10. Sage

CHAPTER 10

Sage

I woke with a throat and chest tight with regret but still determined to stay focused on my goal: keep my secret until Sawyer was safe and learn everything I could about the fae and the Garden and how to stop manifesting there.

My body hurt as much as it had yesterday and I pushed through getting dressed and headed down to the great hall for the morning meal.

I grabbed my usual bowl of porridge, rasher of bacon, slice of bread, and mug of watered ale, but when I got to the end of the long counter separating those getting their meal from the rest of the kitchen, I was disappointed to see there were no oranges.

I’d been unable to resist the luxury of the expensive fruit and had enjoyed an orange at every meal since I’d been at the Black Tower, but it didn’t surprise me that they were out. The fruit came from the Southern Isles which were weeks away from the closest fae ring which made them difficult to get in most of the Great Five Kingdoms. Only the wealthiest in the kingdoms could afford them and I’d been shocked to see them at the Tower since no one here was wealthy — and if they had been, they weren’t anymore.

Lewin, a good-natured man with a shaved head, blue eyes, deeply tanned complexion, and someone who didn’t seem to care that I’d screwed up the other night, caught my attention from his seat in the middle of the great hall.

I dodged out of the way of a man purposefully trying to bump into me — having learned my lesson yesterday during all three meals — and joined him.

The rest of the guardsmen continued to give me dark looks and hissed snide comments to one another, but, like I’d also done yesterday, I held my head high and was determined to pretend I didn’t notice.

There wasn’t anything I could do about it. All I could do was work hard and hope they’d eventually forget about me.

“No orange this morning?” Payne asked as he sat on the bench across from me.

He was an enormous fae, one of the biggest at the Tower and had two large swords sheathed at each hip — armed, like all the other Guardsmen were armed, even though we were eating.

“Not this morning,” I replied as Kit, his bonded mate and a member of their four-man elite hunting team, settled in beside him.

Kit was beautiful, just like all fae, including Payne, and was almost as tall as his mate, but had a fraction of his girth. He was thin, lean-muscled, and probably the perfect person to teach me the fighting techniques I needed to survive my impending death since the fighting style that best suited our bodies were similar despite our height difference.

Except that really wasn’t what I should be asking him about. I hurt too much to ask for extra training, and with my additional half shift of stable duties after the evening meal, I didn’t have any extra time.

But after last night’s unexpected reappearance in the Garden, I should ask him about that.

Learning about the Garden didn’t require me to be in any kind of physical condition or have spare time. We could do it while we ate… if I could figure out how to bring up the topic without drawing anymore attention to myself than I already had by screwing up the other night and by just plain being a nobleman’s son.

“Guess we’ll get to see your real hair color,” Lewin drawled, making Kit and Payne laugh. “It’s the oranges keeping your hair orange, isn’t it?”

I rolled my eyes at him but laughed with them. “ Maybe if you start eating them, you’ll actually get some hair.”

“Even more incentive to avoid the things,” Lewin chuckled, running a hand over his head. “The ladies like the smooth top, say it’s sexy.”

Payne snorted, his striking amethyst eyes sparkling with mirth. “They say that because you’re paying them to say that.”

“And it’s worth every bit. Do you know how hard it is to listen to you two go at it every night and know I’ve got one more day until I can see my sweet Vreni?”

“Are you denying us our newly mated bed?” Kit asked, batting his eyelashes at Lewin. “You can always join us.”

“Sounds good to me,” Payne added, shocking me.

The minstrels’ tales said the fae were more sexual than humans — which I’d seen first hand in the Garden — but Kit and Payne were married… unless a fae’s bonding didn’t mean the same thing as a human’s marriage.

Lewin yanked off a small piece of his bread and tossed it at Payne. “You two are pretty and all, but I like someone soft and sweet and nice smelling when I fuck her.”

“And you really can’t complain.” Payne tossed the bread back. “We’ve spent the last two nights in the Garden so you can get your beauty sleep.”

I fought the urge to sit forward and look overeager. This was my opening.

“What’s it like?” I asked.

“Glorious, when those two aren’t going at it like the newly weds they are,” Lewin laughed. “I dream of Vreni’s big tits and her soft skin, and sunshine. Man, I can’t wait for you novices to get into the rotation so we can get our regular lieu time back. There’s daytime in the Gray, but hardly ever sunshine.”

Which was depressing to learn, but made sense as to why this place between realms where the Three Gates of the Realms met was called the Gray. The two days I’d been here it had been overcast and misty all day and now, from what Lewin said, it seemed like that was the Gray’s natural state.

And wasn’t at all what I wanted to talk about. “I didn’t mean your beauty sleep. I mean the Garden.”

“Why do you want to know?” Lewin replied, popping the piece of bread in his mouth that he’d thrown at Payne and Payne had thrown back to him. “You can’t go there.”

“I don’t know,” I said with a shrug, focusing on my porridge. “Half of the Guard is fae, but I know nothing about your people. Up until yesterday, I thought all fae had magic.”

“I’m kind of surprised you humans still believe that,” Payne said .

He’d told me yesterday that he didn’t have magic, which was why he’d said he wasn’t eligible to have a mate… which brought up a whole bunch of other questions that I didn’t know if I should ask or not.

How suspicious would I look if I pressed about mating details? Did men ask about things like that? They were more likely to talk about what it was like to have sex with a woman than to marry her, which could be an interesting perspective to learn but wouldn’t help me navigate the social rules of the Garden.

“About half of us don’t have any magic,” Payne continued, “and of the half that do, most don’t have particularly powerful magic.”

“Although you could say your magic is your strength,” Kit added, teasing his fingers through Payne’s shoulder-length dark blond hair. “You’re easily twice as strong as I am.”

“My chest and arms are twice as big, lover. That’s not magic. That’s math,” Payne shot back with a smile.

“And both of you are probably four or five times stronger than Sawyer, so he must think you’re gods,” Lewin chuckled.

“Ha ha,” I replied. “No, I just think you’re all really strong.”

Lewin wrapped an arm around my neck, drew my head to his side, and ruffled my hair. I stiffened at the contact suddenly aware of how close his hand was to my chest, even though I wore my heavy jerkin and I doubted he’d be able to feel my breasts with an accidental brush.

“You’ll get there, runt, don’t worry,” he laughed and let me go. “You’re sixteen, so you’re due for a growth spurt any day now. Then all the other novices will be looking up at you.”

I snorted. That would never happen. Not the looking up at me or me getting taller, since I was twenty and as tall as I was ever going to get.

And this wasn’t the conversation I wanted to have.

“Tell me about the Garden. I overheard some of the guys talking about a new arrival with all her marks,” I pressed. “It seemed really important to them. They were really excited about it.”

“It is important,” Kit replied. “A new arrival is someone who’s now a fae adult and can enter the Garden, either physically or spiritually. For men it just happens when we’re about thirty. For women, it’s when their mating marks first awaken which could be as early as twenty but usually around thirty or thirty-five.”

“But it’s kind of a raw deal for the women,” Payne added around a mouthful of bacon. “Whether they’re ready or not, the marks increase their sexual desire and compels them to find their mates. My sister was in the middle of her apprenticeship with a Water Master at the White Tower when her marks awakened and she couldn’t concentrate until her first mate had been bound to her.”

My pulse stuttered at that. Increases their sexual desire and compels them?