Rogue's Pawn by Jeffe Kennedy

Author:Jeffe Kennedy [Kennedy, Jeffe]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fantasy, Romance, Adult
ISBN: 9781426894060
Google: br8nO6IszCcC
Amazon: B00814M5WI
Goodreads: 14289063
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2012-07-16T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seventeen

In Which I Prepare for War

Evening found my tent converted to my own third-world sweatshop full of busy Brownies, all in various colors like the pillows. Dragonfly had also fetched several look-alike friends—none with wings, however. Clearly she was a little queen amongst them. Complete with preening.

They all gaily sewed and sang. It could have been a scene from the animated Christmas specials that had populated my childhood. Now I wondered how much of those stories pulled from this world. I asked Larch if any of his people lived in a place that was always ice and snow. He just gave me the standard puzzled look and bent back to his work. At least I had the sense not to ask him about the jolly fat guy in a red outfit.

I’d tweaked the spell a little, so that the stuffing-floss would transfer its properties to like material. Larch assured me it was standard stuffing, made from a shrub that was good for little else. To make a new Loden Pillow, the Brownies took a strand of floss from the mother-pillow—their term, not mine—opened a seam in a daughter-pillow, and tucked the strand deep inside. Once the pillow was resewed, they smacked it hard and said “Loden” three times. The small spark spread from within, replicating outward until the whole pillow glowed. The Dragonfly girlies were allowed to sew seams but not touch the stuffing. Seemed sexist to me, but since the girls didn’t protest Larch’s arrangement, I stayed out of it.

I hoped the Brownies’ belief in the spell might help to sustain the magic in the pillows so it wouldn’t wear off when I wasn’t around. The philodendron and the pedestal had faded away at some point. Had they become pillows again or just kind of dissolved when I wasn’t looking? During my training, whatever I converted or created was usually gone the next day—I never knew exactly what became of it.

Something else to chase down if I was to understand the limits of my own abilities and up my chances of defeating Rogue. And finding a way out of this freakish world. I really needed to start keeping notes.

It seemed to please the Brownies to be making magic. In the stories, their ability to accomplish work like this was magical in and of itself, as I recalled, so in theory they ought to be able to make Loden Pillows forever, without my adding anything more. Then they’d have a business enterprise beside sacrificing pages to fire. I’d also modified the spell so that the light glowed in three levels of brightness—might as well have flexibility in our lighting design.

As the Loden Pillows piled up, Larch called in runners to distribute the light-up cushions back to the camp. Darling, as self-appointed quality tester, pounced repeatedly on the pillows, bouncing them from soft to bright to brightest and off again, which, together with the light flashes from the pillow-creators, created an almost disco effect that oddly complemented the brisk harmonies of the faerie song.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.