Gray frowned, shoving his hands into his pockets. “Is this normal?” he asked after a moment of watching Phelan and Aoife square off.
I shrugged. “Hard to say. I’ve never seen him with anyone closer than a cousin before.”
“It used to be,” Seamus said, seating himself on one of the logs near the fire.
“Stay out of this, Seamus,” Aoife snapped.
He tsked softly and arched a brow at her. “That sounded dangerously like an order, Aoife.”
“I said stay out of it,” she repeated. “And I’d listen if I were you, since I’m pretty annoyed with you at the moment.”
I glanced at Seamus. He shook his head. “Something about me not having the decency to be dead.”
She rounded on him. “That’s not it and you know it. Now stay out of this.”
“All right, that’s enough,” Sif growled, shooting all three of them a nasty look. “If the lot of you can’t play nice, I’ll make it so you have to.” She looked at Jacqueline. “How’s Thordin?”
“Grumpy,” Jacqueline told her. “Starting to go stir crazy, which means he’s probably about a week out from my letting him out of bed.”
“And about three days from him deciding that’s too long to wait and trying to get up on his own,” Phelan added.
“Thordin’s here, too?” Aoife’s eyes fluttered shut and she tilted her head back. “Maybe you were right, Gray, maybe we could have stayed exactly where we were.”
“If you can help me and Marin and all the rest of us get Phelan back to what he needs to be after being sundered, Aoife, you made the right choice in coming,” Jacqueline said, taking a sip of her tea. “Even if your brother doesn’t wholly appreciate your presence here, I sure as hell do and I think that’s important to both he and I.”
Oh, yeah, sundered. I had forgotten about that.