I don’t want to be like a brother to you! Jak’s pained and furious words echoed in her mind, and she flinched internally.
“I made it sweet,” Jak said, appearing in front of her as if conjured by her thoughts, and pushing a pretty cup of black coffee into her hands. “No cream, right?”
“Right,” she replied faintly, rather astonished.
He put a plate on the table in front of her, piled high with pastries. A lemon tart glowed like sunshine, another spilling with glistening blueberries. Buttery, flaky popovers oozed with cream that glinted with strawberries. Her stomach growled at the sight. “Thank you, though I can’t eat all that.”
“It won’t go to waste,” he replied. “And unless you ate a great deal after I left last night, you need it.”
“Why are you feeding me?” she asked, aware of Gen nearby, listening with interest.
“Don’t sound so suspicious. I’m feeding Gen, too.” He pointed at the plate Gen was holding. “Unless we’re sailing or fighting, I don’t have many responsibilities. Might as well play waiter.” He grinned and snagged a chair with one foot, picking up his own coffee cup and raising it to her as he lolled back in the fussy chair, a lock of unruly brown hair falling over one eye. The gold hoop in one ear glinted, and he looked decidedly piratical. If pirates drank from elegant, hand-painted ceramic.
“I’ll start,” Lena declared, “since it began with me.” She pushed back her waving caramel hair, a line between her brows. “I should lead off by offering an apology to you all, but especially to Zeph, who risked her life to come after me. I didn’t mean to step through that fold into another realm, but I’m aware I jeopardized all of you with my carelessness.”
“It was extremely careless of you,” Rhy said, pushing up from his chair he’d barely sat in and pacing toward the window. “You could have died.”
“I very nearly did, several times,” Lena agreed soberly, watching him with mingled sorrow and longing. Something she immediately hid when he turned. “And I already stated that I regret my carelessness. It was an accident, however. I was simply trying to track the oddness I sensed in the atmosphere, using my weather magic to get a bead on it, just to gather more data. I was circling what felt like a weather front between high- and low-pressure systems when suddenly I was falling.”
“Falling?” Gen echoed. “But you’d been on solid ground.”
Lena nodded. “I know. Still, it felt exactly like that—as if I’d put my foot down wrong and fallen off a cliff. Except it was a forest. I fell through branches, then into this deep leaf litter. Deepest I’ve ever encountered.”
“Easily as deep as Astar is tall,” Zeph put in. “Maybe more. It was compressed at the bottom, looser at the top. I never did determine where the soil was, if there was any.”
“If there was a forest, there had to be soil,” Gen offered.
“Not necessarily.” Lena shook her head, gaze haunted. “This world worked by different rules. I had some magic, but not all of it, and what I had was—twisted from the usual.”
“And I couldn’t shift back from gríobhth form,” Zeph said. “I never thought I’d dislike my First Form, but the prospect of being trapped in it forever, no words or thumbs…” She trailed off with a shudder, and Astar put his arm around her on the settee they shared. She sagged against him, closing her eyes.
Jak had discarded his cup and pulled out a silver dagger, spinning it through his fingers thoughtfully. “Given the wounds you returned with, I’m guessing something nasty lived in that leaf detritus.”
“Zeph dubbed them tentacle things,” Lena said. “If there was more to them than that, I never saw.” She raised a brow at Zeph.
“Whatever the tentacles were attached to, it was buried deep,” Zeph said. “I could hear it—or them—moving down there, but was never sure if it was one creature or thousands. Thousands of tentacles, though. I thought there was no way Lena could’ve survived those things—they had a sting to them and could strip your flesh away with a touch.”
So that was the source of the many lacerations and what had looked like burns on both Zeph and Lena. In some places, they looked like they’d been flayed. If Stella hadn’t had magical healing skills, and the assistance of the Star to renew her magic, neither of them would’ve lived.
“I was lucky to land near that rock outcropping,” Lena replied. “Once I figured out I couldn’t climb any of the trees—smooth surface, no limbs below several man-heights—I managed to get on those rocks.” She threw a grateful smile at Jak, nodding at the blade walking through his nimble fingers. “I fended them off with the dagger you gave me. I meant to thank you right away. Without your lessons in bladework, I’d have been dragged off that rock in no time.”
Jak grinned in sincere pleasure. “You’re a good student. It makes me happier than I can say that the lessons stood you in good stead. I’m happy to work with all of you. Best to be prepared,” he added, a hint of challenge in the dark eyes that lingered a moment longer on Stella, a reminder that she’d asked him for help. Something she now regretted, given the tension between them.
“I have claws, thank you,” Rhy replied, glaring at Jak, his jealousy ripe in the air. “I can protect Lena, too.”
“Not if you’re not there,” Lena countered, “which you weren’t. I’m not blaming you for that,” she added, holding up a hand when he opened his mouth to argue. “My point is that any of us could be isolated as I was. We have to be able to fend for ourselves.”
“And you can’t count on claws, Rhy,” Zeph pointed out. “Whatever that place is, I could not shift. If I’d been in human form, we’d both have died there.”
“Everyone is taking lessons in hand-to-hand,” Astar decided. “In human form only, no shapeshifting tricks or enhancements. Jak, thank you for the offer.”
Jak stopped the spinning blade by tapping the flat to his temple in a jaunty salute, while Rhy groaned, muttering about being forced into mossback ways. Everyone ignored him.
Zeph and Lena went on to describe their escape from the forest floor, the attacks by the canopy denizens, the endless circling to locate another rift to return to their own world. Stella comprehended even more, hearing all that they didn’t say. She bent her own rules a bit more to probe deeper into the black emotions clouding around Lena, who sat by herself in a high-backed chair, fingers digging into the padded arms. Though she reported the details of their harrowing adventure in a precise, even tone, the remembered despair plagued her inside. Stella experienced with Lena the moment of decision to let herself fall, to save Zeph by killing herself, crystal clear and bleeding shards of residual grief.
Though it was an invasion of Lena’s mind, Stella was glad to have probed. Sometimes healing the body from trauma was the easiest part. To have decided on suicide, to the point of taking that action and throwing herself into the arms of death, and then awake to a life she’d thought she’d relinquished… That changed a person.
Lena would need help, perhaps more than Stella could give. Lena also needed to be not so alone. Speculatively, Stella observed Rhy, with his restless pacing and helpless rage. Was he the answer? That very much depended on Rhy, she supposed. But when she took a look at the future between them, it didn’t look likely. Not unless something changed. Hmm.