The Queen's Librarian (3 page)

“Mathlasa thei scontun,” someone said behind him.

Lucas paused. He ran it over in his head, but no, it was just as nonsensical as it had sounded the first time. He sighed. Pinned to a bush, needing to piss almost desperately, and now it seemed he’d lost the power to interpret speech.

He angled a look over his shoulder, caught a flash of platinum hair atop a tall, lean frame, and sighed again. Damn it, it
would
be Slade, wouldn’t it. Clara was never going to forgive Lucas if her new suitor decided her family was too bizarre a potential addition to his respectable family tree.

“Slade,” he said, slowly and carefully, because it looked bad enough as it was; he didn’t need to add slurring. “I wonder if you could maybe give me a hand here. I seem to have got myself hung up on—”

“Mathlasa thei
scontun
,” Slade said again, “Scontun,
scontun
!”

Lucas’s mouth pursed. Slade hadn’t
seemed
drunk before. Was Lucas the one speaking in tongues? Maybe the things coming out his own mouth sounded more like
Flurgle gurp
to the world that existed outside of his head.

“Yes, scontun, whatever,” Lucas conceded, “just, would you please…?” He tugged lightly on his arm, just enough to rustle the bush and get his point across, and tried to angle another look over his shoulder. He frowned. “Hey, you’re not Slade.”

Easy mistake
, Lucas thought. There weren’t many about with that platinum hair. But now that Lucas was actually looking, he could see the difference in the features, and the way this man’s face was set in a grim look that Lucas didn’t think had ever crossed Slade’s perpetually pleasant, almost dreamy countenance. And this man was definitely older than Slade.

Oh, no. This couldn’t be
Mister
Slade, could it? It would be bad enough, Slade catching Lucas—the Master of Rolling Green and pseudo-guardian to his hopefully future bride—drunk and stuck to a bush, but his
father
….

Lucas felt a little sick.

“Slade,” the man repeated thickly, like he had gravel in his mouth. He seemed to chew on it for a moment then shook his head, eyebrows snapping down. “Scontun!”

“Scontun,” Lucas echoed blankly. He blinked a bit myopically through his lightly fogged spectacles. “Mister Scontun?”

Scontun, Scontun, where had he heard that name before?
Had
he heard that name before? Not someone from the village, Lucas was sure. He didn’t exactly socialize, but he knew all the names, at least. This one didn’t have the familiarity of knowledge, but it was ringing a faint bell in the back of his muzzy head.

“Mathlasa thei scontun,” the man insisted, then he went on to babble a string of something that sounded very urgent by his tone, but Lucas couldn’t pick out anything in it that made sense except the repetition of that one word. The man finally wound down, flopping his hands at his sides in apparent exasperation, then he reached over, took hold of the tail at Lucas’s nape and gave it a tug. “Libe-aar-in,” he said slowly. “Red. Libe-aar-in.”

Lucas frowned. “Red” he got. It nearly made him roll his eyes, but he at least understood it. The other, though…. “Librarian?”

“
Ma
!” said the man happily, and he gave Lucas a thump between the shoulder blades that sent his face into a clump of thorns which, had it not been for his spectacles, very likely would’ve taken out his left eye.

“Hey!” Lucas snapped. “Do you
mind
—?”

“Libe-aar-in,” the man repeated. “Red libe-aar-in—scontun.”

“Scontun,” Lucas said again, more slowly this time. He frowned as he tried to get a better look at the man from under his arm, but quickly righted himself again. As it were. After his head stopped doing loops, he asked, “D’you mean
scounttune
?” The man blinked at him. Lucas blinked back, then sighed yet again. “No, of course you didn’t mean
scounttune
, because that would mean you’re trying to speak the language of the Daimin, and that would make me the most reasonable person here at the moment, although the more you babble, the more that looks like an actual possibility—”

He puffed a dubious snort and shifted a shrug aborted by confinement. Vaguely, he thought he heard a burst of noise coming from the direction of the inn’s front door, which meant someone was either coming out or going in, which in turn meant that his chances of getting caught by someone else in this predicament were increasing a little too steadily. Annoyed now, Lucas let his chin drop down to his chest and tried very hard not to whine. He very nearly stomped his foot, though.

