Page 39 of A Fae in Finance
When we approached, the table went silent. Sahir and I slid onto the last two empty stools. He slammed his tray down so hard his stew slopped into his salad. This was remarkably restrained, given the day he’d had.
I looked away from him, at our other tablemates: a cluster of sharp-faced people with naked curiosity in their eyes. Most of them had a humanoid skeletal structure, but there was at least one faerie with six limbs, another who looked like a giant sea squid, and one who was most definitely on fire but calmly eating the salad.
“Hello,” I said, because everyone was staring at me.
This sent a wave of titters and squeaks around the table.
I glanced at Sahir, who had gripped a fork with fervor and was trying to eat his stew with it.
Instead of picking up a spoon, he flicked his pointer finger down the stem of the fork, and the wooden tines wove together into a teaspoon-sized basket.
“You have to teach me how to do that,” I said, awed.
“Humans cannot do magic,” one of the faeries at the table said. “Except for witches, but they have been gone a long time.” I looked up. She was smaller than most of the others and had reflective feline eyes with slit pupils. Her face was furry. “Did you really ask for your cat?”
“I’m Miri,” I said, refusing to eschew good manners in the face of adversity. “It’s nice to meet you.”
“Why,” groaned Sahir next to me, in the tones of a man having an unmedicated appendectomy, “why must humansliein greeting?”
“It’s not a lie,” I said, looking at the cat lady. “It’s a pleasantry. It’s a way of expressing gratitude for your time and conversation.” I almost asked for her name but remembered the Gray Knight’s explanation. “How should I address you?”
“You may call me Lene,” she said. “But tell me truly, for you have been here but one rotation of the Earth upon its axis. Did you ask for your cat?”
“Yes. I was worried no one would feed him,” I said, looking down at my tray. I stuck my fork in the cake, ignoring the healthy-looking options. How many times is a girl kidnapped into Faerie, anyway? I deserved cake.
“I had heard humans could not eat cake,” said the man next to Lene. “Or they would grow horns.”
I paused, fork in the air. The man next to Lene was on fire. I took my cue from the other people at the table and didn’t worry about it.
“You will not grow horns,” Sahir said to me, “as that is anatomically impossible.” My fork resumed its course toward my face.
Lene stretched a hand out and touched my forearm, stilling me. “It is unusual to grow horns,” she said.
Since faeries couldn’t lie, either they’d been on the receiving end of a baffling disinformation campaign or I was about to be the coolest human I knew.
“Gaheris,” Sahir said to the cake-horn-man who was on fire, “even you, who remember no sciences, should know it is anatomically impossible for a human to grow horns from eating cake.”
“I do magic,” Gaheris said, and wiggled a bone-white hand in my direction. Even with only that gesture I could tell he had an inhuman number of bones. “I could enchant the cake.”
I couldn’t help it. I smiled at Gaheris, who looked as pleased as a man who looks like two bushfires had a baby with a beech tree could possibly look. The flames licking up the sides of his head shot out as he smiled back at me, and Lene yelped, her claws digging into my forearm.
“I did not enchant the cake,” Gaheris assured me.
“Thanks.” I pulled my arm out from under Lene’s hand, in no small amount of pain.
I stuck a forkful of cake in my mouth. It tasted fresh, and more like a sweet bread than a dessert. No one said anything. I took another bite.
Silence. Every eye remained focused on me. My cake consumption continued apace.
“So, what do you do? All of you,” I added around a mouthful of cake, because the entire table was motionless.
“This is another human question,” Sahir said, like my own personal and worse David Attenborough. “A greeting like the first, which assumes employment in some meaningless repetitive task or debauchery with wine and dancing to be the only options.”
Too tired to argue, I ate a bite of stew. Despite a startling variety of shapes and colors, everything had the texture of a boiled potato.
“We are Fae,” Lene said. “Sometimes I sit in the trees and watch below me for those that come and go.”
“I sing to the rivers,” said Gaheris, which didn’t seem to mesh with his appearance.Don’t judge a book by its cover, I reminded myself. When he saw my raised eyebrow, he added, “So they do not forget their path.” As if that were the explanation I required.
