Heart Fortune

bedsponge. Her mother joined her HeartMate.

“Hey, baby,” T’Licorice said, stroking back a bouncy strand of her hair.

An idea wormed its way through Jace’s head. He lowered the bulb and cleared his throat. “Sir, Lady, do you have bonds with Glyssa? I can’t feel mine.” He made sure he didn’t sound pitiful.

The older Licorices joined hands, gazed at each other.

“I can feel her, faintly,” said her sister, probably at the end of the bed. It took Jace a minute to turn his head, he was using all his energy to stand and hold the oxygen bulb back up to his mouth. Her face showed dried tearstains and raw nostrils. As he watched, she pulled a softleaf from her large, formal sleeve and wiped her nose, then blew it.

“I have a bond with my youngest child,” said D’Licorice. “Again, it is faint, but it is there.” She blew out a breath. “She lives.”

By the time Jace got his head swiveled in their direction, T’Licorice had his lips pressed together, met Jace’s stare with torment in his eyes. “I have faith the bond will return as she gets stronger.” His sigh was heavy and he shook his head. “I took part in the emergency ritual. With the high priestess there we raised a great deal of Flair. We—I did not feel my daughter tap into that energy for your ordeal.”

The man’s gaze got bluer as his face paled. “You two—”

“Four,” Jace corrected.

T’Licorice dipped his head. “Four. You four did it all on your own. I wouldn’t have thought it possible.”

“We had to,” Jace said. He held out the bulb to Artemisia and his fingers barely shook. Progress? He hoped so. After the Healer took the breath support object, Jace leaned forward and kissed Glyssa on the mouth, swept his tongue over her lips to taste her, let her taste him, thrust the tip of it at her teeth. Her mouth opened and she inhaled audibly.

“Very good!” Artemisia said. The Healer stood by the chest pump, sharp gaze on Glyssa.

Jace straightened, took her limp, warm fingers in his left hand, stroked her cheek with his right hand. “Time to wake up, Glyssa, HeartMate.”

Her sister gasped a second before his lover did. The pump automatically stopped and removed itself from the bedsponge, trundling into the corner.

“Open your eyes, HeartMate mine, my Glyssa,” Jace said, then added, “People are waiting on you. I’m waiting on you.”

Breath sighing out on a long groan, Glyssa did, touched her tongue to her lips. Her mouth formed the word, “Dry.”

“She needs water here,” Jace said, altered his body so it looked like he leaned insouciantly against her bedsponge, not that he was propped against it.

Artemisia hurried up with a coarsely woven folded softleaf with a corner that looked like it held orange juice. Glyssa’s parents propped up her shoulders. Her eyes opened, but her gaze didn’t shift. Jace knew what that was all about.

“You’re really tired,” he said. “I am, too.”

Again he read her lips. “Lep-id?”

“The Fams are at the Ashes, being treated like we are.”

Her lips showed the tiniest trace of a pout.

“Glad to see you back,” her father said gruffly. He bent and kissed her forehead.

“Back,” whispered Glyssa.

Jace went weak, swallowed. “Move her over and help me up.”

Garret was there and T’Licorice, helping him, while Artemisia and Glyssa’s sister shifted her. Her wavery moan wrenched at him, but not enough that he stopped the action he wanted.

Even when he was helped onto his side to look at her, no embarrassment touched him. Only gratitude and triumph that they’d succeeded.

The door opened. “The Fams insisted we return so they can be with their companions,” announced the young Gwydion Ash. He settled Zem—Jace could smell his bird—close to Jace’s head.

A very thin and scruffy-haired Lepid was placed near Glyssa. Jace wondered if he looked so bad. He supposed so.

“HeartMate,” he said, and moved his hand to touch Glyssa. Then he fell asleep.

This time he thought they’d all wake up.

Forty-one

A week passed and Jace, Glyssa, and the Fams were recovering. The Elecampanes had shown up a few days after Jace’s and Glyssa’s ordeal and told them what had happened at camp—how they’d found Trago dead at the bottom of a cliff, and how they’d brought in a barracks for the Holly guards for the upcoming winter. They’d already closed the camp.

Raz and Del had brought Glyssa’s file no-times and the materials Jace had left in the workshop tent. He’d turned over the brooch to Del D’Elecampane and Lepid and the older fox, Shunuk, had had a session where Lepid had told Shunuk of his various caches that held antiquities.

As for the brooch, Del had consulted with the great jeweler, T’Ash, and the starship Nuada’s Sword and the piece was called a cameo and probably originated on old Earth, not the ship. A great find. They’d determined that the room Lepid and Jace had been trapped in had belonged to a female lieutenant who had survived the landing and the long trek to Druida City and had founded a GrandHouse that had since died out.

The AllCouncils of Celta had voted to establish a museum for the Lugh’s Spear artifacts, hired Antenn Blackthorn-Moss to design it, and had purchased the cameo for an outrageous sum that put a good amount in each member of the crew’s pockets. As Jace had speculated, the cameo had sparked a new fashion craze. Laev T’Hawthorn had been the first to commission one of Camellia from T’Ash.

Glyssa’s friends were often in D’Licorice Residence and soon Jace considered them like younger sisters, sometimes annoying, but often just thinking of the Family he’d acquired filled him with warmth. So had meeting with a banker regarding the middling inheritance his father had left.

That afternoon Jace sat with Glyssa on his lap in the main library of D’Licorice Residence, being “debriefed.” Both Laev and Camellia Hawthorn were there, along with a bunch of lords and ladies and the Elecampanes.

A large Fam bed was set near the fire and held a small fox curled around a hawkcel, Lepid and Zem.

“Glyssa thinks my Flair manifests as passive luck, especially with regard to near-fatal events,” Jace said.

“Luck!” Del D’Elecampane frowned at him.

“Hmm,” Laev said, with a gleam in his eye. “Maybe I should take you on as a partner in a couple of my riskier ventures.” He turned his purple gaze to Del. “Face it, if any other of your staff had gone down into that ship and died—something we think was masterminded by a Druidan noble working with the late and unlamented Trago, and we will find him or her—this project would be considered cursed for generations.”

He waved a hand. “There are plenty of other interesting expeditions and explorations and places nearer to Druida City and Gael City to build communities that people would have preferred to go to instead of the excavation of Lugh’s Spear.”

“But Jace went down, and he’s HeartBound with Glyssa,” Camellia pointed out. “And she is a determined person . . . and Trago could have been a whole lot more efficient with those explosives of his. He didn’t really want to kill anyone except Jace, and you had no casualties in camp.”

“That’s because after the first explosion, everyone scattered into the countryside except the guards,” Raz said. He squeezed Del’s hand. “Good call on those Hollys. They all survived, too, and I don’t think Trago would have cared if one or more had died.”

“The bottom line is that the project is still viable, you have a very tight camp community that is motivated to