“Like Micah?” Mom asked. Okay, I know I was being obvious, but she could have let me beat around the bush a little. “I think Micah is a fine man. Don’t you?”
“I do.”
“Then, what’s troubling you about him?”
“He’s not troubling me,” I clarified. “He wants a baby. I don’t—not yet, anyway—but I want to be more than a useless consort.”
“Do not make the mistake of seeing consorts as useless,” Mom said. “Many have shaped our world from the bedchamber.”
“I don’t want to shape a world! I just…” I shoved the plate away and sent crumbs flying. A silverkin was there in an instant to sweep them up. “Why do I have to be obviously pregnant before I’m Lady Silverstrand?”
“Ah. You don’t feel that consorts are useless; you feel useless as one.”
“Of course I do,” I grumbled, now pouring my own cup of tea. “No one pays any attention to me; no one cares what I do or say.”
“Micah does.”
“All they do is stare at my stomach, looking for bulges.” I dumped too much sugar in my tea, stirred it a few times, and pushed it away. “So? Why do I have to be pregnant?”
“To prove that your relationship has been consummated,” Mom replied. “In the old days, a bride was held in a tower from her wedding night until she was heavy with child. That way, no one could dispute who’d fathered the babe.”
Well, that was pragmatic. “I hope Micah doesn’t stick me in a tower,” I mumbled.
“Come, now. It wouldn’t be so bad.”
“Mom!”
“That was the original intent of the honeymoon,” she continued, undeterred. “To drink sweet mead and come away with a babe for your troubles.”
“Is that what you and Dad did?” I sneered.
“Careful, or I’ll tell you,” she warned. She watched me squirm for a few moments before she continued. “As to your first question, Max will be fine. For all that he’s of metal, there’s fire in his blood, and he’s never gotten a chance to feel it. Let him burn a bit.”
I nodded, gazing past my mother to the heavy mantel above the kitchen hearth. Since the kitchen was always the heart of the home, it’s where we’d put the one of the few mementos we had from the Raven Compound—the picture of Max, Sadie, and me in the backyard beneath the fairy tree, taken when we were kids. As I looked at the sweet-faced boy crammed between his sisters, I tried to reconcile the brother of my memory with the man of today. “If he burns any more, Micah may extinguish him.”
“That he may,” Mom murmured. “That, he may.”
4
The next morning dawned bright and clear, complete with fluffy clouds and a soft breeze. I should have known that something bizarre was going to happen from the deceptively calm way the day began.
I’d spent the bulk of the morning shuffling around the manor, bored out of my mind. Micah had been summoned to some sort of a meeting that had to do with the Gold Queen, and, being that I’d insulted Old Stoney only the day prior, we both thought it best to give the old rock a bit of time to cool down. So I had helped Micah back into his formal attire and handed him his sword, and, after a lingering goodbye, he went off to hear about what I hoped was the Gold Queen’s most excellent recovery.
And really, it’s not that I minded being left to my own devices. I liked having free time to explore the manor and its surrounding gardens and orchards, since it was now, and probably always would be, my home, too. It was a far cry from the tiny two-room apartment I had rented in the Mundane realm, not to mention the gaudy opulence of the Raven Compound. Just like the girl in the fairy tale, I’d found myself a charming prince and moved right on in to his castle.
However, spending the last few weeks surrounded by this never-ending luxury had left me feeling more than a bit jaded. The Otherworld is an amazing land, filled with untold wonders and beauty, yes, but sometimes I just wanted to play a game on my phone. My poor, trusty, old phone, which by now had probably been confiscated and dissected by Peacekeepers, who were now very aware of how often I had called for takeout.
Speaking of takeout, I missed eating it in front of my elderly Picture Vision while I watched bad postwar movies and good prewar movies. Not to mention all the types of takeout I, um, took out—pizza, grinders, rubbery Chinese. Yeah, the silverkin could whip up anything I asked for, but they couldn’t quite manage the proper containers. Yes, I missed the little white cartons, and paper coffee cups with their badly fitting plastic lids, and my car, and…