6. Rain

Chapter 6

Rain

Winter.

It was Winter.

It was all I could think about, all I could focus on, all that kept screaming like a siren in my head.

Winter was there, standing next to Huxley Dawnchaser. Huxley Dawnchaser, who was not only as insufferable as expected, but I was reasonably sure he was the man from my vision of Titania from earlier. The Dawnchaser himself had been the one to destroy Titania Gloombringer's spirit.

Oh yes, and Winter was there.

My brother.

My oldest brother, who had long been my very favorite person in the world. My brother who had left home after one too many arguments with Mother, wishing us all the best in life and saying he hoped he never saw Moonstriker lands again so long as he lived.

Winter.

I'd missed him terribly, tried to track him down multiple times, and spent so many sleepless nights worried about where he was and what he was doing. Whether he had enough to eat. Mother had impressed on us quite young, whenever we tried to turn our noses up at vegetables, that there were lots of starving people in the world. So it had always been the irrational fear in my child's mind.

What if Winter was starving?

But Winter wasn't starving. He was right there, wearing a ridiculous red suit, the jacket cut so short I could see the zip of his trousers. And a dueling sword on his hip.

That in itself wasn't a shock or horror. I was wearing one myself. Mother had seen to it that we were all well trained—that every Moonstriker who was ever forced to leave our family lands was well trained in the art of dueling. She thought duels were a ridiculous, frivolous waste that the other families indulged in, and she had no intention of losing people to them.

But Winter was wearing a sword in front of two family heads. It could mean only one thing.

Winter wasn't starving.

He was a duelist.

Sim was relaying information, but I was struggling to focus on anything but Winter. It turned into a visual jumble in the back of my head. Beautiful gardens. A happy, young Titania Gloombringer. A beautiful young woman with ash blonde hair and an unfamiliar speech pattern, with an exaggerated overenunciation of her words but some randomly dropped and slurred letters. The same woman, probably about twenty, sobbing over a broken doll. Yet another woman I'd never seen before, hand clapped over her right eye, shaking and pale as blood ran down her cheek despite the pressure she was putting on it, as Oberon Gloombringer looked at her, nodded, turned around and walked away. It was too much, and I cut Sim off.

Next time , I told them. It's too much right now .

Their response was silent concern, but they let the flow of information stop.

"My son, Florian," the Dawnchaser was saying, motioning to the young man next to him. No surprise, that, since the boy was a smaller, younger version of him. I nodded to him again, and he lifted his own chin in response, in that so-modern way. I half expected him to call me bro. "And my cousin Ivy," Huxley added, motioning to the woman behind him in the gold suit. Then he turned to Winter with a smile and said, "Oh. And this is Kit Emrys."

The Gloombringer made a sound that said he knew the name.

I glanced at him, because he clearly knew it in a different way than I did. Sure enough, he was staring at my brother with something that looked oddly like fear.

A tiny part of me wanted to laugh.

Kit Emrys.

The immortal fox, a storybook character my brother had spent my whole childhood telling me tales about. He was a figure of fun, not terror. A jokester. A happy-go-lucky creature who wanted everyone he crossed paths with to be happy and sometimes bent over backward to make it happen.

The man calling himself Kit Emrys smiled my brother's sly vulpine smile and inclined his head to first the Gloombringer then to me. Then, finally, he looked at Adair Courtwright, and I had to hold myself back from stepping between them.

What in the hells was happening? I was concerned that my brother was going to hurt a man I barely knew. But why else bring a duelist to a meeting of family heads? Surely, the Dawnchaser didn't think Winte—Kit was going to kill a family head for him? Even my brother couldn't be that reckless, no matter that his recklessness was much of what he and Mother had fought about again and again.

Well, that and the fact that her son had settled for a diamond. Heightened reflexes. Shameful beyond all reckoning in Mother's eyes.

Frost worried constantly about disappointing her, but he could never do it in the incredible style Winter had. Resonating with a mere diamond. Refusing to go to college.

And now, running off to become a duelist.

I wanted to scrub a hand down my face, drink a bottle of vodka, or run out into the darkening evening and scream my frustration to the world. Instead, I smiled at everyone, looking at Win-Kit blandly as though he hadn't been my role model until I was a teenager, and asked, "Shall we head to the dining room, then? We were summoned for dinner, I believe."

"So you were," the Gloombringer said, sounding almost petulant about it. "Let's go see what they've put on, I suppose."

He supposed. What an odd man. Perhaps he preferred his protein bars.

We were seated around a long table in short order, Oberon at one end with his sister on one side of him and Adair on the other. Then the Dawnchaser party sat along one long side of the table next to Adair, across from Titania, me, Tempest, and Char. I ended up seated right across from Huxley Dawnchaser, and that was fine.

Perfect, even. It was what I should have wanted. The respect they ought to afford me as the representative of my family in the proceedings. Huxley himself was perfectly...well, he was perfectly awful. Arrogant and snotty and determined to stick his nose as far in the air as it'd go. But that had been expected, from what I already knew of him. A surprise he'd arrived in the early evening, and I didn't know how he'd managed that, given Frost's calculations—which were never wrong—but their time of arrival had definitely been calculated. That had been clear from the snippy comments about dinner being late at just a few minutes past six.

