“It’s none of his business.”

“You’re probably right.” Lucivar gave her a smile that she knew meant trouble. “But now it’s my business. So what’s wrong?”

Trapped. Excuses like being late for school or needing to do something that would get her away from him wouldn’t work. A glance at him told her everything she needed to know—the relaxed wings, the easy stance, the lazy smile. Anyone who didn’t know him wouldn’t realize he was prepared for a brutal fight. And right now she was the opponent he was focused on.

“I don’t know,” she said, her voice barely audible.

Lucivar went back to folding diapers. “You must have some idea.”

“I don’t!”

They folded clothes in silence for a minute before Jillian blurted out, “I broke the permission-before-action rule. I kissed Tamnar. And he kissed me back.”

“Oh?” Lucivar didn’t look at her, just kept folding diapers.

“It wasn’t intentional. It just sort of happened. And that’s all we did, so we barely broke the rule.”

“And?”

She was down to matching little socks and wasn’t sure how long she could spin out the task. “And what?”

“Did you like it?”

Relief that he wasn’t roaring at her made her head swim. “It was all right. I think Tamnar liked it more than I did.” She instantly felt disloyal. Tamnar was her friend, and it wasn’t his fault that kissing him hadn’t felt wonderful or exciting. Except . . . “Who else is there to kiss?”

Lucivar folded the last diaper. “That is a question, isn’t it?” A beat of silence. Then he looked at her. “Shouldn’t you be getting ready for school?”

“Yes, sir.” He was letting her go. He wasn’t going to push. She hurried out of the room but stopped when he said, “You didn’t eat this morning. Get some food in your belly before you leave here, so your legs don’t give out. Understood?”

Maybe feeling dizzy wasn’t all due to relief. “Yes, sir.”

As she passed through the eyrie’s kitchen, Marian handed her a hollowed-out roll filled with scrambled eggs, bacon, and cheese.

“You know he’ll ask you if you ate anything, and you know you can’t lie to him,” Marian said quietly. “If he was willing to use Craft to pin his sister’s chair to the table and keep her there until she ate enough to satisfy him, he won’t hesitate to do the same to you.”

Lucivar’s sister had been Jaenelle Angelline, the Queen of Ebon Askavi. Jaenelle could have exploded Lucivar’s defensive shields and torn him to pieces, despite his Ebon-gray Jewels, but he still was willing to fight her into the ground if he thought she was ignoring anything she needed to do to stay healthy. Which made no sense, on the one hand, since that kind of fight would have left both of them badly injured—or worse. But knowing he was willing to do exactly that usually had the Queen backing down or negotiating a compromise.

Unlike Jaenelle Angelline, she wasn’t powerful and she wasn’t a Queen. She’d have no chance to make her own choices if Lucivar started paying that much attention to her.

Jillian took a small bite of her sandwich. Marian smiled in sympathy and shooed her out of the kitchen.

“I’ll be back in the afternoon to help with the baby,” Jillian promised.

She collected Titian, ignored Daemonar’s surly looks, and made them wait—him especially, since he’d been the one who had tattled to his father—until she finished her sandwich. Then they flew to the eyrie that had been converted into a small school.

 

* * *

 

* * *

Lucivar’s chest tightened as he watched Marian walk into the laundry room. His darling hearth witch was ill, and there was no denying it even if he pretended along with her that it was just something that happened sometimes after a hard birthing and she would recover.

Pretending because that’s what she needed from him didn’t mean he wasn’t acutely aware of every aspect of his wife’s health—and would fight her with everything in him if that’s what he had to do to keep her safe. To keep her with him.

“I don’t know what to do for the girl,” he said as she wrapped her arms around his waist and settled against him. “How can I help her if she can’t tell me what’s wrong?”

“She’s not a girl,” Marian replied. “She can sense the sexual heat now, so she’s not a girl.”

“Well, as sure as the sun doesn’t shine in Hell, she isn’t old enough to be considered a woman.” He tried, unsuccessfully, to keep temper and frustration out of his voice. Marian didn’t need either of those things. Not from him.

She looked up at him and smiled. “Is that transformation from boy to man as hard on your gender as girl to woman is for mine?”

“Not a question I’m going to answer.” When she laughed, he rested his forehead against hers. “She kissed Tamnar, which Rothvar and I already figured out. Kissed him without permission, which explains some of her moodiness and the boy’s lack of concentration when he’s been sparring.”

“It was mutual, wasn’t it?” Marian sounded concerned. “I can’t imagine Jillian taking advantage of a boy—and certainly not a Warlord she’s grown up with.”

“It was mutual, but I think Tamnar is going to be disappointed if he hopes Jillian will continue to help him practice his kissing technique.”

“There aren’t any other Eyriens their age,” Marian said.

“I know that.” Just as he knew how limited the choices were for his own children finding Eyrien partners.

“Did you know what you wanted to be at her age?”

“I wanted to survive.” By the time he was Jillian’s age, he’d realized that wasn’t something he could take for granted. He was a half-breed bastard in the Eyrien hunting camps, and every man in those camps wanted to put him in the dirt, wanted him to believe he was nothing. Problem was that the boy was already a better fighter than most of them, and the boy grew up fast and hard and deadly. “I’m a Warlord Prince. We’re born to fight—and to kill.”

“I had dreams when I was her age,” Marian said quietly. “I wanted to get out of the Black Valley, wanted to get away from the drudgery of caring for my mother and sisters, since they made it clear that my being a hearth witch was a family embarrassment and I was beneath their notice—unless I didn’t do a chore they wanted done right that instant.”

“Bitches,” he said just as quietly. He hadn’t met any of Marian’s family. He still hoped they would be foolish enough someday to come to Ebon Rih and try to contact her. Even if they weren’t that foolish, they would die eventually, if they hadn’t been swept away decades ago in Witch’s purge of the Realms, and then they would end up having a chat with his brother.