Page 65 of A Fae in Finance
Someone else called out from the side of the room: “Death was fair return for the attempt on your life,” they said, hummingbird wings trembling behind them. “Kamare expected to die.”
“Rhesus did not raise his hand!” Caraya exclaimed, flinging her own hand up a second time.
“Ah, yeah, Rhesus, again, we try to raise our hands when we speak,” I said, scratching the back of my neck. “But thank you for your contribution to our conversation. I didn’t know that death was the fair return for the attempt on my life…”
Everyone was silent.
“So, yeah, thanks for… enlightening me,” I finished, dropping my hand and then violently twisting my ring around my finger.
“Perhaps death was not her expectation,” Rhesus’s pearlescent neighbor argued, thrusting their own hand skyward. “Kamare was not truly of the Princeling’s Court.”
“Kamare was born in the Princeling’s Court!” a third person said from across the room, both many-fingered hands in the air like an emphatic sea anemone.
“Her fealty shifted!” Rhesus said, flinging his second hand up and then hovering a few inches off the ground.
“How could her fealty have shifted?” I asked.
“Is this human class or faerie class?” the Gray Knight interjected, her silver eyes flashing. She hadn’t raised her hand, but none of the other faeries pointed this out.
Anger bubbled in the yards of negative space between us. I clenched and unclenched my fist, flexed my fingers to shake out the phantom feeling of her hand on my palm that morning. Instead, I tried to concentrate on the Princeling’s mask of a face, staring at me implacably from that damned silver throne.
He quirked his brow at me, startling me out of my reverie.
“Sorry, right. Well, the reason I didn’t want her to die is…” I trailed off. “Her feelings were valid?” I tried.
This set off a storm of raised hands and raised voices. I couldn’t understand any of them, so I looked back at Sahir.
“The general tenor of the commentary is confusion,” he explained.
“Look, Kamare is right that humans could fundamentally alter your way of life,” I said.
The expression on the Princeling’s face could’ve pulverized stone. But I wasn’t stone. I was a human, and squishy, and really fucking annoyed right now.
“Faeries prize honesty, right?” I said. “Faeries must be honest.”
“We prize deception,” Kellen called out, waving his left hand like a stoner at a concert. “We prize lying through truth.”
I turned and thumped my forehead against the wall next to Sahir.
“Why is she doing that?” someone asked—I obviously didn’t see who.
“I’m expressing frustration,” I said to the wall.
“What if I don’t have hands?” someone else called out. “How can I raise my hand and speak?”
“If you can put an appendage upward, please do,” I told the dirt in front of my face. “And if you can’t, you may just call out.”
This emboldened all of them. I shut my eyes tight as a swarm of voices rose up.
“Do all humans express frustration by hitting the wall with their faces?”
“It must be a way of connecting to the earth and recentering themselves.”
“I do not understand.”
Sahir cleared his throat, and everyone quieted. “The lady will explain why she spared Kamare, if you let her speak.”
He touched my shoulder, spun me gently around. He left his hand on my elbow, providing small support.
