Page 91 of The Kingdom Cursed By Iron

“And that helps me how?” I say. His complex analogies tend to do more harm than good, leaving me confused.

“It reduces the perception of distance. With power like yours, when you can change something at its core level, how far away it is shouldn’t matter so much. But your magic doesn’t realize that yet. Once you wrap your head around the part of the object that really matters—its makeup, not its location—then you’ll stop getting in your own way.”

“Right, so I’m the problem,” I say.

He shrugs, and I’m not sure if he’s missed my sarcasm or just chosen to ignore it.

“Keep working at it. It will build up your stamina, at least.”

I try again, attempting to bury my consciousness deep in the substance of the cup, finding the layers of matter that Maidar is talking about. But I just hit a wall—a hard, shiny, brass one.

“It’s not working,” I snap, my brain fried from trying to wrap itself around Maidar’s explanations; my magic strung out from pushing against that wall and getting nowhere.

“Fine, we’ll try something simpler,” Maidar grumbles. “Why don’t you tell me where I got it from? Read the metal, if you can’t change it.”

I nod, reaching out across the streets, feeling for the brass once more. This is easier, the memories dancing across the surface of the metal, vivid and accessible. There’s the sense of the same hand picking it up and putting it down, over and over—a warm fire and the must of old books.

“You’ve had it a long time,” I say.

“True enough, but that’s not what I asked,” Maidar says.

I huff, but see his point. I sink beneath the surface of those recollections, looking for older imprints on the metal.

The noises and bustle of a market, the cup being handed from a set of soft, pale hands to Maidar’s thick, leathery fingers.

“You traded with it, at the market,” I say.

“Still doesn’t tell me where it actually came from, does it?”

I wonder if he was this much of a know-it-all when he was teaching Ruskin.

I go a layer deeper, noticing how the texture of the brass changes, revealing ridges and bumps I couldn’t see before on the polished surface. With it comes a sense of the metal in younger days, when it was unshaped, just a sheet in a workshop, the sound of a hammer beating against an anvil, the smell of warm bread creeping from next door.

I know that place—the village where the blacksmith’s shop sits right next to the bakery.

“Deppenridge,” I say with excitement. “The cup came from there. That’s not even that far from my village.”

“Very good,” says Maidar.

I open my eyes and look at him, an old question resurfacing.

“How come you’re one of the few Unseelie I’ve seen at the market?”

Maidar shrugs his craggy shoulders again, turning towards the steps that lead back down into his house.

“The Seelie go there for their pretty things. You humans know that that’s what will sell, so that’s what you bring. And then Unseelie go and see nothing but frilly nonsense that doesn’t interest our kind, so they don’t return. There aren’t many who bother to look deeper—to ask if there’s something more that humans can provide, if asked.”

“Like what?” I say, following him down, pulling the attic hatch shut behind me.

“Knowledge, Eleanor. That’s the most valuable thing anyone can have, and like it or not, you humans have plenty that we ignore as fae.”

“Like magnets,” I say, remembering how Ruskin and his friends hadn’t known what they were when I first used them to draw the iron out of Destan.

“Aye, like magnets, and chemicals and even cells. Magic is all well and good, but the natural world has a magic of its own even outside this realm.”

He’s right; I’ve often thought the same myself. I see now why Maidar is considered eccentric by his own kind, but it’s an eccentricity I can admire. It allows him to look past a lot of their prejudices and assumptions too. After all, he was the only fae I considered something of a friend before I came to this place.

“Tell me, what did you notice when you pushed yourself, and went deeper into the cup’s memory?” Maidar asks, unhooking a long walking stick from the wall.

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