Page 20 of A Fae in Finance
Inside, the communal dining hall looked depressingly like a high school cafeteria, a large room full of long tables. Along the far wall, three faeries stood behind a counter, serving scoops of food to a line of people with wide wooden trays. Behind the counter I could see windows into a kitchen area.
There were rows of tables like the one we’d sat at the night before, long wooden rectangles crowded with stools. A series of small holes in the ceiling let in light, and more tiny faeries flitted through the air above the tables, bringing flashes of illumination with them.
I didn’t see the Princeling or any of his retinue.
“We will eat here, and then I will bring you to your room before I leave,” Sahir said.
“If you’re going into the office, why can’t I?”
Doctor Kitten had started getting restless so I hefted him over my shoulder, his front paws on my back and his back paws on my stomach.
“You must not leave Faerie,” the Gray Knight said, appearing out of nowhere to glower like a very hot and foreboding bodyguard next to me. Sahir walked toward the food line. I felt the eyes of everyone in the room on us as the Gray Knight and I followed him.
But Thea and I had spent a summer teaching ourselves Elvish so we could read the inscription on the One Ring in its original language. Jordan had once created a monthslong campaign whose mechanics hinged on the precise wording of a mysterious letter. I was primed for verbal loopholes, is the point.
“Must not or cannot?” I asked the Gray Knight.
Sahir grabbed a tray for himself, looked at me with the cat over my arm, and then grabbed a tray for me, too.
The Gray Knight said nothing, the haughty tilt of her chin almost but not quite hiding the way she clenched her jaw.
“Mustnot orcannot?” I repeated, glaring at her.
“Must notandcannot,” she snapped. “The food you consumed has altered your body, and the attempt would disintegrate you into a fine mist of blood and bone shards.”
I recoiled, thinking about how the grain bowl had warmed me, how my arms and legs had tingled. It clearly wasn’t from the spices. It was magic.
I clutched Doctor Kitten tighter. I’d been such an idiot.
She pointed to Sahir, who was putting a bowl onto my tray. “You might enjoy the porridge, Miriam. It is made with wilderberries.” Then she stepped ahead of us in line, skipping the porridge entirely.
“Sahir,” I pleaded, hoping he’d intervene, but he kept his back to me. We went along the line together.
The first faerie serving breakfast scowled at me. I stared back, the wordcannotpounding along my veins with every frantic beat of my heart.
The second pretended not to see me. The third—who looked like a Dallas Cowboy with a day of stubble, big arms, and the faded blue eyes of a person who spends all his time in the sun—nodded in greeting.
I blinked.
Sahir led me back across the wide room to the table closest to the door, where the Gray Knight had already made herself comfortable. Her silver hair lay in a thin sheet down her back, and her silver tail flicked in time to some music only she could hear.
“My lady,” he said, hooking a stool with one foot and straddling it. He put both of our trays down with the expected inhuman grace and then glanced at me.
I put Doctor Kitten on the table. “Please sit,” I said. Doctor Kitten stared at me for a second and then sat.
“She brought her familiar to breakfast?” the Gray Knight asked Sahir. She had the loveliest cheekbones, high and broad against her narrow chin. “Did you not advise against this?”
“Miriam is unwilling to hear advice at the moment,” Sahir said, his fist clenching on the tabletop. The smooth line of his suit rippled over his forearm. I wondered if faeries had similar circulatory systems to us, if the vein in his forearm would pop when he flexed.
With a violent internal shake, I refocused my attention on the Gray Knight and my literal imprisonment.
“If I eat this food, will I get… more stuck in Faerie?” I tilted my head, took in the slope of slender neck into delicate trapezius.
Seemingly determined not to engage, Sahir picked up his spoon and started shoveling porridge into his mouth.
“More stuck?” The Gray Knight glanced at him. My eyes caught for a moment on her free hand, laid out on the table, slender fingers close enough that I could have reached out and brushed my fingertips along her nails. I looked away, feeling a hot flush creep up my cheeks. “You will become no more or lessstuck, as you put it, no matter what you do, my lady.”
With his left hand, Sahir snatched up a slice of bread with jam and took a huge bite. He had a smear of blue on his full upper lip. I fought the urge to wipe it away.
