Page 50 of The Thirteenth Child
But it was one of his favorite mortal traditions, so I always played along.
“Kieron was planning on taking me for a birthday picnic,” I said, watching him begin to cut into the top tier of cake. The inside was marbled pink and yellow. “Strawberry?” I guessed, accepting the plate.
He grinned wide, pleased to have fooled me. “With all the sugared berries, you’d think so, wouldn’t you?”
“What is it, then?” I asked, poking at the sponge. I waited for him to serve himself before taking a bite.
“Dragon fruit,” he intoned, his eyes fixed on me as he motioned for me to try it.
“Oh,” I mused after swallowing a mouthful. Its sweetness lingered too long, and I wished there was something other than lemonade to wash it down with. “I thought it would be spiced, for some reason.”
“Spiced?” Merrick asked, then took a large bite. He chewed with relish. “I have. I have outdone myself.”
“Because of the dragon, I guess,” I said, shoveling another pieceonto my fork as though I were going to eat it. “Fire…spice…” I shrugged. “Would you want to join us?”
“You and Kieron?”
I nodded, watching dismay color his features. He didn’t want to, but he also didn’t want to tell me no. Not on my birthday.
There had been a recent change to my godfather and Kieron’s relationship, one I wasn’t sure the cause of or the solution for. No longer would Merrick join us in a game of cards after supper or a long stroll through my carefully salted acres. He always seemed to be rushing away whenever Kieron knocked on the door, snapping himself into the void after a harried remembrance of needing to be elsewhere.
“You said it was to be a picnic?”
A jagged bolt of lightning crackled down out of the sky as if on cue, and I absently wondered if he’d enlisted the help of the Divided Ones to turn my fortunes sour today.
“We could spread out a blanket in the parlor and pretend,” I suggested. “It would mean a lot to me if you did.”
“Because you miss me,” he tried, already cutting a second piece.
“Of course. And because Kieron is so special to me as well,” I answered carefully.
The edge of Merrick’s fork dug into the plate with a decisive screech. “He’s not good enough for you,” he finally said, his voice quiet and subdued.
“You’d say that about anyone,” I reasoned.
“And I’d mean it.”
“That’s not helping your cause,” I teased him, and refilled his lemonade.
“I wasn’t aware my cause needed assistance.” Merrick frowned. “I don’t like that you’ve gotten so serious about the boy. You’re soyoung. You have so much of your life ahead of you. I don’t want to see you hurt.”
I set my fork down. “Kieron would never hurt me.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Butyoudo,” I said playfully, nudging his side. “You see everything, and you know that it will all be well. You can see how happy he makes me.”
“It…it’s only going to make things harder.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, a nasty, peevish worm twisting in my stomach. Any trace of lightheartedness had faded from hiseyes.
“When he—” He bared his teeth as he ground to a halt, stopping the words that wanted to spill out. “Whenyou,” he tried again, putting too much emphasis upon the new word. “When you leave.”
I couldn’t stop the sigh from escaping me. “I don’t want to go. Alletois is my home. The homeyoupicked out for me,” I reminded him. I didn’t want to fight, not on my birthday, not when I’d been hoping to make headway with him and Kieron.
“When you were a child,” he said, his voice irritatingly patient and level. This was a god who could argue for millennia and not raise his tone even once—he didn’t have to. He was the literal last word. “You’re not one any longer. It’s time you took the next step. It’s time you left Alletois.”
“Then Kieron can come with me,” I said, brightening as the idea struck me for the first time. “So I’ll have someone with me in the capitol.”
