The Invisible Ring

thoroughly shaken. Brock looked grim.
    “What happened?” Brock asked.
    “Later,” Jared snapped, shoving between them to reach the gelding.
    The trip back to the wagon was too swift to cool his temper or soothe the fear that still jangled his nerves.
    Handing the gelding’s reins to Tomas, Jared pulled Lia out of the saddle. The other three children clustered around the roan mare, watching him. “Stay here,” Jared told them. Not that he thought any of them would be anxious to be in a small, enclosed space with two snarling witches who had just torn into each other. Hell’s fire, he didn’t want to be inside the wagon with them either.
    Ignoring Lia’s muttered protests when he picked her up, Jared marched into the wagon and dumped her on the bench opposite Thera. Blaed stood nearby, blocking any escape through the shutters that opened onto the driving seat, his muscles quivering with the effort of keeping his own anger in check.
    Rubbing his teeth-marked hand, Jared leaned against the door and started putting shields around the wagon—physical shield, psychic shield, aural shield. No one was going to interrupt or overhear this little discussion.
    Blaed gave him a look that said, what do we do now ?
    The women weren’t paying any attention to him or Blaed. A good thing, too, since he had no idea what to do next.
    Still breathing hard, Thera dabbed at her lip, then stared at the fresh blood on the back of her hand. “Hell’s fire, Lia, you split my lip.”
    Lia pushed her hair away from her face, and said contritely, “I’m sorry.” She studied all the strands of hair now tangled around her fingers. Her eyes narrowed. “Then again, maybe I’m not. Did you have to rip so much hair out?”
    “Wasn’t deliberate. My arm jerked when someone who didn’t have enough sense to get out of the way fell on us.”
    “Oh.”
    They looked at him.
    Jared gave them a cold, hard stare.
    Their eyes dropped to the hand he was still rubbing. Both of them shifted on the benches, putting them a little closer to Blaed.
    “We’re sorry we bit you, Jared,” Lia said meekly, glancing at him through her lashes.
    “You’re not the only one who got hurt,” Thera complained, rubbing her shin. “I slammed my leg into something miserably hard.”
    “Yes,” Jared said coldly. “Mine.”
    “Oh.” After an awkward silence, Thera huffed and pushed her hair back. “Well, I doubt anyone’s going to have the balls to ask questions about what happened.”
    Blaed growled.
    “Except you two,” Thera added, regarding Blaed with respectful wariness. “Which was the point.”
    Blaed’s muscles seemed to swell with the anger he was holding in.
    Jared’s eyes narrowed. Where was the fury that had made Thera and Lia tear into each other? Their tempers couldn’t have cooled that fast. But they were sitting there like friends who had had a minor spat instead of ...
    “You did this deliberately,” Jared said slowly. “You scared the shit out of all of us deliberately.”
    “Of course,” Lia replied, looking surprised. “Thera and I realized we had to shift everyone’s attention away from the explosion so that no one would ask about it until we had time to figure out what happened.”
    “You lied to us.”
    “We didn’t lie ,” Lia said indignantly. “We were pretending to have a fight in order to create a distraction.”
    His mind understood the distinction between “lie” and “pretend,” but his emotions weren’t interested in being that picky.
    “The fight did provide a reason for the explosion,” Thera said.
    “And we used Craft to make sure our voices carried far enough so that everyone in the group would know,” Lia added.
    Jared forced his teeth apart before he cracked some of them. A few seconds. That’s all it had taken for one of them to send a thought to the other. Something like, We have to do something to keep the males from asking questions . “You planned this in the time it took for you to get to your feet, but you couldn’t take a few more seconds to send a communication thread to Blaed and me to tell us ?” He smacked a fist against the door, causing both women to jump. “You just started flinging out insults and tearing into each other without a thought about how we’d feel. You used Craft so that everyone could hear—”
    The air in the wagon chilled. He saw the shift in their eyes. They’d been willing to placate him up to a point, and he’d reached it.
    “You forget yourself, Warlord,” Lia said coldly. “A Queen doesn’t have to explain herself to any