“Welp, it’s official. The boss’s dead.”

“She’s not dead. For fuck’s sake, Lingon, she was snoring when we walked in.”

“T’was but a death rattle, dear brother.”

The voices, one thin and nasally and the other deep and guttural, roused Oralia from her dreamless sleep. Her heavy eyelids eased open to find two human men crouched on either side of her. Regrettably, she recognized the pair instantly.

“Not dead,” Mul grunted at his brother. “Told you.”

Lingon peered closer, brushing a stray lock of long brown hair from his narrow face. “How do we know this isn’t one of those living dead situations?”

“Because she’s not dead! You want me to kill her to prove it to you?”

Oralia held up her hand, wincing at the effort it took to stay Mul from drawing his sword. “That will not be necessary, thank you.”

Lingon narrowed his eyes at her. “Just what an undead would say.”

Clenching her jaw, Oralia heaved forward into a sitting position. Pain lanced up her spine and erupted within her aching skull like a lightning strike, spawning a cloud of blinding spots that blinked along the edges of her vision. A crippling wave of nausea followed. Oralia closed her eyes and breathed through it. It was only after the tightness in chest and abdomen had eased that she regained the ability to form words.

“Where are the others?”

“Still tearing the forest apart looking for you, probably.” Mul straightened his posture. He hooked his thumbs into his belt loops and swaggered a few steps away, eyeing the yellow walls in search of something worthy of his attention. “Me an’ Dingleberry were actually not far from here. We’d found a hidden trail and were following it when this mouthy little faun popped up out of nowhere, insisting she knew your whereabouts.”

Oralia found that scenario highly unlikely for several reasons. One, as Briony possessed a fully functioning sense of self-preservation, she would have known not to approach either Mul or Lingon outright. Secondly, of the many, many qualities the Stoneclaw brothers lacked, a deep distrust of strangers was not one of them. The pair would have never blindly followed a strange faun into the woods.

She clicked her tusks softly and sighed. “None of that is true.”

“That bit about us being close by was!”

“We did actually find a secret trail,” Lingon insisted. His reluctant expression implied there was more to the story than either of them were letting on. Fortunately it took only a few seconds of uninterrupted eye contact to coax the rest of it out of him. Lingon hurried through it, hopeful, perhaps, that if he blurted it out all in one breath, Oralia would only catch half of what was said.

“And then we came across this giant tree and I bet Mul I could climb to the top faster than him. While I was proving my mettle, a faun came up out of nowhere and stole our packs. We raced after her and it wasn’t until we got to this here cottage that the little thief announced that you were inside and that if we didn’t believe her, we could go see for ourselves.” He dipped forward, small chest heaving as he gulped in a giant breath of air. “There, happy?”

Mul nodded in agreement. “The faun also said not to steal her shit before disappearing back into the woods. Which seems a little hypocritical, if you ask me.”

Oralia mentally sifted through the wealth over-information for the important pieces. Her efforts produced only one. “Briony is not here?”

“Fetching the others, likely,” Mul said, scratching the underside of his beard. “We broke up into groups for the search. Most of them went in the other direction.”

“The whole camp was worried sick about you.” Lingon moved to the red brick fireplace and busied himself with rifling through the trinkets carefully arranged along the mantle. “Not me an’ Mul, obviously. But everyone else’s been tearing the woods apart trying to figure out what happened to you after the bandit attack.”

The mention of the attack sparked Oralia’s memory. She lifted her head from where it was buried between her hands. “The bandits–”

Mul cut her off with a flippant flick of his wrist. “Didn’t stand a chance. Thanks to Kalihn’s screaming, we heard them coming a mile away. It wasn’t until after we made short work of them that we realized you were still missing. And then we saw the smoke in the distance, but when we got there, all that was left was charred remains.”

While Mul’s brief explanation answered most of her questions, it inadvertently sparked several more. Most notably, whether or not the added stress had caused Sascha’s hair to go gray. Perhaps it had simply skipped that step and fallen out entirely. Her fuckmate worried excessively over even the most mundane of things. Oralia hated to imagine what sort of toll an actual crisis was taking upon him.

