Noble, 55

“Don’t drink too much,” Javier said quietly, hand on Geoffrey’s arm.

Geoffrey nodded, holding his wineglass. He was only part way through his first one. “I won’t,” he promised.

“And try not to spend the whole night staring at Giacomo, he’s fine.”

Giacomo was not fine, but he was better than he’d been the other night. He was smiling when it was appropriate and talking to people normally and acting like he always did, like he’d never had a mental breakdown in Geoffrey’s bed.

Others, 53

Grey Rain couldn’t get Sky Heart’s antlers right.

Antlers were really hard to carve on a fetish and Sky Heart had really big ones that were thick and curved and had a lot of prongs and Grey Rain kept getting them wrong and that was probably why the stupid fetish wasn’t working.

He tossed the useless carving on the floor and resisted the urge to cut its stupid antlers off. Sky Heart might not like that even if they weren’t going to visit the fetish. Dammit.

A hand on his shoulder made Grey Rain look over, and Snowball was there, looking worried. “Are you okay?”

Knighthood, 106

Edwin was five minutes late for breakfast, but only because Erik hadn’t wanted him to pull out. But Robby had helped him put his armour on and now all three of them were ready to go.

Well, Robby was still sluggish and had had bad dreams last night, but he’d insisted he was okay to go back to class today and had certainly been okay for sex earlier. And Erik was walking a bit bow-legged, but he’d get over that, probably.

“Morning,” he said to Nigel, as he sat down. “You’re picking up the cats today, right?”

“Yeah,” said Nigel. “We just got an urgent message for you, from the castle.”