“What happened?”
“It’s a beautiful day,” I said, gesturing at the light cascading through the spreading limbs, the now happy little birds, and the resilient flowers, which despite the cold, were turning their heads upward to the sun. “Don’t you think?”
“Lady.”
“Much too pretty to discuss business—”
“Lady.” That time, it was accompanied by a gentle hand on my arm.
Gentle but implacable.
“We already had a link,” I told her, “Mircea and I, thanks to Lover’s Knot. We just . . . expanded it a little.”
“Expanded it how?”
I sighed. “Mircea’s fine mentally,” I said. “It’s his emotions that are out of whack, clouding his good judgement. And we had an emotional tie; I felt it yesterday, when that Were attacked me. That was Mircea’s bloodlust, his love of combat, his—”
I broke off, because Rhea was staring at me. And the look on her face wasn’t one I’d ever seen before. “You didn’t.”
“I—it’s just a little link,” I said. “Just enough to stabilize him.”
But Rhea didn’t seem to understand that. “Y
ou linked yourself mentally—”
“Emotionally. For a week or so—”
“—to an insane master vampire—”
“I told you, mentally he’s fine—”
“He is not fine!” Rhea suddenly jumped up, her face furious, and started for the house. I caught her halfway, having gotten up so abruptly that the bread had scattered all over the place, much to the tiny birds’ delight.
“Where are you going?”
“To give that vampire a piece of my mind!”
“You can’t—”
“And why not?”
“He’s gone, remember? I sent him back—”
“And it’s not like you can follow him, is it?” Agnes asked Rhea, coming outside and holding open the back door, but not for us.
A gaggle of little girls, none of them over seven or eight, ran out of the door and into the garden. The looked like a flock of little birds themselves, or like the illustrations off a set of Victorian Christmas cards. They had on white dresses without all the lace, which I guessed was considered too grown up, but with big satin ribbons around their waists in blue or pink or yellow, which were tied in huge bows in the back. Their hair was up in ringlets, with more bows that matched the sashes on their dresses.
They were adorable.
And obviously glad to be outside, because they started running everywhere. Agnes ran after them, along with a couple of nursemaids, which was just as well, judging by the look on Rhea’s face. I pulled her off to the side, to try to explain a little better than I’d managed to do so far.
“Look,” I began brilliantly.
“My job is to keep you safe,” she hissed. “This is not safe!”
“It’s safer than losing the coalition and then the war,” I pointed out. “And like I said, it’s just for a week, until we invade—”
“An invasion is not a war,” Rhea pointed out right back. Normally, she was the peacekeeper around court, the voice of reason when the rest of us were flying off the handle, the calm in the midst of the storm. Only she wasn’t looking so calm right now. “The war could drag on for months, maybe years—”