“And Sascha?” she asked timidly.

“In a fucking mood,” Mul replied.

Lingon spun around on his heel, throwing his slender arms out at his sides. “He kept going, morning, noon, and night, insisting he wouldn’t stop until he found you. And of course all the rest of us felt bad, so we kept going too. Sascha refused all breaks. Wouldn’t even stop to catch his breath. You should ‘ave seen the look he gave me when I politely asked him to stop and make me a sandwich!”

Oralia was spared from replying by a sudden, unexpected tap at the window. She twisted her head in the direction of the noise, squinting through the barrage of sunlight filtering in from outside. “What is that?”

Both brothers acted strangely indifferent to the ominous tapping. Together, they answered as one, “Nothing.”

“It is not nothing.” In addition to the increasingly loud tapping, Oralia swore she heard the harsh, rattling croak of a raven. “There is a bird outside clearly trying to garner your attention.”

Now that she thought of it, this was not the first time either. While Rasp may have been the only one of his people capable of understanding the ravens, it did not stop the ravens from communicating with the rest of the family. Trying to communicate, anyway, as Mul and Lingon obviously had no intention of listening.

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Lingon stormed across the room and threw the window open. “Go away! We already told you, we’re not interested!”

The raven fluttered past him and circled the room twice before coming to rest on the green settee. Ruffling its feathery head, the raven slung open its cavernous maw and argued back just as loudly.

Oralia’s sharp eyes spied something fastened to its spindly leg. “It appears to have a message for you.”

Mul dropped onto the opposite side of the couch with a huff, glaring daggers at the noisy bird. “Yeah, we know. And I guarantee you it says the same thing as the last three.”

Lingon paced in front of the couch, pointing his finger at the raven as he passed. “And you can tell that ugly fuck that our answer is still no. We’re not coming home. He can have the throne. We don’t bloody care!”

Throne? The use of the word had Oralia’s thoughts churning. She strung the bits and pieces of information together until it produced something, if not cohesive, then as close to it as she was going to get. “Lingon,” Oralia said, taking care to keep her voice level. He already looked like a spooked horse prepared to bolt. There was no sense in sending him dashing out the front door prematurely. At least not until her curiosity was satiated. “Has Bil been trying to reach you this entire time?”

“What?” Lingon scoffed, still nervously pacing. “No. Of course not.”

Bil Stoneclaw, the eldest and possibly most competent of the royal siblings, had vacated Mount Hook prior to the battle. With their home destroyed and their warring neighbors in an active scramble to seize territory, Bil and the Stoneclaw clan had seemingly vanished without a trace. Until now, Oralia had been under the impression that Mul and Lingon had hung around simply because they didn’t know where to go next.

Bil, evidently, was not the only Stoneclaw to have gone into hiding. “How long has your brother been trying to reach you?”

Lingon had the expression of a child caught pinching sweets from the kitchen. Stifling a groan, he collapsed onto the ancient settee beside Mul, uncaring of the fact that he nearly squashed the raven messenger doing so. Lingon ran a lithe hand over his face and groaned. “I don’t know. A few weeks maybe? A month, tops.”

“I do not understand,” Oralia said. “You told me you did not know the location of your clan. I thought it was the only reason keeping you here. When the truth is, not only do you know where Bil is, but he has been summoning you home, and you could have been well on your way a month ago?”

“Uh, yeah.” Lingon’s face reddened as his gaze dropped sheepishly to his feet. “The thing is we don’t want to go home.”

“Come again?”

“We don’t want to go home, alright? This is the most adventure Mul an’ I have ever had and the thought of going back is just…well, horrible.”

Mul nudged Lingon in the ribs with his elbow, murmuring, “Tell her about the banana.”

Lingon elbowed him back twice as hard. “I don’t want to tell her about the stupid banana!”

“We tried a banana for the first time back in Adderwood.” Mul grudgingly took on the task himself. His eyes were wide and his expression was unusually sincere. “I didn’t even know such a thing existed. It was the best thing I’d ever tasted. I ain’t ever going to see another one of those if I go back to the Iron Ridge.”

