“The elders have been summoned,” he said. “We can’t leave until they’ve seen her.”
“Wait,” Lily interjected anxiously. “Juliet’s guard is missing? Is she okay?”
The sachem looked up at her as he ate. “You would know that better than we would,” he said. “Have you felt like she’s in distress?”
Lily sat very still and searched around inside herself. She had no idea what she was looking for. “I don’t know. I don’t feel anything.”
“That’s good. It means she probably isn’t dead,” Alaric replied. Lily stared at him while he ate, trying to figure out if the sachem was being intentionally callous or if he was always so blunt. She stared a bit too long.
“You’d better feed this girl before she steals my bowl,” Alaric said with a sideways grin. Embarrassed, Lily was about to protest that he’d misunderstood her stare when he continued. “What can she eat, Rowan?”
“She needs poultry and salt, Sachem,” he answered immediately.
“No. I don’t eat anything that came from an animal,” Lily insisted, shaking her head. “I’ll have what the sachem’s having.”
Rowan met her eyes, his face unmoving. He looked back at Alaric. “She’ll have poultry and salt.”
“No, I won’t,” Lily said simply. “I don’t eat meat.” She glared at Rowan, but he wouldn’t look back at her. Alaric held up his hand in Rowan’s direction, trying to stave off the impending argument. He turned to Lily.
“Why?” Alaric asked, a curious glint in his eyes. “It is perfectly natural for people to eat meat.”
“Maybe it was once,” Lily conceded. “But the world I come from is very crowded. The animals live in cages, stacked on top of each other in horrible places in order to feed people more meat than they need. I stopped eating it years ago.”
“To make up for the sins of everyone else in your world?” Rowan snapped, an eyebrow raised in derision. “Or do you just do it to prove that you’re superior?”
“I do it because I believe it’s wrong,” Lily said, standing up and facing Rowan over the fire. He jumped to his feet and met her eyes, his body straining toward her like he wanted to launch himself over the flame and shake her.
“And would you force that belief on everyone else?” he yelled back. “Even if not eating meat made them sick? Even if it made you sick?”
Lily didn’t have a response to that. She repressed the image of her dresser drawer full of slogan-emblazoned T-shirts, especially the one that read I’M VEGAN. AND YES, THAT DOES MAKE ME BETTER THAN YOU.
“What a lively debate we’re having,” Alaric said wryly. He waved his hands at both of them, indicating that they should sit down. “Tristan, would you serve Lily some lentil stew?”
“She can’t have it, Sachem, there are potatoes in it,” Rowan said, taking his seat next to Caleb. “Potatoes are a nightshade. They are poison for her until she learns how to transmute their alkaloids into power. If she refuses to eat poultry—which is a neutral, nonreactive food for you, by the way,” he added, shooting Lily a withering look before continuing, “she may have cooked oats for energy. For protein I’ll figure something else out. Lentils without potatoes, maybe.”
“Problem solved. Amazing what we can accomplish in a morning,” Alaric said with the faintest of eye rolls.
Lily smiled hesitantly at Alaric. His dry sense of humor took some getting used to, but Lily could tell he was pleased that the conflict was solved. Alaric liked finding solutions to problems—even silly ones, like what Lily could and couldn’t eat.