are you pissed at me?” he asked, genuinely taken aback. Gendra never got mad at him—unlike everyone else—and was always staunchly on his team.
“I’m not.” She sighed, relenting and putting a hand on his arm. “You know I love you like a brother, Rhy, but it would be nice if, for once in your life, you thought about how someone else feels.” She walked away, leaving him gaping after her.
“Burrrrnnn,” Zeph whispered in his ear as she leaned past him to toss her paper in the fire.
He narrowed his eyes at her. “What did you tell Gendra?”
“Me?” Zeph patted his cheek. “Not a thing. Go write something down so Astar will let us leave the Room of Doom, all right?”
Beyond irritated, he stalked back to the table and dashed off one word—using a Tala rune just in case any of them peeked—crumpled it in his fist, and threw it in the fire. The flames caught it, burning slowly as the pungent smoke coiled up. The runes seemed to glow, taunting him.
“Put a lot of thought into that, did you?” Salena teased as she tossed her crumpled paper into the fire.
“What is this, everyone yell at Rhyian night?” he grumbled, and Salena paused, giving him a considering look. He’d forgotten about that, how she couldn’t let a question go unanswered. She took every one seriously, and he’d used to love to tease her by asking questions she couldn’t possibly know the answer to, just to wind her up.
But this time she did. She really had changed. “Just play along for a bit longer, and then you can be free,” she suggested.
“Not hardly,” he replied in a sour tone. “I’m trapped in mossbackland until dawn. On the longest night of the year.”
“I’m sure you’ll find a way to cope,” she replied, walking with him back toward the table. “You can drown your sorrows in one—or several—of the hundreds of women out there waiting to enjoy the longest night with you.”
He caught her hand again, partly to stop her harsh words—all the harsher because he knew he deserved them—and partly because he needed to touch her again. The glide of her clever fingers against his skin reminded him of so much. Why should he want to forget the past? It had been far better than his recent present. Salena raised an inquiring brow at him, and he released her hand before he made some declaration in the impulse of the moment that his future self would never be able to live up to.
“Do we get to drink now?” he asked Astar somewhat desperately, gazing at his temptingly full glass of mjed.
“Not yet.” Astar gave him a stern look. “Now we write down a wish, hope, or promise for the future, to keep or to give to someone else.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Rhy sighed. “I remember that part.” Catching the edge of Gendra’s glare, he pasted on a happy smile. “This is so fun and meaningful!”
“Oh, for Moranu’s sake,” Gendra muttered, writing rapidly.
“You could wish for me to be a better person,” he murmured to her, hoping to make her smile.
“I’m not wasting any more of my wishes on you, Rhy,” she replied crisply.
“I’m done,” Zeph declared, folding her paper and making a show of tucking it in Astar’s breast pocket, giving him a sultry look as she did it. Salena and Gendra exchanged looks, and Rhy wondered if he’d missed this development. Stella looked on calmly, her mind possibly somewhere else, as it often was.
Astar, always well-mannered, took Zeph’s hand and bent over it. “Thank you, my lady. Should I read it now?”
Gendra groaned under her breath, and Salena closed her eyes as if in pain. Zeph smiled, bringing Astar’s hand close enough to brush it with her breast. “Later,” she said as Astar jerked and turned bright red, “when we’re alone.”
“Shall we toast?” Gendra said, much too loudly, and everyone seized on the moment.
“Rhyian isn’t done with his,” Salena said, giving him a lethal smile.
“Yes, I am,” he told her, writing down another single rune, then folding the paper and putting it in his pocket. He picked up his glass and looked to Astar. “What is the toast, Your Highness, Crown Prince Astar?”
As Rhy had hoped, the words shook Astar out of his flustered embarrassment. Salena flashed him a grateful look, and Gendra squeezed his forearm. There. A hero to his favorite women in the world. Who said he was a total shit?
Astar lifted his glass, holding it up, once again secure as leader