Page 107 of A Fae in Finance
“What did you think it meant?” Gaheris asked, looking baffled.
“I didn’t think it meantanything.”
Now Sahir looked irritated. “We have had several very involved conversations about names, Miriam. Why would the Princeling have given you a meaningless name?”
I flung my hands up so hard I almost unbalanced, the pack pulling me toward the forest floor. “Political cachet?” I guessed wildly. I regained my footing. I’d thought the Princeling had given me a title to protect me in his Court.
Lene, who had been pretending not to listen, turned around, too. “Is this a human prank?” she asked. We’d covered practical jokes, pranks, and April Fools’ Day in one of our recent human classes.
My jaw dropped. “So Idohave prophetic dreams?”
At this, Sahir emitted a sigh so vociferous it disturbed some nearby birds nesting in a tree. “Miriam, obviously you have prophetic dreams,” he said, and turned his back to me definitively.
I trailed the three of them as we continued on our trek, my feet crying out and my head spinning. “Who was that obvious to?” I asked. Then I remembered the conversation between the Princeling and his knights on that Teams call months ago—about my fractured eyes and weird zygomatic bones. If my dreams were prophetic, why were they so much sexier than my waking life?
None of the faeries answered me, so I subsided into baffled silence. Hours passed as we walked.
Finally, at a signal I didn’t discern, the three faeries stopped in a small clearing.
They didn’t verbalize the division of labor but moved with the ease of long familiarity. Gaheris touched my arm and jerked his head in a gesture that probably meantCome with meand notWow, the strain of these backpacks has caused me a lot of neck pain.
While Sahir and Lene raised the tent, Gaheris and I collected wood for the campfire. This entailed me trailing him and humming in agreement whenever he picked anything up. Gaheris was uniquely suited to this task, touching each piece of wood in turn to determine if it would burn. We collected two armfuls—enough for dinner, but not enough to keep the fire going through the night.
When we got back to the campsite, a large A-frame cloth tent had been raised. I found myself wondering who I would sleep next to, a little stressed out about the idea. I was used to falling asleep in front of Sahir. And Lene was used to falling asleep in front of me. Gaheris and I were each vastly removed from the other’s sleeping habits, and this made me nervous.
The air had a bite to it, cleaner and sharper than autumn in New York. Gaheris and I gathered several large stones and marked out a circle in the dirt.
“This should be enough,” he said, leaning a few logs against each other in our makeshift fire pit. He left a hand on the wood, and a tongue of fire twisted down his head and neck, along his shoulder, and out over his fingertips. The wood caught, and he pulled a hand away.
“Why doesn’t your hair set anything on fire?” I blurted out, finally vocalizing a question that had bugged me for months.
He looked up from where he knelt on the ground. “Because I do not want it to,” he said, frowning at me. “Do you want it to?”
“No, of course not.” I turned away from him, toward the discarded packs. I reached for the nearer one and opened the top to find a stack of wooden bowls. I pulled it out, and then grabbed the food containers underneath.
A loaf of bread. Some more of the purple hummus-adjacent spread. Something that looked like precooked lentils.
I put my hands in the air and stretched upward. I didn’t hear Sahir come up behind me.
“That looks edible,” he said, his cheek nearly pressed to mine as he peered over my shoulder. I suppressed a shiver and arched my back. The motion nestled his chin farther into the crook of my neck, where the rough stubble on his cheek rubbed against my skin.
“I like the purple stuff,” I said. I could see half of his face, lit by the crackling flames.
Gaheris looked up at us. “Dinner will be ready in a moment. Where is Lene?”
“She is in a tree.” Sahir pointed up.
I followed the line of his finger, letting myself lean into the flex of his biceps, and saw her reflective green eyes staring down at us.
“I hope we didn’t say anything rude.” I winked at Gaheris.
“We did not,” he said earnestly.
Sahir hadn’t moved, letting me stand in the half circle of his arm, my face nearly pressed to his shoulder.
“Is dinner ready?” Lene called to us, her voice thin in the night air.
“Yes,” Gaheris said.
