The Lion's Tail and the Fox's Fail

Chapter 1

During an exceptionally long night of negotiations with the Seelie and Unseelie courts, Jude was about ready to help Ghost assassinate both leaders and their respective dignitaries and be done with it, consequences be damned. Keeping the balance between the armies of Chaos and Order was proing more difficult than she'd expected, and it was beginning to show in the bags under her eyes and Carden's increased liquor consumption.

She looks up absently as the doors to the High Court's Great Hall swing open with the snarl of steel-on-latch and watches Locke enter. Jude tries to track his movements, eyes narrowed at the familiarly disgusting fox, but he's quickly removed from her view when a Seelie lord moves his elbow and blocks her view. She listens to an Unseelie Lady titter on about the day-to-day annoyances of her clashes with and lack of freedom in dealing with the humans; fingers the knife hidden in the folds of her dress; and waits for Locke to make another appearance.

After he ran off with Taryn and officially made her his wife, Jude had wondered when the meddling vulpine would show up to destroy another aspect of her life. Whereas Valerian had coveted violence and Nicasia was prone to involving herself with the currency of humiliation, Locke was drawn to things and people he found entertaining like a moth to a flame. Unfortunately for most of his unfortunate subjects, his idea of entertainment more often involved emotional torture and faux love than it did human fun.

Glancing to her left, she found Cardan already looking her way, offering a lazy smirk as he effortlessly makes small talk with a Seelie noble with green wings and wobbling chins. Jude glares back and his smirk only widens, drinking in her apparent fury as if it were as tangible as the wine in his cup. The lacy sneer shows off finely pointed canines and the barest hint of gums wet with the dark-red elderberry wine that the leader of the Unseelie court had bestowed upon him as tribute to his "generosity" in allowing her increased freedom to meddle in human affairs inside her domain.

She considers kicking him under the table to demonstrate how tangibly painful her fury can be when he abruptly straightens in his chair, smirk falling off as though someone had just stuck both of his feet in ice water or showed him a horrible premonition of lurking threat. Jude raises an eyebrow, trying to appear unconcerned and desperately hoping that it was the former and not the later that caused the shadow of panic to cross the king's face. In any case, the look is gone now, Cardan having schooled himself back into cool amusement.

Then Locke appears around the corner of the Kingling's high-backed chair, leaning down to whisper in her ear a hasty "good luck" before, with a smirk rivaling Cardan's vanishing into the depths of the pillars in the back of the Great Hall, the back of Jude's chair preventing her from seeing precisely where he went. She turns the knife in her pocket over and over in her hand and grits her teeth. Whatever Locke just did to Cardan, (because there's really no reason to believe that the timing of these events is coincidence) he did it knowing that His Majesty and I would be trapped in this hall with the Courts of Vinegar and Swine and forced to endure whatever trap he had set out for Cardan and her.

Mulling this over and very much liking to not end up on the receiving end of another one of Locke's little "games", Jude surveys the table quickly for signs of Locke's meddling before scrutinizing the amount of empty glasses that have accumulated around Cardan's plate like a flock of flightless birds.

She's not expected to do much at this gathering, as the human advisor of the High King, she's here out of decorum in the eyes of the visiting courts and as a sort of glorified babysiter in her own. She's here more out of obligation to make sure that Cardan doesn't drink too much than to engage in court affairs, which makes for an extremely dull evening. Tonight however, Jude begrudgingly accepts that while it may be boring most nights, at least now she has some freedom to observe and attempt to figure out what Locke was after and what he meant by "good luck" after doing something that make Cardan nearly fall out of his chair. Was Cardan keeping something from her that Locke reminded him of? Was something going to go down at the dinner that would give her need of luck?