Page 58 of Twisting Twilight (Homesteader Hearth Witch #9)

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

It took some coaxing to get Emmett and Cody into the carriage with the uncamouflaged Rhydian reclining nearby. And by coaxing, I meant a liberal dusting of Caer powder.

I hated to drug them, but when the two older men had turned around screaming and sprinting for their lives—Emmett like a hog and Cody like a stick bug—I’d drawn that vial out of my bra pocket faster than an Old West gunslinger.

The men were quite immune to most of the powder’s effects now, after being drugged by Ossian for so long, so it only took the edge off.

That was all that was needed to usher them inside and lock the doors after.

After the red dragon had reached his preferred altitude, the carriage had stopped lurching, and Kian had stopped vomiting out the nearest window, I announced, “I need you two to make a fae bargain, Kian, my lady. What I need to tell you all, I can’t have you babbling to everyone who has ears.”

Kian, while a friend, was still Kian the Junior Scholar of the Insatiable Curiosity/Obsession About Everything Blight.

He’d based his entire career on it. And despite the kinship I felt towards the high lady of the Green Court, I didn’t know her.

While she’d been exceptionally fair and open-minded for a high fae, she was still fae and I was not.

I hoped we’d be given the chance to deepen our relationship in time—however slim a possibility that might be—but for now, it was safer to bind her into an agreement to keep what I was about to reveal secret.

I’m turning into my grandmother. She hadn’t trusted me with the truth, had made the decision to keep me ignorant instead of preparing me, and look where we were now. On my lap, my hands balled my skirt into twin wads of wrinkles. I won’t be like her. This is only for a little while.

In my deepest recesses of my heart, I knew this vow to be true.

I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I took everything I’d learned about the Blight to my grave and forced others to do the same.

While the fae weren’t the most endearing of creatures, they didn’t deserve to live under the threat of this plague.

But Sawyer’s premonition of a future where witches like me were kidnapped and forced into servitude was a warning I refused to ignore.

Steps had to be taken and safety secured.

“But my thesis,” Kian protested.

“You’ll have plenty for your thesis.” I molded my hand over his, and his beautiful eyes jumped to mine. “Something tells me our paths will be more intertwined than we originally thought. And we need trust to get us through it.”

He swallowed, nodding. “I’ve been feeling the same way for some time now,” he admitted. “Some roads were meant to cross, regardless of realms.”

“Agreed.” The Green Mother gestured to the Redbudians. “But what of these others?”

“Like we don’t know how to zip the lip,” Cody snorted, shimmying into a more comfortable position on his bench.

He waggled his thumb between himself and Emmett.

“We’re of the generation when a man gives his word, he keeps it no matter what.

Unlike some of you fairies who trying to wiggle out of your commitments with loopholes and whatnot. Shady.”

“What he means to say”—Emmett tsked at the carpenter—“is that when you live amongst the other variety, some of them not ‘out’ to the world, you develop the ability for keeping things close to the vest very quickly. It does wonders for your reputation and life expectancy.”

“ And we’re Redbud patriots.” Flora brandished her thorn sword, still stained from where she’d stabbed it into Ler’s hand. “We’re not gonna do anything to risk the safety of our town. Especially with fae shenanigans.”

“You are fae,” the Green Mother countered.

“Yet my allegiance is with my adopted home,” the garden gnome said stoutly.

“More so, we’re all friends here,” Daphne added. “The best of friends. And friends don’t go around breaking each other’s confidences.”

“That’s how you end up bitter and alone and grumbling to yourself with not even cats to keep you company,” Shari said.

The Green Mother thought about that for the spans of two blinks before her brown eyes settled on me. “You are bold, Niece, to ask this of a high lady. Perhaps extortionate.”

“Go big or go h?—”

Daphne clapped a hand over Flora’s mouth before she could finish.

What proceeded next was a stare-off contest worthy of the orneriest cats.

She, proud and convinced of her entitlement simply because she was high fae.

This affected her people, after all, and she was my elder, not to mention my family matriarch many generations removed.

I should submit to her wishes. But to her credit yet again, she did not attempt to bend me to her will with her aura.

And me? I stuck to my beliefs tighter than an Alabama tick on a pampered coonhound’s hock.

This affected my people too. Not just supes, but all humans, many of them without any defense against the wiles of the fae.

All I could think of were the ghosts of those women Ossian had sacrificed to the portal.