Oralia’s tone was woefully unimpressed. “A banana?”

“It’s not just the banana.” Lingon tried to explain their reasoning better which, for whatever reason, involved an excessive amount of hand gestures. He grasped at the air with his fingers as if plucking the answer from nothing. “The banana is just, I don’t know, symbolic of everything we haven’t tried, I guess?”

Oralia wished there was someone else present with whom she could exchange confused glances. Her only option was the raven, however. And she was not quite prepared to stoop to that level of desperation yet. “If you stay, you forfeit your claim to the throne. Neither of you can lead your people if you are not with them.”

“Yeah, we considered that.” Lingon continued talking to his shoes, unwilling to meet Oralia’s unflinching stare. “Bil can have it. It’s better he doesn’t know what he’s missing, else you’d have one more of us tagging along after you. Seven realms, probably a whole clan.”

“I do not want a clan behind me! Not even one as formidable as the Stoneclaws.” Oralia’s unexpected outburst was as much of a surprise to the brothers as it was to her. “This is only temporary. I have no intention of traveling the land and freeing each individual territory from realm control one after the other.”

Mul nudged Lingon with his shoulder as a grin slowly pulled across his bearded face. “Temporary, right.”

The younger brother nodded his agreement. “She’s got the fever something fierce.”

Although Oralia understood the majority of the words that came from the pair, their meaning was often lost in translation. This case being no exception. Oralia attempted to massage the growing ache from her temples. “I am not ill.”

“Martyr fever,” Lingon clarified. “You can act detached all you want, but it’s as plain as the tusks on your face. You could have been free of this mess months ago, but each time you were given the chance to step back, you plunged right back in. This ‘temporary’ schtick ain’t fooling anyone but yourself.”

“I…” Her voice trailed as she could not outright deny it. If it was this obvious to these two, it meant everyone else already knew as well. Everyone but herself, of course. That seemed to be the nature of how this sort of thing worked. Oralia was always the last to fully understand her own motivations. “I do not wish to talk about it.”

Although the pair themselves said nothing, the smug delight on their faces assured Oralia that her days of secrecy were long gone. Somewhere along the line she’d become completely transparent. Not that she was about to open that up for discussion either. “You are the subject here, not me,” she said sternly. “Am I to understand that the two of you would rather follow me, to your own detriment, possibly death, than return to your people?”

“Why is this so hard for you to wrap your head around?” Mul’s eyebrows shot high on his head, as though offended by the very question itself. “Our lives were utterly boring before all this. All we did was drink and fight each other.”

“That is all you do now,” Oralia reminded him.

“Not true. We fight other people now too.”

“And make love afterwards.” Lingon added, quickly, “With other folks, not each other. Or the dead bodies.”

“So glad you clarified that last part,” Mul told him.

“Shut up!”

Oralia had always kept strange company. She supposed this wasn’t any stranger than her previous team. More annoying, perhaps. On some level she almost felt honored. To have not one, but two capable Stoneclaw warriors in her personal company spoke volumes. Their impact probably would have been more meaningful could she convince them to let their reputation speak for itself, versus opening their mouths to let every thought pass through unchecked. And yet, mouthiness aside, the pair would be imperative to the trials that loomed ahead. Possibly enough to swing the fate of Lonebrook in her favor.

Lingon lifted his head curiously. “Anybody else feel the ground shaking?”

Mul rose and hurried across the room, poking his head out the open window to get a better view. “Looks like the mouthy faun found the rest of the party, after all.” He glanced over his shoulder at Oralia and waggled his eyebrows in a manner that begged to be slapped. “Your beau looks to be in an awful hurry. Do you think he’ll slow down or just snap the door off its hinges on his way in?”

Oralia rose onto stiff legs and reached for Mul, using him as a means to keep her balance. He didn’t offer much in the way of support, but at least he didn’t shrug her off. Every step was excruciating. Oralia stubbornly persisted, shuffling one foot in front of the other, knowing speed was of the essence.

“If you want to sleep with a roof over your head tonight,” she said, gasping as a surge of pins and needles moved down her legs, “get me outside before he knocks the whole fucking house down.”