Midsummer Court by T.J. Land

Author:T.J. Land
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: romance, gay, lgbt, fantasy, fairies
Publisher: NineStar Press

Chapter Four

As night drew in, the issue of accommodation reared its ugly head.

“Mighty Oberon, how can you ask this of us?” demanded a matronly fairy about the age of Oberon’s mother. She stood at the head of a cluster of fourteen other well-dressed fairy men and women, most of them highly ranked members of court and all of them Titania’s relatives.

Keep your temper, Oberon told himself. “Baroness, what would you have me do? Your homes lie beneath several hundred pounds of mud. Even if you could get to them, you wouldn’t want to spend the night in them.”

With the hand not grasping his shovel, Oberon gestured towards the sturdy oak on whose branches tents were being strung up and tiny lamps were being hung. “The weather will be good tonight, I am sure of it. You and everyone else will be perfectly safe from…”

“The weather? My liege, I don’t care about the weather. I may be no spring chicken, but I don’t tremble at the prospect of being rained on. No, my liege, the problem is this: my friends and I have inspected the particular branch upon which we are expected to lodge for the night. Frankly, it’s unacceptable.”

She folded her arms as murmurs of agreement rose up around her. They were powerful arms; despite her age, Baroness Mint was one of Oberon’s finest hunters, skilled with bow and with blade. Even so, Oberon observed that she was still wearing her white gloves from the feast, and that they didn’t have a spot of mud on them.

“Why, good lady?”

“To start with, it’s one of the lowest branches. If I sleep on it, I shall spend the night staring up at the dirty feet and undergarments of the many hundreds of individuals snoring above me.”

“I would have thought that you would find that preferable to being on a higher branch and having however many hundreds are below you staring up at your own…”

She interrupted him. “Secondly, my friends and I are expected to share the branch with our servants and their families. Why? Why can’t they have their own branches?”

“The tree’s branches are finite in number. More to the point, the arrangement has been made, and reorganizing everyone now would take time and effort that no one has to spare. Baroness Mint, if the accommodation provided is so wholly unacceptable to you, why don’t you make your own arrangements? There are other trees. The forest is vast; you could sleep anywhere.”

And hopefully get eaten by an owl, he thought. It wasn’t vain hope. One of the reasons fairies lived in close-knit communities was that on their own they made a tasty snack for predators who saw them as hairless field mice.

“Don’t be absurd, my liege,” the baroness said, thrusting out her bosom and fanning her turquoise wings. “We cannot be seen abandoning the court in this time of trouble. The common folk look to us for inspiration and reassurance.”

Enough of this. I have better things to do than quibble with a malcontent.

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