“Look, d’you think you could help a fellow out here? We can go over all the reasons why you shouldn’t later, but right now my fingers are starting to go numb and tingly, my stomach is doing things it probably shouldn’t be doing, I think you took a flap of skin off my cheek with your glad-handing, I’m getting colder by the second, and I
still
have to
piss
!”

“Who
are
you talking to?” Alex wanted to know, striding swiftly into Lucas’s view through the hawthorn branches to his left. “And what…?” Alex paused, mouth hanging open, the corners twitching suspiciously upward.

Yes, Lucas knew exactly what it looked like, thank you, Alex.

“The bush started it,” Lucas blurted.

“I… see,” said Alex. He tracked the position, the upside-down coat, the thorns. “Lucas,” he said slowly. “Love.” He tilted his head. “
How
—?”

“
Don’t
ask,” Lucas growled. Alex’s mouth snapped shut, but Lucas could tell by the way he curled his lips around his teeth and pressed them tight together that he was not nearly as concerned as he was pretending to be. “Do you
really
think I can’t tell by now when you’re laughing on the inside?” Lucas snapped. He didn’t wait for Alex to answer. “Just help me get loose, will you?” To his credit, Alex moved immediately to start working at the coat snagged up in the thorns, while Lucas ranted on, “This Scontun-whoosy-whatsis fellow has been
no
help, and I don’t care if he does turn out to be the Master of All Things Slade and forbids the family to have anything to do with the battier branch of the Queen’s family tree, I’m going to have—Ah! Alex, you’re a marvel!”

Lucas’s arms flopped down to his sides, immediately queering his dubious balance. Alex caught him before his face ended up in the thorns again, untangled him from the coat, and draped it over his shoulders. Lucas wilted into Alex’s chest, dubiously shaking out his tingling hands before lifting his arms to slide them around Alex’s torso. And if Mister Scontun wanted to mock him some more in his babbling pretend language, “Mister Scontun can just go hang.” Drat, Lucas had had no idea that ale made it so all his inner thoughts slipped immediately into outer idiocy. He was going to have to watch that in future.

“Mister Scontun?” Alex asked.

Lucas growled. “
Him
,” he said, waving a hand vaguely behind him then lifting his head. “The man who—Hey, where’d he go?” Lucas blinked around the empty yard then up at Alex.

Alex lightly stroked Lucas’s cheek. “You’ll need a plaster for this.” He leaned down and dropped a soft, warm kiss to the tip of Lucas’s cold nose.

Lucas’s glasses fogged a little more in the wake of Alex’s warmth. “I’ve not had my piss yet,” he mumbled, and then he leaned again into Alex’s chest, not even caring when he felt a suppressed chuckle rumble through it.

“C’mon, love.” Alex prodded gently until Lucas found himself semiupright and pointed toward the inn. After slipping his arm across Lucas’s shoulders to steady him, Alex pulled him in so Lucas was fitted snugly to Alex’s ribs. “I’ve got us a room. Let’s go sleep it off, shall we?”

“Yeah, fine,” Lucas slurred as he leaned into Alex’s side and fixed a death grip onto the lapel of his coat. He wobbled a bit, but he managed not to actually fall down as he leaned up and finally got his lick—a nice, long, sloppy one right along the cords of Alex’s throat. “But tomorrow we burn that bloody bush.”

Chapter 2

A
LTHOUGH
Lucas was fairly certain the sun wasn’t actually out to get him personally, still, it really didn’t have to be so obnoxiously bright. Lucas squinted against the brilliance and let Alex lead him through the marketplace and onto the road toward home. He’d never had a hangover before, but he had to assume that the clinging nausea, the inability to convince his body it was
not
wading through neck-deep mud, and the way the sunlight had apparently turned hostile all pointed to the fact that yes, at the age of twenty-four summers, he was, in fact, experiencing his first hangover. Alex had been kind enough—or malicious enough; it depended on one’s perspective—to force Lucas to choke down some slimy goo that had actually helped with the bubble-for-a-head thing, and the stomach-trying-to-escape-through-his-nostrils thing. But there was apparently nothing to be done about the sun-trying-to-fry-his-eyeballs thing.