I worried about Frost having to put up with these people for most of the next year, but Frost was strong. He could handle it.

Next to me, Tempest was sitting across from...from Kit. She was following my lead and ignoring him utterly, and I could have kissed her for it. Char, well, I didn't think he'd come to work for the family until after Winter left, so it was possible he didn't even know what was going on.

Adair was looking at me, though. He knew. Well, maybe he didn't know what he knew, but he knew something.

I would have to explain the truth to him and beg him not to tell everyone, and that was going to smell like three-week-dead fish. If I were him, I would already assume that the Moonstriker were in the middle of enacting some plan to assassinate—well, who? The Dawnchaser? The Gloombringer? Both? Them and Dane Sunrunner as well when he showed up?

Oddly enough, I thought I would have, if I were doing it for Winter. If my brother needed my help killing the three most powerful people in the world, I'd do it for him .

But this new Winter, Kit, he just sat there eating the offered dinner as though he was precisely what he appeared to be.

Admittedly, it was a lovely dinner. I turned to the woman refilling my water glass and inclined my head. "Please tell the chef this is even more impressive than lunch. The fish is perfect."

"Mmm," the Dawnchaser hummed thoughtfully. "The sauce is a little heavy, don't you think?"

Char blinked at him in confusion. "It's a white butter sauce. It's a standard with flaky white fish."

"Yes," he agreed, his voice going strangely unctuous over the word. "Standard. Very...common."

"Classic," I corrected, then smiled at him, pretending innocence. "Tradition certainly isn't always right, but sometimes it exists for a reason."

The server dipped in a quick curtsy and made herself scarce, which I couldn't much blame her for. I wouldn't have wanted to be in the middle of that, either.

Besides, as much as Oberon hated my presence, he might fire the kitchen staff because Huxley Dawnchaser thought the food was merely acceptable while I thought it was excellent. They both seemed the type to screw up people's lives over ridiculous whims and childish insults.

Lady Titania held up her glass when the serving girl rushed by, and as though automatically, she grabbed the thing. A moment later, a different servant swooped in and replaced it with a full glass.

It was her fourth at dinner alone, I thought. If I drank that much, I'd have a horrible hangover the next day. Much more than that, and I'd pass out where I sat. No one else had even finished the first drink they'd been given, and I'd been paying attention. Mother had drilled into me that you could learn a lot about people and use it to your advantage in negotiations, if you paid attention to the way they consumed both their food and alcohol.

Tempest hadn't been exaggerating when she'd said Titania was drunk that afternoon. It was frankly somewhat impressive. And also frightening. How much abuse could a body take?

I probably didn't want to know.

"Do you think the Sunrunner will show at all?" Huxley asked as he finished his fish course—he'd cleaned the plate, the lying ass—and leaned back to let the server take it away. "His grandfather really quite hated your father. Something about a useless whelp too big for his britches?"

Oberon rolled his eyes. "The ancient wolf has been dead since before you were born. It's long past time to let go of all that nonsense." He shoved a forkful of fish into his mouth, chewed it for less than a second, and swallowed. Then another. Like it was his job to eat, and not a pleasure.

I turned slightly to meet Tempest's eye, and I could see she was holding her jaw locked shut, staring straight down at her empty plate and refusing to acknowledge the world around her. I rather wished I could do the same.

As I turned back to my own plate, Kit caught my eye. The bastard was amused, quite clearly. He was savoring his fish, swiping a slice of bread through the rich sauce to sop it up and clean his plate entirely. He winked at me.

Winked!

I turned away, realized I was scowling, and closed my eyes to breathe deep. I was the youngest person present representing my family. I was the only representative who wasn't a family head. I had to keep my calm and represent the Moonstriker with honor. I took another breath. In. Hold. Out. In. Hold. Out.

I could handle these arrogant asses and their bizarre behaviors. Huxley Dawnchaser was a bastard, but he was there for the same reason as me. We were there to work together to save the Summerlands.

But is he? Iri asked in my head, and I blinked in shock.

Of course he was. He had to want to save us from any impending explosions of Mount Slate. Didn't he? What else could his motive be for even showing up?

Maybe, she finally agreed. But he's a slippery eel, that Dawnchaser. Never take him at face value. If he tells you the sky is blue, ask yourself why he wants you to think that.

I couldn't deny the wisdom in that. He did seem the kind of man who'd point out the sky was blue so you'd look at it instead of the assassin with a knife sneaking up behind you.

Or, I supposed, your own brother with a dueling blade.

I knew better than almost anyone how good Winter was with the thing. He'd been the one to teach me to duel, and no doubt he was still quite a lot better than me. Mother might not have approved of his diamond song, but it was a good choice for someone who spent their time dueling. Sim telling me about someone's past history didn't help me beat them in a fight, unless it was a battle of wits.

Iri could help in a duel, but that felt like demanding that the Gloombringer chef make me a peanut butter sandwich—Iri was made for bigger things than slowing the world around me so that I could beat someone in a fight. Besides, I'd never managed to focus her song that well. The single time I'd used it, the effect had been minimal, just barely what I'd needed, and then I'd paid a heavy price for it. It hadn't even slowed the world enough to win me a duel.

Not that I thought Winter was going to kill me. Not even when he was Kit.

Would he?