I could not turn back time, but I could be the shield that defended against that atrocity from ever happening again.

The tick won.

“Let’s get on with this then.” The high lady’s upper lip curled in momentary distaste.

“You’ll need my full name for a bargain of this magnitude—” She cut herself off, realizing something with a faint smile, and continued more pleasantly, “Which, as it happens, is your ancestral name. I am Briony Ní Dara. Briony means ‘to grow luxuriantly’ and Ní Dara means ‘Daughter of the Oak.’ It is the strongest and most sacred of our trees.”

Daughter of the Oak. There could be no other explanation why my core resembled an oak tree, why it was so strong. It was my birthright. “Back there with Ler,” I ventured, “you called me your heir.”

“She did what ?” Kian practically ripped his notebook in half, he opened it so fast.

The high lady cleared her throat as gracefully as a queen. “You are not fae, Niece, and thus cannot wear the verdant robes when I pass. When I called you my heir, I meant you are an heir of my family bloodline. Regarding Ler, it was for… dramatic effect.”

Tricky fae, as usual . But I was relieved. I had enough responsibilities already without adding Heir Apparent of the Green Court to the list.

“And my full name is Meadow Lavender Hawthorne.”

“Meadow? I thought your name was Misty.” Kian flipped to a new page in his notebook.

“Don’t write that down,” Flora snapped at the junior scholar.

“It’s said Violet adopted that surname Hawthorne when she came to our world,” I told the high lady. “Presumably to hide from any who pursued her. Or maybe just to claim a new life.”

“Hawthorn: deciduous shrub or tree of the Rosaceae family with five-petaled flowers, thorns, red pome-style fruits… and the legendary gateways to the fae realm.” She smiled softly again, reminiscing. “How fitting.”

Was that why Violet had adopted the surname Hawthorne, as a kind of homage to the tree that had delivered her from Ossian’s grip? I squirreled the theory away examine later.

So with our true names revealed, the two fae and I made our bargain.

And now that I had that bargain protecting me, I decided to drop the biggest information bomb first. Or rather, the one I thought would stir up the most trouble.

The better to get it out of the way, I’d thought. “Nobody freak out.”

“Nobody leads with that unless they know whatever they’re going to do is gonna freak people out,” Shari said.

Flora blew out an exasperated sigh. “What did you do this time, cider witch?”

I shoved my sleeves back past my elbows. A smattering of gasps and choking noises greeted the tattoos wreathing my forearms.

The Green Mother’s eyes snapped wide open.

“Since when were you going through a goth phase?” the garden gnome asked.

“You didn’t enter the Twilight Court with those,” Kian said, instinct making him lean back.

The bench creaked violently as he suddenly scooted all the way back, holding up his notebook like it was a shield and his quill a sword.

On his shoulder, Fiachna puffed out until he resembled a cumulous cloud anchored to the junior scholar’s overcoat.

While the Green Mother didn’t retreat, she regarded me like a mother goose does a fox when it slinks too close to her goslings.

That look there is why we call geese cobra chickens , I thought.

If I weren’t her own flesh and blood (very distantly removed), I bet I would’ve seen green magic glowing in her balled-up fists.

Her voice was as tight as her fists. “How did you get those?”

“They’re not dangerous,” I said. Hedged. Actually, assumed would’ve been the more accurate term here.

“You sound very convincing.”

“And I told y’all not to freak out.”

When the Green Mother wet her lips, eyes darting from the tattoos to my face and back again, Thistle hopped onto the backrest nearest to me. Her wings manifested with a sharp snap!

“That’s my move,” Sawyer groused from my lap.

“What do they do, dear?” Daphne asked curiously.

I carefully rolled down my sleeves. “They’ve only done something once.

When I thought Stripes was in danger—enthralled by the high lady—they lifted from my skin, shrouded me in black vapor, and, well, teleported me from the castle battlements to the courtyard.

In less than a second. I-I guess my need to get to Stripes activated them? ”

“My audiobooks would call you a shadow daddy now.” Shari’s eyes twinkled behind her wing-tip glasses. Her steepled fingers drummed against each other in a rare show of mischievous delight.

Was this the real Shari breaking free from the chrysalis of her traumatic past?

“But that’s not right,” she corrected herself quickly. “You’re a woman. So… shadow momma? Shadow temptress?”

Flora thrust her finger into the air. “I vote that one.”