The current occupancy beyond me included Rianna, Desmond, Ms. B, and a garden gnome, all of whom had lived there before I’d accidentally inherited the castle. The new residents were my former landlord, Caleb, and our other roommate, Holly; two ghosts; an assortment of gargoyles who’d moved in on their own and decided to start guarding the place; and Falin Andrews, the Winter Queen’s knight and my sometimes—but not current—lover. It should have been getting pretty full, but it was a magical Faerie castle, and I was starting to think it conjured more rooms when needed.
I crossed over the moat and under the portcullis, and then into one of the magnificent gardens within the stone walls. I still hadn’t gotten a chance to fully explore the gardens, but tonight wasn’t going to be the day. Crossing through the garden quickly, I entered the castle proper and followed the sound of people to a dining hall. There was a huge banquet room in the castle somewhere—I’d wandered into it once by accident—but this room was narrower, holding only one long table in the very center of the room. A roaring fire crackled in an enormous fireplace along one wall, directly beside the table, which should have made the room uncomfortably hot and dry since the weather outside the castle was so pleasant, but instead the room remained at a constant ideal. Magic. The fire and the half dozen candelabras scattered among the serving platters on the table were the only light in the room. Typically I would have needed a little more light, but here it was enough for me to see by. This place might have been a blend of mortal reality and Faerie, but there was a lot of Faerie magic here.
Holly, Caleb, and Ms. B sat at one end of the table, talking and laughing as they ate. Falin sat at the other end, alone except for the smartphone in his hand. He looked too preoccupied to be interested in joining the cheery gathering at the other end of the table.
And maybe he was.
But I doubted it.
Falin was the Winter Queen’s knight, her enforcer, her bloody hands. He was subject to her commands, and she’d made him do some pretty terrible things in her name in the past. It hadn’t made him very popular. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a job one could easily resign from.
The queen’s nephew had been poisoning her, driving her increasingly insane, possibly since before I’d first had my less-than-comfortable introduction to her. Many of her commands had reflected that growing insanity. I’d been told she was getting better now that she hadn’t been exposed to the drug in nearly a month, but she still hadn’t reversed one of her last commands to Falin, that he live in my home to keep an eye on me. So he lived in the castle with the rest of us, much to the disapproval of most of my castlemates.
You would think a magic castle would be big enough that everyone could avoid each other if they wanted, but the castle had other plans. It served an enormous feast, family-style, every night. The kitchen and pantry went missing during the evening hours, and even normal, mortal food we brought into the castle and secreted away in our rooms disappeared. If you were in the castle and wanted to eat, you came to the table or went hungry.
Some days Falin came down long enough to fix a plate and carry it back to his room, but mostly he sat at the far end of the table, alone. It always forced me to choose whether I should sit with him or the rest of my friends, like some grade school cafeteria table dilemma. Today I wasn’t in the mood to choose. I’d had a long, hard day. I didn’t feel like having to think about it.
Walking around the table, I scooped up the plate in front of Falin. I’d intended to keep going, walking away with it, but I didn’t make it a full step before he caught my arm. He frowned at me, but I grabbed his wrist with my free hand and gave him a tug. Now, I’m not a small girl—in my boots, I’m easily six feet tall—but Falin was taller, and broader, and all muscle. I couldn’t have moved him if my life depended on it, but when I tugged again, he rose to his feet. The look he gave me was skeptical at best, but he followed when I led him around the table. I sat down beside Holly, placing his plate on my other side.
“—which is why I said bikes,” Holly was saying as I sat. She turned, offering me a friendly smile while completely ignoring the blond-haired fae standing at my back. “What do you think, Al?”
“About bikes?” I said, leaning forward to fill my plate with some sort of carved bird that had been cooked until the outside was crisp but the pale meat oozed with mouthwatering juices. “What about bikes?”
“To reach the house quicker. A bicycle would cut down the time it took for us to respond to things happening outside the folded space.”
“True.” I accepted a plate of rolls as Caleb passed them my way. “But you’d get pretty sweaty on a bike. Wouldn’t a vehicle of some sort be faster and more convenient? “
Caleb shook his head. “How would you get a vehicle through the door, not to mention my house?”
“An ATV could work,” Falin said, finally sitting down. “Though we might have to carry it through the door and put the wheels on once it was on this side.”
The others at the table frowned at him, and I wasn’t sure if it was because he’d joined their conversation or if they disagreed.
“That could work,” I said between mouthfuls of food.
Ms. B shook her head. “Those things are loud and the wheels rip up the ground. You’ll give our poor gnome a fit.”
The elusive garden gnome. I was starting to think he was a myth. I still hadn’t met him.
“Well, I bought a bike,” Holly said, setting down her fork and leaning back in her chair. “Maybe it will help me work off all these elaborate feasts.”
I laughed and shook my head. “It’s Faerie food. I’m pretty sure it magically lacks calories.”
“It has to have some calories,” Rianna said from the door. “Otherwise we’d all starve while gorging ourselves. But we do seem to be able to indulge rather more than we would in mortal food.”
“Well, in that case,” Holly said, picking back up her fork, “someone cut me a thick slice of that German chocolate cake.”
Caleb and Ms. B chuckled, but I was focused on Rianna. She crossed the room slowly, leaning heavily on Desmond as she moved. She was paler than she’d been when I saw her in the office earlier, her movements labored. When she finally reached the chair across from me, she sank into it gratefully. Desmond fussed at her side a moment longer, as if ensuring she wasn’t going to collapse sideways out of her seat, and then he turned and climbed into the chair beside her. I might have commented on the huge black dog sitting at the table, but the barghest wasn’t really a dog, he was a fae, and he actually had a man-shaped form, though I’d only seen it twice.
Rianna’s movements remained stiff and slow as she served both herself and Desmond, but they smoothed out as she went. By the time her plate was full, they seemed much less laborious.
“You’re frowning at me,” she said as she filled a mug from a pitcher on the table.
Oops. “I’m just concerned. Maybe you should go to the Eternal Bloom for sunrise and sunset.”