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Juniper called on Gaia’s protection if the year was expected to be difficult, or a huge life change was coming, or a hard journey. They were also the customary symbol for newly mated pairs.
It was the big clumps of mistletoe, pinecones, and the star anise.
At least they hadn’t tied it with a red ribbon.
I pushed back against his soaking chest. “Ah-ah, work first. Don’t get distracted by that mistletoe.”
“Your scent is distracting,” he murmured.
I ducked around him and back into the living room to retrieve the laptop.
“We thought about red ribbons,” Cye said, still trying not to snicker and doing his best to make wide, blue eyes at me like he had no idea what star anise and pinecones and mistletoe were about.
“You could have stopped at juniper.” I stepped around the huge pile of evergreen garlands they were weaving with juniper, holly, and cinnamon sticks. The usual protection, happiness, good health, friendship mix.
“Mistletoe can also mean compatibility and deepening affection,” Cye said sweetly as I retreated down the hallway.
Right. That’s surely what they’d meant.
Accidental Empire Building
While I waited for Sterling to finish his shower, I contemplated the antique chess set on the side table of his office. It was a beautiful set, all burnished red and gold woods, highlighted with mother-of-pearl and abalone. He’d picked it up in a market in Hungary and didn’t know much about it except it wasn’t complete. A few pieces from another set filled in the gaps.
I pulled out the black rook, white king, white bishop, black bishop and white queen, then tried to remember the positions they had been in when I’d seen the board at AmberHowl.
“It was probably just in-the-moment madness,” I muttered as I fiddled with the rook. It was one of the most powerful pieces in chess and generally considered second only to the queen. Rooks were also crucial end-game pieces. I hadn’t seen the white rook, but that didn’t mean there hadn’t been one—I also hadn’t seen the black king.
Why was I wasting time thinking about this? SnowFang sure as hell seemed like the pawn, and why had the black rook needed to defend the white queen? The obvious answer was to prevent a queen’s sacrifice that would have resulted in prompt checkmate of the unseen black king.
“What are you doing?” Sterling asked as he claimed his chair.
“Nothing. Just thinking.”
“About the chessboard you saw?”
I shoved aside a stack of papers and hopped up onto his desk. “Yes. So, what do you have on Apharia?”
Sterling glanced at the chessboard, but let the subject change to Apharia. He studied my purple map, nodding to himself like it confirmed what he suspected. He pulled up another map of the eastern seaboard doodled with yellow, red, and blue, then overlaid my purple doodles on that one. “Apharia is red. Yellow is my father, blue is mine. The estate in Clare is here.”
Apharia sat like a big red blob tucked against the Appalachians. A few blue blips scattered in Maine, and some yellow pockets in New Hampshire. “You’re right. Not empire building. What’s special about Apharia? Diamonds? Rare earth?”
“That was my first thought. Demetrius, I found out, is a geotechnical engineer.”
I wiggled my toes. “Which is what?”
“If you want to build something very large, or dig a very deep hole, you need a geotechnical engineer.”
“So if I wanted to build say… a doomsday vault… I’d need a geotechnical engineer.”
“Among other things.”
Apharia included mountains. “Is that area geologically stable?”
Sterling raised a brow. “Yes.”
“And there’s nothing worth digging up? Gold? Diamonds? Artifacts? Ancient alien UFOs?”
“The land has no value. It’s public lands that were released for private sale because the state doesn’t want to deal with it any longer.”
