Chapter 11

It took me the better part of an hour to get him off my floor.

He was stubborn about it. He said the books were comfortable. He said, with great dignity, that a King did not leave a room until the conversation in it was finished, and when I pointed out that we weren’t having a conversation, he started one. I told him about the summer I was seven, when Molly and I painted the Thornwood Alpha’s prize hound with blue dye from my grandmother’s stores because Molly said it would make him a magical wolf; he stayed blue for a month and the Alpha never found out who did it. He told me about the time he fell asleep at a treaty signing two hundred years ago, woke with a start, and signed his name on the wrong page, thereby granting the troll clans of the north a lake he had never seen and that he was still, legally, not allowed to fish in.

Finally, after a great deal of pleading on my side and stealing kisses on his, he stood up. Carefully.

The four pairs of boots were still