“Thanks to you, yes.” Cathy flashed Aodhan a smile. “And Aodhan as well, of course.”
“My contribution was hardly substantial. I couldn’t break the tithe curse that bound her to this realm.” Aodhan blew out his breath, still annoyed with himself over that failure. “I’m still working on that, though it’s hard to make much progress without an actual tithed human to use to test my theories.”
“You’re very bright,” Motley informed Cathy, for no apparent reason. “Very shiny. Can I see your sword?”
“Uh…” Cathy’s eyes cut to Aodhan in a silent appeal for help. “I think you have me confused with someone else.”
Aodhan sighed. “You need to give him something so that he’ll be able to remember you. Otherwise we’ll keep going round in circles.”
Cathy looked down at herself. “I haven’t really got much.”
“Anything that’s been in close contact with you will do.” Aodhan gestured at the band that secured her hair in a high, tight mass at the back of her head. There was probably some technical term for the style, but his own knowledge of such things stopped at mane braids. “What about that?”
With a somewhat dubious expression, Cathy pulled the band out. Freed, her hair tumbled down, falling past her shoulders. If he’d had to describe its color previously, he would have said ‘brown’… but now the sunlight picked out a thousand shades of chestnut and caramel. He had a sudden intense desire to run his fingers through those soft, gleaming waves, pushing them back from the elegant curve of her neck…
Herne’s balls, what is wrong with me?
Aodhan was seriously starting to worry that his close encounter with Cathy’s iron frying pan had somehow affected his magic, throwing off the accuracy of his transformation. It was the only logical explanation for the way his hormones seemed to be malfunctioning. He made a mental note to inspect his gonads at the earliest possible opportunity.
“Here.” Cathy offered the hair tie to Motley. “Will this help?”
“Not shiny.” Motley looked a shade disappointed, but he took the hair tie. He ran it between his fingers, and abruptly he sucked in his breath. “Oh. Oh. So that’s why Aodhan is different.”
Can he detect the connection between us?Aodhan clenched his teeth on a swearword. Motley was always full of surprises, most of them emerging at the most inopportune moments.
“Focus, Motley,” he snapped. “Remember why you came here?”
“Yes, yes,” Motley said testily, as though Aodhan had been the one rambling. He looped the hair tie around his wrist, the red elastic standing out sharply against his ghostly skin. “Need to find a door. Cuan and Tamsin are worried. Have to let them know that you found your treasure.”
“We haven’t rescued Kevin yet,” Cathy said, and Aodhan breathed silent thanks for her misunderstanding. “But we should update everyone back home. Tamsin said you can make magic portals, even between the human and fae worlds. Is that right?”
“Of course not.” Motley sounded as though Cathy had asked if he could drain the sea. “Can’t make doors.”
“She means open a door,” Aodhan said, recognizing this particular conversational dead end. Having known Motley for decades, he was well used to his quirks. “So we can talk to Tamsin and Cuan, back in the human world.”
“Oh, yes, that’s fine.” Motley perked up, his ageless face brightening. “Can I use your front door?”
“Absolutely not.” Aodhan had never experimented with mixing Motley’s strange ability with his own magic, mainly because he had no desire to turn his entire tree inside out. “I assume you came in by the usual route? We’ll use that one.”
The ‘doorframe’ that he’d made for Motley lay a little distance from his clearing, well outside his magical wards. When it came to mixing different types of magic, Aodhan preferred to err on the side of caution. He led the way there, wondering the whole way whether he was making an enormous mistake.
They did need to talk to Cuan, just in case his own research continued to be as fruitless as the Winter King’s loins. If he couldn’t find a way to conceal Cathy’s human aura from the seelie, they’d need a different fallback plan. Cuan was stuck in the human realm, but the warrior might still be able to help.
And besides, Aodhan still had that nagging sensation that a key piece of information was hiding in his mind, coyly slipping away every time he tried to grasp it. For some reason, he had a feeling it was connected to Cuan in some way. Maybe the sight of the warrior would finally shake it free.
Aodhan would have preferred to talk to him alone, just in case Cuan realized that he’d set off to find Cathy before Motley’s message had arrived… but there was no good reason to exclude Cathy from the conversation. And in any case, he could hardly deny her the comfort of a glimpse of home.
It will be fine, he tried to convince himself. And even if Tamsin and Cuan do suspect a discrepancy, what of it?Tamsin wouldn’t know a soul-bonded steed if one stood on her foot, and Cuan’s hardly likely to jump straight to such an outlandish conclusion. The woman’s human, for pity’s sake. Who ever heard of a human summoning a steed?
Cathy broke his circling thoughts. “You two seem to have known each other for a long time.”
“Very long time,” Motley agreed. “At least a month. Maybe even two.”
“Rather longer than that,” Aodhan said dryly. “We go back a while.”
“How did you meet?”
Aodhan hesitated, unsure how to answer that one without revealing far too much. Motley, with his usual unerring sense for making things worse, jumped into the gap.