The House Of Gaian

he doesn’t get off our land.”
    “Breanna.” Falco sounded shocked, almost breathless.
    “Breanna!” Jean said, sounding equally shocked. “How can you say such a thing to our guest?”
    Mother’s tits! She’d forgotten about Jean. “I told you to get back to the house,” she said sternly. She didn’t like the calculating look on Lucian’s face, as if he were considering a filly he wanted to add to his stables.
    “I’m not a child, Breanna,” Jean snapped. “You can’t—”
    Breanna let power follow the path of temper. A wind suddenly whipped around Jean, turning the girl’s hair into a tangled mess and blowing her skirt up. Shrieking in dismay, Jean grabbed the front of the skirt, holding her arms down to prevent the men from seeing everything she wore—or didn’t wear—beneath her skirt.

    Breanna drew the power back into herself. The wind died as quickly as it had appeared. “Get back to the house, Jean. Now .”
    “You’ll pay for that, Breanna,” Jean said before running to the house.
    Breanna’s arms were getting tired from keeping the bowstring drawn back for so long. But she didn’t dare ease back, didn’t dare give a moment’s appearance of yielding in any way. Not when Lucian was watching Jean run back to the house.
    If the girl had stopped and talked with him in the woods, it would have taken so little effort on his part to convince Jean to go with him. A promised visit to Tir Alainn? Oh, Jean would have loved that. And then what? If he got her to Brightwood and then abandoned her, what would happen to her? What would happen to anyone living near that Old Place who had to deal with her? No matter how you turned that stone, there was a sharp edge that would cut someone. So she had to get him to leave and not come back.
    But how?
    “Listen to me, Fae Lord, and listen well,” Breanna said. “You aren’t welcome here. If you ever come back and try to persuade any of my kin to go with you—”
    “What will you do?” Lucian snapped. “Shoot me?”
    She heard a horse galloping toward her. A muffled sound. There was only one horse she knew that sounded like his hooves barely touched the ground, and that was Oakdancer. Which meant Liam was riding toward her. Fast.
    “You won’t shoot me,” Lucian said sneeringly. “Do no harm. Isn’t that your creed?”
    “That is our creed,” Breanna agreed. “But we make exceptions.”
    That startled him. Unnerved him. He regained control quickly when he saw Liam rein in and dismount.
    “This is no business of yours, human ,” Lucian said.
    Liam strode toward Breanna, stopping beside her. “I may be gentry, and I may be a baron, but”—as he yanked one of the arrows out of the ground and held it up, the top half of it burst into flames—“I’m also a Son of the House of Gaian, so any intruder on my sister’s land is my business.”
    “You threaten me, the Lord of Fire, with fire ?” Lucian laughed nastily.
    The man had a point. Liam’s gift, which had come down to him through his mother, had awakened just recently. He could draw power from the branch of fire easily enough, but he still wasn’t adept at controlling it or extinguishing what he’d created.
    Before this could turn into a pissing contest that would, most likely, burn down part of the Old Place if it didn’t kill someone outright, she lowered the bow, chose a new target, and released the arrow. Having an arrow go to ground between his feet startled Lucian.
    Breanna took that moment to snatch the burning arrow out of Liam’s hand. Using her own connection to the branch of fire, she banked the flames as she drove the arrow into the earth, doing it so smoothly that not so much as a blade of grass caught fire.
    When she straightened up, she noticed how warily Lucian watched her.

    Not so sure of yourself now, are you ? she thought. Well, she’d give him more reason to think twice about her.
    “The House of Gaian created Tir Alainn out of dreams and will. We created the shining roads that anchor that land to the human world. If you, or any other Fae, try to force or seduce or remove any of my kin from Willowsbrook, I will gather the rest of my kin, both here and in the Mother’s Hills, and we will turn Tir Alainn into a wasteland. And then we will close the shining roads and leave you there.”
    Lucian paled, staggered back a step. There was fear in his eyes now. “You couldn’t.”
    “Oh, but we could. As I will ...” Breanna let the words hang in the