Page 153 of Spar of Hearts

Those damned fangs.

There was a scheme behind them.

“I’ll be taking that,” he said, reaching for the hat.

Anya jumped back and drew her cutlass.

“You’ll have to spar me for it.”

“With pleasure.”

Bonus Epilogue

Vetiver Fenn

Vetiver sat behind his desk in the glass-paned greenhouse in the floralogy wing, enjoying the little bit of warmth the glass radiated from the few hours of sunlight Aquillas got during the winter months. These were the most peaceful hours of his workday. Just him and a sea of plants.

A thud came from the dry storage. He sighed.

And whatever that was.

He thought it was a rat, perhaps, trying to eat the dried holly berries or nibble on the Chicken of the Woods colony he’d been carefully cultivating. Curse me, he thought, pausing from his work plucking petals from a dried sunflower the size of a dinner plate. How did they get in there?

Vetiver rose from his knotty oak desk, nearly opting not to put his boots back on—then thought better of it.

He flung the door open, prepared to zap the rodent to teach it a lesson—but found a fellow Elven student instead.

“What are you doing in here?” His hand fell.

"Ah!" A doe stared up from where she crouched on the floor, her violet eyes wide.

Vetiver’s gaze fell from her eyes to her slightly tapered ears, then down to her chin, where a thick black stripe split into two down the small of her throat. She wasn’t Elven. She must be the student from Valeria, handpicked by the Regent herself. And judging by the state of the wooden root bins, she’d clearly been searching for something.

The surprised gape of her pink lips made his heart stutter for an infuriating moment. He despised anything out of his routine, and finding someone in the storage room—a doe, no less—was the very definition of out of the ordinary. She was forbidden fruit sitting right at his Spirits-damned "feet". And saying Spirits-damned was not an overreaction.

She was small, with gently tapered ears that seemed nearly like the humans of old. She couldn’t be taller than the thorn apple bush he’d planted last spring, about five foot three, maybe four. Though nothing about this doe seemed prickly. She was all soft angles, with coppery skin like the center of a pollinated sunflower.

“What are you doing in here?” he asked a little quieter this time, taking another step inside.

“I-I—” The doe retreated her hands from the roseroot bin and hastily shoved it back onto the shelf. “I was…taking inventory!” she sputtered and pushed her round spectacles up the bridge of her nose, pretending to inspect a bin of ginger rhizomes with a loud "Hmmm…"

“Inventory,” Vetiver deadpanned.

“Yes?” She flashed an unconvincing half smile.

“For which professor?” He’d never seen her in any of the horticulture or floralogy classes before, so she was likely in a much different wing of study.

“For…uh—"

“That was rhetorical," Vetiver said. "I’m the one in charge of inventory, so it’s my head on the line if you steal anything. So if this is about peppermint, you're out of luck. Professor Fulkow got sick of it all being—”

“It’s not!” the doe blurted, nearly a shout, then covered her mouth. Instead of rearing back like he thought a Valerian like her would, she actually shot to her feet and stepped closer to him, so close he could smell the light, fancy perfume that clung to her clothes, littered with notes of cranberry and vanilla bean. “I mean, it’s not. About peppermint, that is." She rubbed her hands on her arms repeatedly. “I was going to replace what I took eventually, I just need…”

"What?"

The doe bit her plump lower lip, then held out her hands. They were slightly curled inward and trembling, and a couple joints were visibly swollen.

“What happened?” Vetiver asked, resisting the urge to touch them.