Page 13 of Time's Fool

“You seem fairly blasé about this,” Yvain said angrily. “You let the master down. Most people would be quivering in their boots! Yet you sit there, practically inhaling every bit of food in the place—”

I raised a brow. “Do you want some?”

“You know damned well I don’t want some!” He pointed the knife at me. “But you—”

I took the weapon away, in a move too fast for him to see, judging by the look in his eyes when he realized it was missing. I started to use it to cut some of the hard-as-a-rock bread, to help sop up the rabbit juices, before remembering what he’d been doing with it. So, I wiped it on my sailor’s trousers first.

“We all screwed up,” I said, in between bites. “You lost your assigned witch or you wouldn’t be here. And unless our missing members manage to trace them without being spotted—”

“They didn’t,” a redhead said. His name was William, like half the men in any town in England, which was fair since he was native born. He was called Liam by the other vamps, and had adopted a middle of the road path in clothing, with decent enough wools and leathers in shades of brown and gray.

They complimented his gray eyes and wide, handsome face, which looked like it had come through the battle unscathed. But he was poking at a sodden, once-expensive looking felt hat, as if trying to get it to go back into shape. I had bad news for him.

“What happened?” I asked, as he gave up on the hat and sat back against the wall with a sigh.

“We didn’t lose any more, but half were temporarily blinded by a spell and are wandering aimlessly in the forest, and the rest are imprisoned in trees along the road.”

“Imprisoned . . . in trees?”

He grimaced. “They reached out and grabbed them, then holes opened up in the trunks and they just . . . stuffed them in. Or that’s how it was explained to me.”

If he had been in contact with the imprisoned vamps, he had some impressive mental powers. Not too surprising as Children tended to take after their master, and Mircea had gotten confirmation of his suspicions from a group of women trained to resist such things. I made a note to guard my thoughts around both of them, although reading family and poking through the head of a random dhampir were two very different things.

But it never hurt to be careful.

“And they’re all right after that?” I asked.

Liam shrugged. “As much as a person could be. The enchantment is regrowing the wood whenever they try to punch through, but it’ll wear off eventually and they’ll be back.”

“Lucky everyone was a vamp,” I said, stuffing down the cheese tart. And wondering how I would have fared with wood instead of air to breathe.

“They were trees,” Yvain said, hitting the table, and making all his little rocks jump. “Made of wood. They could have been staked—”

“But they weren’t,” Lucha said, stubbornly drawing the conversation back to the point he was trying to make. “The women could have killed all of us—and don’t say they couldn’t,” he told his blond companion, who had flushed angrily. “There were at least a hundred of the belle signore—”

“Bella!” Liam scoffed. “Nothing beautiful about them—”

“That is what they call witches, where I am from.”

“I don’t give a damn what they call them!” Yvain said. “They killed Tura! They could have done the same to any of us—”

“But they didn’t—”

“They may have spelled us, and it just hasn’t showed up yet,” a fifth vamp said. He was the second bruiser from the incident with the pigs, and had kept shooting me nervous glances. He had a flat, unintelligent face under a shock of brown hair, and had been fiddling with a shallow bowl of water since I sat down.

“Not that again!” Yvain said. “Put that thing away, Dolph!”

“I’m looking for the evil eye,” the giant protested. “You put some wheat seeds in the water and watch to see if an eye forms. I know some prayers to take it off if it does.”

“Then use them now and be done with it!”

Dolph, whose full name was Dolphus although nobody called him that, looked shocked. “Can’t pray if there’s no hex. Could upset God.”

Yvain got up with a curse and went to poke at the fire.

“Would you listen to me?” Lucha said, looking around the table at us. “There’s something strange going on. The witches could have killed us—should have killed us. But they didn’t—”

“There’s no mystery to it,” Liam said, drinking some of the inn’s ale and then making a face at it. “They were afraid of running afoul of the Senate. They already have the Circle on their tails; they don’t want us, too.”

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