His jaw set stubbornly. “I’m good.”
I straightened up and squared off with him. “Go to bed,” I growled. Power whipped through the shed. My animal turned over within me and stirred.
His muscles flared. He swayed a little, his eyes hard. I pulled more power, my animal pumping it out for me.
“Now,” I said in a firm voice.
He took a step back that he clearly didn’t want to, judging by the jerkiness of his movements. Humor filled the bond.
“As you command,” he finally said, turning for the door. “And Finley?” He stopped and glanced back. “Please join me this evening before I leave. I’d like to show you the library. You’ve been reading, and I have not. I miss it.”
I pushed the hair out of my face. “Okay.”
“And get those clothes sorted out. We need to get the villages up to speed so you can do…other things.”
I frowned at him, but he left.
What other things?
By late afternoon, I’d made all the elixir starter, as I was calling it, that I could with the leaves we’d dried and harvested. We’d need to harvest more. The problem was, because I wasn’t directly seeing the effects of the elixir, I had no idea if the one harvested at dawn worked any better than the usual. Though I supposed it didn’t matter. It was the crowded plant that would provide the cure, if there was one. The slight difference in potency of the drying times wouldn’t make enough difference to matter.
I walked to the wall around the queen’s garden and hopped up. I knew how to get there through the castle, and Nyfain had given me a key to access the room, but I was dirty and tired and didn’t want to go through the trouble of traipsing through the castle when it was faster to reach it from outside.
At the top of the wall, I paused before walking around the side. A crew of three were working diligently, Hadriel the only one I recognized. The blackberry bushes were long gone, the vines and brambles had been cleared away, and now they were weeding and tilling the ground.
“Wow, you guys.” I jumped down, marveling at the transformation. “This is great!”
Hadriel looked up from his patch of tilled dirt, his face red and sweat streaming down his temples. “I haven’t worked this hard in…” He puckered his lips in thought.
“That’s the reason you’re still alive,” a grizzled older man said. White whiskers hung down the sides of his brown, wrinkled face. He wore a faded denim shirt and dirt-stained trousers.
“This coming from the only gardener still going, Jawson?” Hadriel drawled. “I wonder how we can possibly explain that? Mediocrity, maybe? Hmm…” He tapped his chin in a pantomime of deep thought.
“Because I know how to keep my head down, that’s why. I don’t parade around the castle in nothing but a fancy thong screaming about goddess knows what.”
“Ah, you noticed how fancy my thongs are.” He waggled his eyebrows. “Caught you looking…”
“I never did see a butler who does so little butlerin’,” a ruddy-faced man said. He wore a wide sun hat punched through with holes in the bill. I wasn’t quite sure what the point of it was. “We’re gettin’ real close, miss.” He straightened up with a wince and put a hand to his hip. He didn’t look a day over thirty-five, but he stood like he was eighty years old, stooped a little, somewhat crooked.
“That’s Gyril, the horse master.” Hadriel hooked a thumb the man’s way. “He’s gotten thrown a few times. No one wonders why he’s still alive.”
“The horses are all spooked about the curse, that’s all.”
“What were they before the curse, then?”
“Awful cunts,” Gyril grumbled.
I hazarded a guess that he hadn’t been the horse master before the curse. He’d probably stepped into the role because everyone else was gone. That seemed to be the situation around here.
I wandered around, getting a feel for the space. The rosebushes lining the back were still wild, big, thick bushes with shoots every which way. All the other flowers and plants had long since died.
“I have a map of what it looked like back before the queen died,” Jawson said, leaning on his shovel. “Don’t know if that would be any help to ya.”
“It would, actually, thanks. What do we do for seeds and things around here?”
“I have a store of seeds up at the shed. The master can get some starter plants from the wood or the other villages if you need those,” Jawson answered. “We don’t have a nursery anymore. Everything kinda fell apart when the curse came and the king died.”
That was understandable. I nodded, turning toward the queen’s quarters.
“Wait, love.” Hadriel followed me.
“You should call her miss, milady, or Miss Finley,” Gyril said.
“You should learn not to stand behind temperamental horses and scratch your nuts. Besides, you don’t know what we’ve been through. We’re on friendship terms now.”