A Midwinter Fantasy - Leanna Renee Hieber [42]
She was angry at Jayden, frustrated and tired. More, she was cold, her shawl tight around her shoulders despite the heat from the stove. Lily Blackwell, still known as the Widow to almost everyone in the Valley except Mace, was eighty-two years old. Her white hair was thinning where it was gathered into a bun, her back hunched and her hands gnarled. She leaned on the cane he’d carved for her, glaring at the door through eyes that were rheumy and, he knew, not as clear as they used to be, despite the Valley’s healer’s efforts. As far as he knew, no one could cure age, and humans were short-lived creatures indeed, compared to the near-immortal sylphs.
Noting his regard, she lifted her gaze to evenly meet his. Thanks to their master/sylph bond, she could feel his worry even as he tried to suppress it. Lily didn’t like to have anyone worrying about her. For nineteen years, since the day the collective was established, she’d been caring for most of the Valley’s orphans—many of whom had lost their parents because of Mace himself, back when he’d still been a slave. He’d been frozen in the shape of a suit of armor then, forced to obey the orders of a male master he’d loathed. Jayden was decades too young to be one of the orphans Mace had created, though, and he’d arrived after Lily meant to retire. Mace’s heart ached that she was stuck with the boy now, in what should have been her quiet twilight years. He ached even more that caring for Jayden might be shortening the time she had left.
She felt him thinking that.
“Don’t,” she said, turning and shuffling over to get a kettle of water and put it on the stove. Jayden was the most useless of her children, but he wasn’t the only one still living in the house. Mace hoped that one of the sweet adult girls still living there had been the one to fill the kettle and scour the kitchen to its current cleanliness; Lily shouldn’t have been doing that herself anymore. At least no one had needed to go to the well at the bottom of the garden in years. Now there was a barrel in the side of the kitchen with a pipe leading to it. Once a day a water sylph topped it off, and Mace had made quietly sure that Lily’s house was the first on her rounds.
“I’m going to smack that boy one of these days,” Lily said, shuffling to the cupboard to get some tea. Mace beat her there and she grudgingly allowed him to retrieve it for her and measure a few spoonfuls into her old clay pot.
“He could probably use a good smack,” Mace agreed.
Lily smiled, a touch of amusement in her emotions at the thought, though if anyone was going to do the smacking, it would be her, not him. For all that he looked like a large, heavily built man of indeterminate age, that was only illusion. Mace was actually a shape-shifter from a different plane, only able to keep his place in this human world due to the tie he had to Lily Blackwell. She kept him here, but in turn he had no choice other than to obey her slightest command. He didn’t mind. Obedience was part of what he was. He was a battle sylph, a defender of the hive and a prospective lover for the hive’s queen. Unable to accomplish that second goal in his original hive, he’d come through a mystical gate into this world instead. He’d done so in pursuit of a woman, only to have her murdered and him bound to a man he despised. Jasar Doliard had been dead for a very long time now, though, and Mace had taken Lily to be his new master. It had been a practical decision at the time, but the arrangement had worked well for both of them for close to twenty years.
She didn’t have him do any of the disciplining of her children, though. While Lily was quick with a wooden spoon on the back of the knuckles, Mace’s instincts were more intense. She very likely didn’t want him turning Jayden into a pile of fine ash on the floor, no matter how annoyed