”

“Best not finish that sentence,” Flora cut off.

Human , Lori mouthed instead. She shook her head. “How do you expect to get back?”

“Same portal,” I answered. The hair on the back of my neck rose as Lori snorted.

“You say that as if it were that easy.”

Daphne cast me a worried look, then the same to Flora. “Isn’t it?”

Lori took a deep pull of the green blunt and released a literal cloud streaked through with lightning. “If only.”

Both Callan and Shannon knew it had always been my plan to retrieve the mirror and return to Redbud, yet neither had mentioned to expect any difficulty on that last part. Troublesome fae , I growled inwardly.

“I think the real question here,” Shari began, “is do you want to come back with us, Lori?”

The human changeling stopped smoking. Stopped blinking. She stared at Shari with an expression impossible to read.

The quiet crafter held her gaze without fidgeting.

Then, she extended her hand across the table, palm up.

Her sleeve caught the edge of the table and dragged up to her elbow, revealing a smattering of old thin scars.

When Shari spoke, it was so soft, yet we could hear every word above the rambunctious music.

“You don’t have to stay trapped. You can find a way forward. ”

Tears welled in the depths of Lori’s eyes, but they didn’t fall.

“Success!” Kian cried, shattering the heavy stillness that had befallen the table.

The four of us jumped, the boisterous atmosphere of the tavern returning like a crashing wave. Lori jerked towards the junior scholar, who gave the table a triumphant slap before dropping into his seat. Fiachna, looking thoroughly unhappy, hunched in a tight ball on Kian’s shoulder.

“The collection process went off without any spillage,” he crowed, smoothing down his collar to risk a swallow of lukewarm ogre beer. “The lorgnette lenses are all clean and night has finally fallen and— Oh! Am I interrupting something?”

“If you didn’t, he would’ve,” Flora said, jerking her chin at the approaching half-ogre.

Ruben came under the guise of offering refills and pressed a massive hand to Lori’s back as he leaned down with the pitcher. “It’s time,” he murmured. “I told your friends in the kitchen to meet us out back.”

I tucked my amulet under my shirt and shifted forward in my seat. “So do we just… leave?”

“We need a distraction,” Ruben answered. “A reason for me to leave. And it looks like one of you already gave it to me.” His brown eyes darkened. The metal handle of the pitcher warped as his fist tightened. “Which one of you brought tears to my sweet’s eyes?”

“Oh, Ruben,” Lori said, quickly laying her hand on his hairy forearm. “It wasn’t them. It was… something else entirely.”

“He did it.” Flora thrust her finger at Kian.

Ruben’s gaze snapped to his cousin.

“What?” The junior scholar’s pale skin turned so white the blue of his veins streaked like rivers across a freshly printed map. “I-I did no such thing!”

“When he said ‘diversion,’ he really meant ‘tavern brawl,’” Flora explained, “and you’re the only one big enough to challenge him here. So hand Fiachna to Daphne and put ’em up.”

“Put what up?” Kian wailed.

His panic increased as Fiachna, with no external prompt from either Kian or Daphne, hastily crawled down the junior scholar’s arm, waddled across the table, and crawled into Daphne’s surprised-but-welcoming arms. The opossum gave Kian one mournful look, then hid his face in the crook of Daphne’s elbow so he didn’t need to witness what came next.

Flora rolled her eyes. “Your fists, of course!”

“But I’m a scholar, not a brawler!”

“Seems like you get to expand your education today,” I told him. “And won’t this be something for your history books?” I gave him a thumbs-up. “Thanks for taking one for the team, Kian.”

Kian whimpered as Flora took Fiachna’s place, going one step further and wedging herself between his neck and the overcoat collar. “I’ll coach you through it. Misty, this would be a good time to do your thing with the bling while everybody is distracted. Carefully. ”

“Right.” I leaned in towards Daphne and Fiachna, as if cowering, and took hold of Daphne’s amulet.

“Now up , Book Boy.” She twisted his ear, and the junior scholar leapt to his feet with a cry.

“Lori,” Ruben warned.

Without saying goodbye, Lori bolted from the table and retreated behind the bar. Then disappeared entirely.

