Total pages in book: 88
Estimated words: 84840 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 424(@200wpm)___ 339(@250wpm)___ 283(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 84840 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 424(@200wpm)___ 339(@250wpm)___ 283(@300wpm)
A Wyrd delegate blinks.
“This . . . is your king?”
Nicostratus barely holds in a laugh. “It has been a long day.”
“I’ve got the pudding!” I yelp, hurrying up the endless aisle of boggling eyes. “Give him to me.”
Nicostratus is holding back tears, just like me. His are tears of laughter. Mine are for my impending head-loss. He hands Quin to me and returns to calmly addressing the delegates.
With little hands thumping my back, I escape through a back door.
Nope, I’m never getting away with this.
I feed him The Fix and send him to bed. By morning Quin is his normal, fully grown, serious self. “Why are you down there and not in here?”
I jerk to my feet, knees aching from kneeling at his bedside all night.
He rubs his jaw. “Such a strange dream I had.”
Yes! It was a dream!
An aklo suddenly enters the room, bowing low. “The pony has arrived.”
Stunned silence.
The air thickens.
Quin slowly, deliberately rubs his temples.
Then, in the most carefully measured, deadliest tone imaginable: “Caelus.”
I panic-smile. “Now, Quin. Before we jump to conclusions . . .”
Quin rises.
I lurch out of his reach and bolt, not daring to look back.
PUDDING REBELLION
Quin lifts his spoon and a glob of pudding slops back into his bowl. He stares over the table at me, where I’m trying very hard not to act like anything’s unusual.
His fingers are drumming the table now. “Pudding for breakfast was different. Pudding for lunch struck me as an oversight.” He dips his spoon into his bowl again. “Pudding for dinner—”
“Tastes delicious!” I cut in, flashing my brightest grin.
“Where is a balanced meal?”
“There’s a bit of bread right there.”
He leans in and shivers shoot right through me. “Where are the vegetables?”
I squirm. “They’ll be back. Soon enough.”
“Back? Where’d they go?”
I hesitate. “You know that pretty new pony?”
Quin’s eyes flash and I, as calmly as possible, slip off my chair and push it in.
“Cael . . .”
“You also banned vegetables. And demanded pudding for every meal. The cooks took it seriously . . .”
“Cael!”
I’m already running.
A MAKARIOS MOMENT
Makarios stares at me where I’m standing at his front door, smiling a little too hard.
“Why are you here?” he says, suspiciously.
“Can’t I visit an old friend?”
He looks over my shoulder.
“I might have temporarily turned the king to a five-year-old and upturned the royal court,” I say, brushing soot from my cloak.
He nods. “Better come in, then.”
I duck into his cozy cottage and the little girl he saved, Sonya, looks up curiously from an apothecary table covered in books and tonics. She beams. “Caelus! I did my homework, look. I even figured out what ‘volatile’ means!”
Makarios grins. “That’s my girl. Such a hard worker.”
I check out her work and approve.
“Can I move on to harder tonics now?” she pleads, jumping up and down, tugging my sleeve.
I pat her head. “We must master the basics first.”
She grumbles and goes back to her book, and Makarios and I take tea in the adjacent room.
“So?” Makarios asks. “What happened.”
I give him the short version: the potion, the pony tantrum, the child-king demanding pudding for dinner.
Makarios fills in the gaps with irritating accuracy. He smirks and pours more tea for us, but the pot is empty. “Sonya?”
“I’ll bring tea,” she calls out knowingly, and shuttles in two smaller pots. One for me and one for Makarios. With a cheerful smile, she pours Makarios a glass and sets it in his hand.
He drinks it. And slumps over. And starts glowing.
I catch him before he hits the floor. His skin is too warm. Also . . . glowing. “Oh dear,” I mutter.
Sonya is shrieking. “I killed him! I killed him!”
“He’s still breathing,” I say, propping Makarios up. “But you might take after your teacher a little too much. I’m also impatient to learn new cures.”
“I heard him say he has such a headache. I just . . . wanted to help him.”
I crouch to her level and make her look at me. “Let’s consider this a lesson, alright? We have a patient, we must stay calm to help him.”
She tries to hold back her sobs and hiccups as she nods. “He’s . . . he’s the only family I have. My big brother. I love my big brother!”
“Let’s wake him to tell him all those nice things, alright?”
She nods, and I sniff the teapot. “Ah, I see what happened. You used booker bark instead of booker root.”
She drops her head.
“Come along,” I tell her, and at the apothecary table, I give her instructions for a potion. Her hands tremble at first, but steady as she continues.
“If he wakes, can we . . . not tell him I did this?” she asks.
“All our actions have consequences, Sonya. If we don’t face them, how will we learn?”
“Is that why you’re hiding here?”
Gosh. Smart girl.
I wince. “It’s also a good skill to learn when to hold one’s tongue.”