The Pillars Of The World

bitterly complaining all the while that he wasn’
    t trying harder to wring a little bit more out of the land already wrung dry.
    He would give it another year. Then, with her or without her, he was going to go home and put his heart and his sweat into his own land.
    Placing his hands under his head, Neall stared at the ceiling.

    If Ashk had understood what it meant to be a poor relation in a gentry family, would she have still sent him away to live with his father’s people? Would she have considered the lessons she’d wanted him to learn worth the misery of knowing he was unwanted and unloved?
    It had been made clear to him over the past fifteen years that his father had been an ... embarrassment...
    a blot on the baron’s family tree—one the whole family had been happy to forget as soon as he was old enough to strike out on his own. He had been a child conceived during the Summer Moon, and his mother, Neall’s grandmother, had calmly refused to name one of the men in their village as the father, insisting that a Fae Lord had fathered her child. It was a common enough claim that was used if a young woman found herself with child after the Summer Moon and either didn’t want to marry the man who had sired it or found herself in the position of having the man deny any responsibility.
    Sometimes it was even true.
    Thinking about what the small man had said, he wondered if Ari would think of him differently if she knew the truth about him: that his paternal grandfather really had been a Fae Lord . . . and that his mother had been a witch.
     

 

     
     

Chapter Seven

 

     
     

     
    “Be warned,” Lyrra said, pouring another cup of tea when Dianna joined her at the table that held the fruit and cakes. “The mood is rather sour this morning.” She glanced toward the windows where Lucian stood, his back to the room. “Or brooding.”
    Dianna casually looked around the large room. There were several of these gathering places within the Clan house. The women looked bored, but Dianna suspected it was a mask to hide their resentment over the lack of available lovers last night. The men seemed . . . disappointed . . . and were nodding as they listened to Falco. Aiden quietly played his harp, not a song as much as notes flowing together—
    something he’d been doing lately whenever his thoughts troubled him. And Lucian . . .
    “What about you?” Lyrra asked. “Did you enjoy the Wild Hunt?”
    “What’s Falco puffed up about today?” Dianna asked, abruptly changing the subject. She didn’t want to talk about last night, or the cottage with its broken door, or that strange-yet-familiar magic she had sensed at the edge of the woods.
    Lyrra gave her a long look, sipped her tea, then shrugged. “Listen for yourself.”
    Dianna moved until she stood at the edge of the cushioned benches where the Fae sat listening to the Lord of the Hawks.
    “What you say is true, Falco,” one of the other men said, shaking his head sadly. “I remember the tales about succulent women who gave joy to a man. I saw nothing succulent about the females roaming around last night.”
    “Predators, that’s what they are,” Falco said. “Like those female insects that devour the male while he’s mating with her.” He shuddered. “No wonder the males have taken to hiding.”

    “Not all the males hide,” Aiden said with a smile. He plucked a chord, and sang, “When springtime comes, the maidens bloom. They ripen for the Summer Moon.” He pressed his hands against the harp strings to quiet them. “The Summer Moon has been the climax”—he grinned at the word—“for the Courting Moon for generations in Sylvalan. It’s a night when the female expresses the power of her sex freely. Often, she is choosing a mate that night. Sometimes it’s only for that night. Sometimes it’s the man who will be her husband. For many, the mating that night just seals a bargain their hearts have already made, and the pledge made at Midsummer is the formal agreement before witnesses.”
    “If the men were as willing as you say, they wouldn’t call it the Ensnarer’s Moon,” Falco argued.
    The humor cooled in Aiden’s blue eyes. “A man has the right to say yay or nay. If he says yay, he takes his chances. If nothing more than a mating comes from that night, they can both walk away and simply remember whatever pleasure they’d given each other. If there’s a child, then the man has made his choice of wife. That, too, is part