“Through the service fairs?” Lucivar asked, wondering about Jaenelle’s hesitation. The twice-yearly service fairs in Little Terreille had been set up to deal with the flood of Terreilleans fleeing the cruelty of the courts and Territories under the influence of Dorothea SaDiablo, the High Priestess of Hayll.

“No,” Jaenelle replied. “I brought her in.”

What in the name of Hell were you doing in Terreille? He knew better than to ask her that question. He’d just visit the Hall in the next day or two and ask his father.

“She may be . . . content . . . where she is,” Jaenelle said, “but I can ask if she’d consider being your housekeeper.”

“All right.”

Jaenelle nodded. “I can—” Her mood turned grumpy, and she rolled her eyes. “No, I can’t. I have to do Queenly things tomorrow, and there’s a formal . . . something . . . late in the evening.”

Lucivar grinned. “Something that requires getting all polished and dressed up?” Jaenelle hated fancy dress.

“Yes,” she growled, “it’s dress-up. But there will be time to come back here after your usual dinner hour.”

“That won’t give you much time to get ready.”

The look she gave him could have frozen blood.

“I could still see if there are hearth witches among the dragons,” Jaenelle said.

Feeling more relaxed than he’d felt all week, Lucivar stood, stretched, then bent over to give Jaenelle a kiss on the top of her head. “Don’t threaten your older brother,” he scolded mildly. “Especially after I took the brunt of Father’s snarling over the raft.”

Wincing, she looked up at him. “Was it bad? He just kept gritting his teeth when he saw me and refused to talk about it.”

Lucivar straightened up and leaned against one of the porch’s supporting posts. “No, it wasn’t bad. He was actually quite calm about our making a raft out of what he called ‘twigs and kindling’—”

“Which is what it was,” Jaenelle said.

“—and holding the whole thing together with nothing but Craft.”

“Which is what we did.”

“And he said he understood why we felt we needed to be standing on the thing when we put it in the river to test it.”

“How else were we supposed to find out if it worked?”

“He even managed to sound calm about our not abandoning the raft after we hit the rapids. And he didn’t yell about our going over the waterfall.” Lucivar scratched his neck. “Although, I still haven’t figured out how he could speak so clearly with his teeth clenched like that.”

Jaenelle leaned forward. “You didn’t tell him the raft started breaking up before we went over the waterfall, did you?”

“Do I look like a fool?” Lucivar demanded. “Of course I didn’t tell him that. Besides, what threatened to pop a few blood vessels was his finding out that we went back to the starting point and did the whole thing all over again.”