Though, Lucas supposed, he shouldn’t whine about sunshine, even in his own head. The late spring and wet summer had played havoc with the coming harvest, and they could do with all the sun they could get. Earlier in the week had looked promising, until the southern winds had kicked up and brought a haze of afternoon drizzle with them. A straight week of sunshine would be ideal, but no one was counting on it. Lucas had already put the word out to his own tenants that reaping would commence tomorrow, on the third day of dry weather—providing it held—and he knew the neighboring farms and villages were doing the same. Normally, they’d already have the second harvest in, and all attention would have by now turned to preparing for the Harvest Faire. This year, they’d be lucky to get half of it in by the Crone’s Night festival.

It was a good thing, in retrospect, that there hadn’t been any money to invest in the new silos Parry had been trying to talk Lucas into last year. If this second harvest ended up rotting or molding or freezing, they likely wouldn’t even be filling the silos they had now.

“Stop brooding,” Alex chided as he tugged Lucas deftly around a weaver’s stall and shooed an unhappy goose from their path. The goose blatted a petulant honk but thought better of following after when Alex honked back. Lucas didn’t know if the goose fled in fear or just plain confusion. Although, the presentation of the pointed toe of Alex’s ridiculously expensive and oh-so-fashionable boot might have been what decided it more firmly. “It’ll be what it’ll be,” said Alex. “There’s no use fretting over things you can’t change.”

“Easy for you to say,” Lucas grumbled. “You don’t have several hundred tenants who think you should be able to control the weather, prevent infestation, kill mold and mildew, and personally consult the Green Warden himself to make sure you’re doing it all correctly.” It had been so nice last night, when his fuzzy head had conveniently decided ale was more important than all of… this.

“Well, there’s your problem right there,” Alex said breezily. “You can’t expect a Green Warden to appreciate a cuddly redhead.” He emphasized the “cuddly” comment by pulling Lucas in tight to his side. “You need to beguile and seduce the Crone. All the old ladies go for the cute types.” He tweaked Lucas’s nose. “It’s the freckles.”

Lucas batted Alex’s hand away and shoved him off. “Right,” he muttered. “Hence Mistress Singer forking the Evil Eye every time she sees me.”

A rather inelegant guffaw-snort burst loose from Alex. “
Still
?” He shook his head. “I thought she’d got over that when you charmed my father into buying two of her milkers for three times what they’re worth.”

“I don’t think she’ll ever get over it. She thinks I’m a changeling.”

“Maybe she thinks you’re responsible for that deformed pumpkin she calls a nose.”

“She’s at least four decades older than I am,” Lucas pointed out. “And she was born with the thing, or so Mother says. How it could be my fault is quite beyond my own powers of reason.”

“Well, the woman’s battier than the Moonset Bell Tower, so what d’you expect?”

“Mistress Singer or my mother?”

“Is that a trick question?”

Lucas grinned then gave Alex a poke. “And I didn’t ‘charm’ your father into anything. I only—”

“You charm my father by merely existing,” Alex informed him. “All you have to do is flash those gemstones you’ve got for eyes, and he comes over all squishy and
yes Lucas my lad what can I do for you
. It’s sickening.”

Lucas rolled his eyes again, which were, he knew quite well, a rather boring hazel that
sometimes
—in very bad light and if he was wearing the right color coat—
might
take on a slight greenish hue, which, Lucas also knew quite well, was more of a muddy moss than the “emerald” Alex always claimed. A bald-faced flatterer, Alex, and an incorrigible charmer too. Lucas might find it in himself to complain more, if he ever managed to resist it.

Right now, he merely blushed and insisted, “I didn’t ‘charm’ anyone.
You
said there was never enough milk about the house, and I merely gave your father a name. I was only trying to be helpful.”