Page 47 of A Fae in Finance
Having always struggled with latitude and longitude myself, I didn’t feel qualified to answer that question.
“Should we help him?” I asked the Gray Knight, already moving to grasp his hand. I hadn’t touched Gaheris before, and his skin felt strange beneath my fingers—like a poreless stone. I tried to pull him through the water, but no matter how hard I tugged, he came no nearer.
“I need to dissolve the spell,” he said, gasping a bit for breath. “Or I will not be able to get out. My legs are somewhere in the place you call Greenland, I think.”
And indeed, the water splashing onto me felt icy and miserable. Could faeries experience hypothermia? Even ones that were constantly on fire?
“Come back to work, Lady of the True Dreams,” the Gray Knight commanded.
I looked at Gaheris, who nodded that it was all right to leave him. Tentatively, I sat back down at the desk. I glanced over at Lene and Doctor Kitten. Neither had so much as moved because of the sound.
The Gray Knight directed me through the next several points on the document. Most were relatively simple. At some point I heard a gurgling sound like water draining, but I resisted looking.
When we finished, she sat next to me as I emailed the updated model to Levi for review. “Why do you not send it to me?” she asked.
“I need Levi to approve it so I can send it to the client,” I explained.
She stared at me. “I am the client,” she said.
“Yes.”
“I asked you to make these changes.”
“Yes.”
“I sat with you and made these changes.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I didn’t come up with these systems. But Jeff’s my supervisor, and he wants Levi to review it, so that’s what we do.”
She shook her head. “In Faerie, if you cannot accomplish a task without supervision, you are not assigned it.”
“Well, don’t you need supervision while you learn?” I looked out the window, at the wide lawn and the winding pathways.
“We apprentice and then we perform.” She wove her fingers together, an idle gray glow playing between her palms.
“And what do you do?” I asked. “Gaheris talks to rivers and Lene spies on people from trees. What’s your task? Financial modeling?”
She spoke seriously. “I am the Princeling’s to direct. But in the Court, we all have different functions. The Crone watches, and listens, as well you know. The Red Knight and the Blue Knight will take positions, and debate them, so that the Princeling can understand the issues facing his people. They go out into the countryside and speak to our citizens, and bring back concerns for him to address.”
She fell silent.
“And you?” I prompted.
“The Crone knows, and the knights Red and Blue listen, and I learn,” she said. “When we decide upon a course of action, I execute.”
“Like an operations manager!” I said, too excited. But she smiled at me.
“Perhaps, like an operations manager.”
“Thank you for providing insight,” I said, bowing my head.
She shifted in her chair to look at me more directly. “You went to his aid,” she said.
“What?”
“The faerie. You went to his aid.”
“Gaheris?” I asked, glancing at him where he’d finagled himself a space on the bed next to Lene. Whatever magic he’d been trying to do must have taken a lot out of him—he was fast asleep and snoring, little curls of smoke coming out of the higher nostril. No one hadaskedto sleep on my bed, but that was pretty low on my list of concerns.
