Page 58 of Threadbound

Now, sitting at a table in the library, Jamie covered his face with his hands. He’d been trying to find these stupid plants for hours—no, days. He’d gone through every medieval herbal compendium in the library, whether Scottish, English, Norse,French, Dutch, and even one Islamic text from he wasn’t even sure when.

None of them matched. The stupid thistle-burdock-knapweed-sea-holly remained stubbornly unidentified, although the more plants Jamie looked at, the more he was starting to suspect that the damn thing wasn’t any of them, and there was some entirely different plant that he just hadn’t found yet.

He’d moved on to botany textbooks. Modern ones. He was starting with Scotland and working his way out. He had one more Hibernian Highlands botany text before he was going to start on Northern England and the Shetlands and Orkney. From there, he planned on the rest of England, Ireland, and Wales, then Scandinavia, since the Norse Vikings had made their way to Scotland relatively early in history, and they could have brought dried plants or seeds with them.

After that, it was the rest of Europe and North Africa, and then to the Middle East.

Jamie really hoped he wasn’t going to have to go through that many botany textbooks.

Admittedly, he wasn’t reallyreadingthem so much as just looking at the pictures, trying to find things that looked like the stupid drawing.

He’d—of course—also gone back to the original, armed with permission to take high photos with his phone. But no matter how many times he zoomed or enhanced or otherwise tried to find clues in the faded lines of ink on the page, he couldn’t make them resolve themselves into a plant he could identify against any drawings or photographs. Not in the medieval herbals and not in the modern botany ones. He’d even downloaded about five different apps that were supposed to help ID plants, and they’d only offered up selections of things that it clearlywasn’t, even though it was similar.

It was making him crazy.

He’d showed it to Rob, to Trixie, to his professors, to several librarians—some of whom actually seemed to care—and at least a dozen other unfortunate students who happened to be in the library at the same time and who looked over curiously when he’d sighed, muttered, or swore under his breath at the refusal of the damn drawing to be identified.

None of them had been able to tell him what it was, either.

And when he wasn’t thinking about the thistle-burdock-knapweed-sea-holly, he couldn’t stop himself from thinking about Bran and wondering whether the fae had made it to wherever he was trying to go—if he’d been healed, or if he’d died alone on a road, trying to crawl or flap his way to help and safety.

That thought had been the stuff of several nightmares, and Jamie really wished he had a way to contact Bran. Just to make sure he was alive.

But it wasn’t like fae had mobile phones.

Jamie had gotten as far as pulling down a volume on summoning fair folk from the library’s shelves before telling himself to stop being a dumbass. While he’d more or less wrapped his brain around the fact that fae were real—that his mother hadn’t been entirely naïve in her beliefs—he was still very aware that the vast majority of magical things that people had tried to do throughout history had to have been complete bunk.

He just wished he could ask Bran which ones weren’t.

Which brought him back to the problem of the missing, possibly-dead fae and the fact that Jamie had no idea how to find him.

It was as earlyas Jamie had dared leave his apartment—the sun not yet creeping over the edge of the horizon, but still brightenough that strangers were unlikely to lurk in any shadows as he ran down the Royal Mile and began the climb up to Arthur’s Seat. As always, Jamie glanced around, looking for the familiar shadow of the giant raven he’d come to expect most mornings over the past several months. The raven that he now knew had probably been Bran.

No shadow-raven followed his steps, and Jamie swallowed back his disappointment, telling himself that he should stop expecting to see Bran. That he was unlikely to ever see Bran again.

As the path grew steeper, Jamie forced himself to draw in a long breath, then let it go as he pushed his quads upwards, expending energy and tension to keep his pace steady even as the trail grew harder.

It was the rhythm of the run, more than anything else, that was soothing. The steady thump-thump-thump of his feet hitting earth, the rasping sigh of breath into and out of his lungs, the low accompaniment of his pulse.

A rhythm that was abruptly interrupted when he spotted a small face staring at him from halfway up the cliff side of the path. If he could really even call it aface, exactly. For half a second, Jamie assumed that he’d essentially hallucinated the face—the same way you could see a face in a tree or rock face when there wasn’t one there.

Then this one blinked its black-and-mica-chip eyes at him, then yawned, showing blockish yellow-brown teeth in its lumpy grey-brown face.

“Shit!” Not paying attention, Jamie tripped over a loose rock and went down, his bare knees hitting the stone-and-gravel path and sending him sprawling—fortunately not over the edge of the path and down the side of the crag.

With a soft groan, he turned to sitting, looking morosely down at his torn-up hands and bleeding knees.

When he looked down the path, there was no one else coming up the trail. On the one hand, that made him feel a little less humiliated, although it might have been nice if some hiker had been coming up with some bandaids or wipes.

And then he heard a hissing, scraping kind of laugh coming from above his head, and he looked up.

And thethingthat had made him trip in the first place was looking down and laughing its obviously inhuman little head off.

“What is your problem?” he snapped at it, and had the satisfaction of it shutting up immediately.

“It sees us?” it hissed.

With a groan, Jamie carefully pushed himself back up to his feet. “Yeah, it bloody sees you,” he grumbled, adopting Rob’s favorite invective. “Why do you think it fell on its bloody ass?” He was really irritated, and not simply because he’d fallen, although he was not going to enjoy either walking or running back home with aching hands and knees. He was also irritated because the creature—whatever it was—clearly didn’t care what happened to him.

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