“Wait,” Shari cried, but I grabbed her arm, forcing her to stay in her seat. She gave me a panicked, desperate look, and I shook my head. “We’ll come back this way,” I told her. “Let her think.”

“Now take him by surprise with an uppercut,” Flora goaded Kian.

“I d-don’t?—”

“Fingers into a fist, thumb tucked tight, aim for the underside of his chin with your first two knuckles, now drive up with your legs, and?—”

To everyone’s surprise, Ruben’s head snapped back.

His three beards arced towards the antler chandeliers, the gold beads flashing in the firelight.

The half-ogre stumbled back, each footfall resounding like thunder.

The violinist’s bow screeched across the strings and the drummer stumbled over the next beat.

“Whammy!” Flora cried, clapping her hands. “Okay, okay! Follow up with an insult.”

“Y-you call that yellow dough r-revel bread?” Kian blurted.

The garden gnome smacked her forehead. “You’re seriously insulting a half-ogre’s baking skills ?”

“This beer tastes like goblin piss!” the junior scholar tried again.

Half the regulars in the tavern shoved back their chairs and stood. No one insulted The Happy Hound’s Seam-famous ogre beer.

Flora patted Kian’s earlobe. “ Much better. Now get ready, because Ruben is going to hit you back now.”

“He’s gonna what ?”

“Duck!”

As Ruben defended the honor of his tavern and his woman, and Kian dodged that defense to the best of his abilities under Flora’s instruction, I charged the amulets.

Daphne’s only possessed Callan’s earth magic, and I wondered briefly if Shannon had given mine a boost since I was the one who needed the most obscurity.

That theory was negated when I charged Shari’s, finding that same trickle of water magic.

Though, she needed just as much obscurity as I did as a Tainted One.

Regardless of the catalysts’ composition, charging the amulets took no time at all.

Soon two blonde high fae and one ravishing redhead with an opossum slipped out the back door during the fray.

Peeking through the buttercups of the nearest window, we watched and winced as the two cousins landed more blows than I expected for a feigned fight.

The junior scholar was surprisingly quick—though maybe that was the fear kicking in.

Each of Ruben’s fists was the size of a basketball; each hit like a charging ram.

With Flora guiding Kian’s movements, the fight lasted longer than either combatant anticipated.

Ruben sustained a split lip and Kian a bruised eye that swelled up to the size and color of an autumn apple before the half-ogre had had enough.

He grappled his cousin to the ground and poured Lori’s half-drunk tankard over Kian’s face.

Fiachna whimpered and hid his head back into Daphne’s elbow.

The junior scholar sputtered and thrashed, seizing his coat collar to prevent the beer from sluicing inside and staining his precious books.

Flora, her green eyes crazed with battle lust, mercilessly pinched his ears to rouse him.

The junior scholar slapped at her. Nothing was worth compromising the books imperative to his master’s thesis.

With his cousin stuffed under his arm and mewling like a distressed piglet, Ruben shouted, “Pardon me, honorable lads and lasses, while I take out the trash!”

Everyone cheered, raising their tankards of ogre beer and flutes of fairy wine, and the musicians quickly gathered themselves to play a dirge.

Ruben stomped out the back door, snuffed out the lantern hanging on the nearby hook, and traipsed into the pines.

Beyond the trees, the River Neave glistened darkly.

The three of us scurried along after him, dashing from pine to pine.

“There’s a bend upstream that slows the river,” Ruben told us quickly. “I can normally get us across in ten minutes. There’s a bunch of you, so we’ll be low and heavy. Probably fifteen, twenty minutes.”

“Put me down,” Kian said, still tucked under his cousin’s arm. “Save your strength.”

“I’m half ogre,” Ruben laughed, though he still set his cousin down. “I have strength yet to spare.”

“Where are Beaver and Coon?” Daphne hissed, holding Fiachna tight with one hand and tugging Shari along after her with the other.

“Are those horses?” Shari whispered, lurching Daphne to a halt as she craned to see the tavern between the trees.

I caught a flash of red. “Stags.” Heart in my throat, I pushed them deeper in the pines’ shadows.