"Oh, I sure did," I said with satisfaction, plopping back down into my chair as Dain looked at me with an honest-to-God smile, a fond expression I wasn't sure he knew he was making. "I went straight back up that crane, a solid fifteen or twenty feet, and they could not get me to come down. Total blubbering mess. Marcus had to climb up after me, and I kept going higher, like a kitten in a tree. I knew he was going to make me come down, but I kept seeing whiskers down there, so I had to keep away from him."

"How long did it take?" Dain asked. "They must have gotten you down somehow."

"Solid hour and a half," I replied with a grin. "In the end Marcus had to literally hold my hand while we went down, and carry me out of the construction area while I had my eyes squeezed closed. As you might imagine, I did not live that down, ever. Rat jokes for days."

"Mm," Dain said, lips twitching. "I suppose that was a good enough tale to allow Zhiolas to tell another."

"Your graciousness is appreciated," Zhiolas said, smiling. He downed his own flute of champagne, then glanced over at Dain with a sly expression in his eyes. "In the first year of the war with Raven Court, we were in this little village called Pierlon..."

I settled in to listen, enjoying the camaraderie and delighted by the chance to learn more about Dain from someone who clearly enjoyed his company a great deal.

We were still in the garden when night fell, though the rest of the wedding-goers had made their escape hours beforehand. As an unexpected benefit of hanging around the crown prince, nobody had absconded with the food, and nobody attempted to hasten us out of the garden so they could clean up. I'd snacked my way through the dinner hour, as had the two men, so none of us felt any particular drive to go off in search of a meal.

Dain had his face in his hands with his wing-hands over his ears as Zhiolas worked his way through a story about monster-hunting that involved Dain getting swallowed whole by a weird giant toad-lizard thing. I swung my legs gleefully, listening.

"So, of course, we all knew better than to get anywhere near the horrid thing," Zhiolas said, putting his face into an expression of mock-disgust. "I fully expected my prince to gut it from inside and come out gory and pissed-off."

"But he didn't?" I asked, grinning.

"It turns out that carkrana have a great defense for swallowing unpleasantly angry princes," he said, with as much glee as me. "They simply shit them out, explosively, along with about half their internal organs, right into a boulder."