Page 88 of Threadbound

Movement drew Jamie’s attention as Eadar stepped forward and took the arm bands from Cairn’s hands so that the fae could gently take the macramé. Cairn nodded once, although Jamie couldn’t tell if he approved or if he was humoring the stupid human. He supposed it probably didn’t matter.

“Put them on,” the Sluagh prince repeated, and Jamie, blushing, took the bands, one at a time, from Eadar’s hands and slid them up his arms.

Lying on the fabric, they’d seemed too small to wrap his biceps, but it almost felt, as he slid them higher, that they expanded and contracted to settle exactly where they belonged.

They’re fae silver, Jamie,he reminded himself.They probably did.

He struggled to swallow again.

Cairn nodded once more. “Come.”

Jamie followed him, nerves singing with fear and worry about whether or not the ritual would actually accomplish what they hoped and save Bran.

And about whether or not he was about to mess something up.

Or throw up on the Sluagh prince’s shoes.

“Wait here,” Cairn intoned, and Jamie stopped abruptly, then noticed Eadar was trailing behind him.

The smaller fae, his wild hair halo-like in the moonlight filtering through the arching windows, paused beside Jamie and offered him a small smile.

Jamie was too anxious to smile back, his heart pounding in his throat and his palms sweating. “Have you seen him?” he asked, then.

“Bran?” Eadar asked.

Jamie nodded.

“Not in the last three days,” the fae answered. “Maigdeann was with him.”

“What, we each get an… attendant?”

“Yes.”

Jamie thought about that. “Why?”

Eadar shifted. “If something goes wrong, you’ll need help.”

“Couldn’t anyone do it?”

“Not… really. Any healer, yes. Maigdeann and I have the gift. Just… in case.”

Nothing he’d done yet struck Jamie as being particularly dangerous. Of course, he didn’t know the slightest thing about magic, so he could have been a hair’s breadth from death a dozen times and never known it. “What could go wrong?” he asked. “I just… sat there.”

Eadar looked mildly amused. “Some magic is more… volatile,” he replied, and Jamie wasn’t sure if he should feel insulted by that or just take it at face value. Although, to be fair, he spent a lot of time wondering whether or not he should be offended by the things people said to him or by the stares. He supposed they didn’t have a lot of humans in the Court of Shades, so he must seem as strange to them as they did to him.

“Is that true tonight, too? That the magic could be… dangerous?” Nobody would tell him what the ceremony involved other than ‘binding the threads.’ But questions of ‘what threads’ and ‘binding how’ had been answered by Eadar with ‘the threads of Fate’ and ‘by weaving them,’ which was more detail than anyone else had offered, but meant just as little sense to Jamie.

“Probably not,” Eadar answered.

“Probably?”

The fae shifted. “Once you get through the first part, it’s really just a party. And those aren’t usually terribly dangerous.”

Jamie blinked. “A… party?” He decided he didn’t want to ask about theusuallypart of parties being dangerous. He had no idea how fairies celebrated anything, or what they celebrated, but the reading he’d done suggested everything from getting drunk—which seemed about as good an idea as anything at that precise moment—to ritual sacrifice of babies. Jamie was fairly sure that asking which of those options was on the table would probably be offensive, regardless of which side of the spectrum this particular party ended up on. So he kept that question to himself.

Eadar nodded in response to the general question. “A threadbinding is… a cause for joy. Strengthening of the magic of the clan, providing stability to the court, growing the family.”

“The family?”

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