It was hard not to put his arm around her, Much thought. Really, it felt like it should have been natural to put his arm around her, walk through the summer flowers and fat ripe berries to the cottage door. Maybe best not, though…
Behind him, looking up at the cottage, Kaden grunted. It was a you have GOT to be shitting me grunt, which disguided a strange tingle (that was getting less strange the more time he spent with Merlin learning how to identify it, but was still strange.) A tingle that said there was magic here.
Okay, maybe he was just a little more interested now. Was this place like the Enodia… or like something else? With his sweaty hands deep in his pockets, Kaden paid attention as he followed Marcie and Much through the garden gate, looking out for wards. At Hecate’s place, there’d be wards, but here the gate just seemed like a gate. Kaden turned around once he was through, and narrowed his eyes at it. There was a plaited ribbon hanging off it, twisted around the iron, but all it was doing was dancing in the breeze. Maybe he wasn’t looking hard enough, or maybe he wasn’t looking right, or maybe it was just a ribbon.
Trying to dig down into the feeling in his stomach to see if there was any sense that there was anything significant about the ribbon, he almost walked straight into Marcie when she stopped, but managed to catch himself in time - an older instinct kicking in; someone’s too close. Kaden turned to face the same direction, just as the painted door swung open and one of the biggest men he’d had even seen stepped out, and for just a second, just one razor thin sliver of a second, he was seeing another massive, massive, large-than-life man coming toward him, but before he had a chance to shit himself Little John clapped a big floury hand on Much’s shoulder and beamed his welcome at them all. Kaden missed what he said, his attention focused too intently on Little John’s bigger-than-Barak’s arms, but it was something along the lines of come in out of the blazing sun.
And if Marcie hadn’t been there going in first, Kaden wasn’t sure what he would have done.