She stood abruptly. “Very well. I shall no’ detain you from your very important work. Let me just leave you with the thought that you’re no’ likely to come face to face with your intended while you’re shut up in here with Grieve. Because one thin’ I’m certain of, she ain’t him.”
He laughed. “I can no’ believe you said ‘ain’t’.”
“Got your attention, did it?”
“You always have my attention.”
“What a lovely liar you are, my love.” She turned to go.
“Like your hair that way, Mum.”
“Shut it,” she said without turning back.
“And that would be ‘she ain’t he’, no’ ‘she ain’t him.” he yelled after her and heard the muted tones of the bawdy laugh she reserved for when she was at home with family. She was already at the end of the long polished hallway, moving quickly with the resumed purpose of a woman who has a royal schedule to keep.
It had been over a year since Duff had first seen Aelsong Hawking sitting with her back to him in a pub in the shadow of the Balmoral Hotel. Since then he’d only seen her twice and, of those three encounters, had only been alone with her once.
He’d given Elora Laiken a chance to talk to her hothead husband and get him to lay some groundwork, or whatever her plan had been. He’d given the times a chance to change and, while some of the younger fae were definitely making noises that they didn’t really see the point of the hostilities, there was no catalyst. No motivation sufficient enough for either side to move off dead center. There wasn’t even a reason to talk about it.
The following day Duff had a mid-morning appointment with the Director of Communications. On the way back into his office he stopped to spin the giant globe that sat between the window and fireplace in the outer office occupied by Grieve. It was one of those objects that regularly failed to capture notice because of the combination of its familiarity and lack of use. On that particular day, however, something about the blues, greens, and yellows was captivating.
As the sphere rotated deosil, his eye was naturally drawn to Scotia, sitting atop the islands of Britannia to the north. Looking down at the top of the world, from his vantage point, he watched as the tundra of the cossacklands seemed to go on forever before coming to a small break where the Bering Sea separated continents. As rotation continued, he was reminded again of how drastically a flat map distorted the representation of size and space relationships on the Earth’s surface and that Canada’s land mass was immense.
As he was thinking just that, he reached out and stopped the globe with his large fingers under the word ‘Canada’. His eyes moved to the right. He knew that people often talked about the severe Canadian cold, but Edinburgh, the city in which he was standing, was further north than every major Canadian city. Cold was not a Scotia fae’s biggest problem.
He spoke to Grieve without turning around, allowing his eyes to continue to move over the uppermost band of North America: Newfoundland, Quebec, Ontario.
“Grieve.”
“Sir.”
“What do I have for the rest of the day?”
“Lunch at the Ministry of Finance. The king said to mark that one mandatory. The Royal Mile Tourist Commission will be here at three to petition you for permissions to use various national monuments for the stagin’ of events.”
“Hmmm.”
“Photographs with royal scholarship recipients at four.”
“How long will that take?” Grieve blinked as if he didn’t fully grasp the question. “Without the usual dawdlin’.”
“Without dawdlin’, perhaps fifteen minutes.”
“So done at four-fifteen then?”
“Aye.”
“Call Pey and tell him I need to see him today. In a professional capacity. My office. His office. Dinner. I do no’ care. Tell him I’m buyin’ and tell him I’ll no’ be takin’ no for an answer.”
“May I ask how long an appointment you’ll be requirin’, your Highness?”
“I need a half hour for business, but would linger over dinner with port and cigars after if he has time. If ‘tis to be dinner, reserve my table in the wine cellar at the club where we could talk without bein’ overheard. Oh, and, Grieve…”
“Aye, your Highness?”
“Ah, never mind.”
A couple of minutes later Grieve knocked lightly on Duff’s office door and poked his head in.