Page 128 of Fae Reckoning

“Mistress?” Pru said.

I made a show of scanning the hall, alighting on a curious scene involving Zafi and other MISOs, before looking backat Pru.

“I don’t see anymistress. I see only equals.”

Pru stared up at me, her lower lip quivering, her large, dark eyes glistening as vividly as Ryder’s. She swallowed visibly, her voice tentative, as if trying out my name in earnest this time, as if she intended finally to address me as a friend for good, no going back. “Elowyn?”

“Yes, Pru?”

“Can Pru still stay with … Elowyn?”

“Of course we’ll stay together. We’re friends.”

“Even if Pru doesn’tattendher mistress anymore?”

“Especially then. I have no need of a servant, or worse, a slave.” I cringed. “But I do have an opening…”

I waited a beat, two, three.

Pru asked, “An opening for what position?”

“For a best friend.” Feeling Xeno’s stare on me, I jerked mine up to meet his. He smiled; I smiled back, amending for Pru, “A bestfemalefriend. I already have Xeno, and he and I will always be friends. But that’s not the same. I need a best friend with whom I can talk about funny things and silly things and female-y things and pretty much anything and everything.”

Pru stiffened beside me, pulling her head away from my thigh. She straightened her shoulders and tipped her chin all the way up so she could meet my eyes.

“Pru likes that position. She’d like to have it.”

With my one free arm, I bent over as best as I could with a heavy, dozing dragonling against my chest, and hugged her hard. “I’m honored to have your best-friendship. Plus, my best-friend’s a hero. How cool is that?”

Apparently at a loss for words, Pru pressed her face into my side and cried. Feeling the heat of someone’s attention on us, I glanced up and over the heads of Rush and our friends to find Edsel. He was half crouched over a fellow goblin, mending the goblin’s arm, his mouth agape. When he caught me looking, his lips pressed into a smile wider than I believed him capable of.

Oh yes, we’d heal. However long it took, we’d recover from the damage Talisa had inflicted. We were going to come back stronger than ever before.

A succession of tiny, sharp gasps drew my attention away from the gruff, goblin granddoody with the skill for healing, and back over to Zafi and the parvnits who surrounded her.

“What’s that about?” I asked Pru.

“Pru isn’t certain. The parvnits with Zafi are from the Nerotti Forest, and Pru heard that they know Zafi, but Pru doesn’t know what they’re upset about now.” She hesitated. “Best friend.”

My heart squeezed. “Wanna go see?”

“Pru does.”

With Rush’s and Xeno’s attention trailing me as we walked through a few fae who were recovering, resting on others’ laps on patches of repaired floor, we approached the gaggle of tiny fairies. Their wings hung limply against their backs and thighs as they crowded together on a molding. A pair leapt off it to swingaround in a buzzing blur of wings to embrace Zafi from the open side. Their tones were hushed, fierce, and urgent.

Some of the others noticed us before Zafi did, and pinned suspicious, narrowed looks on us.

“This is private, if you don’t mind,” said a parvnit with fuchsia hair and a matching skirt. Her fuchsia lips were pursed in a line of snark.

“That’s our new queen,” hissed one with a bob of hair the orange of fire. “Watch it or it’ll be?—”

“Don’t say it,” I warned. “There’ll be no off with anyone’s heads. Not anymore.”

With a sheepish flush to her cheeks, in a warm orange, she protested, “I hadn’t been about to say that,” only it was clear from her spreading blush that she had.

“You’ll never have to fear for your lives again,” I added.

With orange eyelashes so fine they were like spider web, she blinked furiously to wipe the sheen from her tiny eyes.

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