“And you couldn’t have told me? You couldn’t have said anything?”
He shushed me, which didn’t do much for my temper. And then plucked a guard I hadn’t seen from around the side of the tent and handed him off to the witches. Before turning back to me, looking exasperated.
“There were too many ears around, and my disguise was wearing thin. The Green Fey are generally tolerant toward half-breeds, but with tensions this high—”
“So you left me with a slaver—”
“For a short time. So I would know where you were. So you wouldn’t be taken as plunder, or end up in one of those damn pens—”
“I can take care of myself!”
“Yes,” he said, suddenly intent. “But so can the fey, and there were a good many more of them than you, plus every slaver in the damn country scouring the hills for any woman they could find!”
“So you kidnapped me to keep me from being kidnapped?”
He started to say something, then thought about it for a second. “Essentially.”
“That would only make sense to you,” I said sourly.
“You two are . . . friends?” the blonde asked, looking up, as the limp fey was dumped into a barrel.
“Friends,” Pritkin agreed.
“It’s complicated,” I said, at the same time.
He frowned.
I sighed.
“Friends,” I agreed.
“It’s complicated,” he said, simultaneously.
She blinked.
The redhead laughed. “I used to have one of those sorts of ‘friends.’”
“It’s not like that,” I said.
“I’m working on it,” Pritkin told her.
I frowned. “Working on what?”
“What?”
“Which question were you answering?”
“There was a question?”
I blinked. The redhead laughed. The blonde looked like she was wondering how she’d ended up on a rescue mission with the Three Stooges.
“Is it much farther?” she asked. “To where they’re keeping the leaders?”
“No, just there.” Pritkin nodded toward a nearby pavilion.
And that was the only word for it. The tents in the back half of the camp had started out fairly basic, with a central pole and a dark weave. But they kept getting fancier the farther we got from the cattle pens. The air was cleaner back here, and the stars sparkled above white, multiroom mansions with gold designs on the canvas and bright pennants flying overhead. And this one was the biggest I’d seen, truly a home fit for a queen.
Only apparently, it wasn’t.