Page 71 of A Fae in Finance
On the other side of the doorway was something that looked much more like a construction site, though a very odd one.
Nearest to us stood a small cottage with a thatched roof, like one you might see in a fairy-tale storybook, with a stone chimney and flowers in the window boxes. Outside the cottage, an old woman sat at a loom, weaving fine gray thread into long panels.Cobweb curtains, I realized with a start. Beside her sat a workbench, recently vacated, and several acorns.
Behind the cottage sprawled the imprint of a giant building, carved from the dirt. There were no trucks or diggers, and no other people.
“How—” I started.
“Magic,” the Gray Knight said, anticipating my question. She pulled her documents from thin air and handed them to the Builder, who grunted in acknowledgment.
“Builder, this is the Lady of the True Dreams,” the Princeling said.
“Lady.” The Builder inclined his head with more respect than I merited. I wondered then if the Princeling had given me the title as protection, as a way to elevate me in the Court so that I could be seen with him.
“Will you show us your progress, Builder?” the Princeling asked. But he stood at a respectful distance, his hands clasped before him demurely, as though he would turn around and go back to the Court if the Builder said no.
The Builder looked at me. I smiled at him, hoping I looked friendly and not pained. There was something incredibly jarring about his furred hind legs, which were hidden at the upper thigh by the bottom of a flannel tunic.
“Yes,” he said. He jerked his head, and we followed him past the cottage. I waved at the old woman at the loom, who stared back at me like I had three heads.
Or maybe like I only had one head but she was used to people having three.
“Where are the workers?” I asked. “Aren’t construction sites of this size supposed to have around a hundred people, usually?”
“Magic,” the Gray Knight said again, her hand flexing at her side. Her silver belt had reappeared, sporting a crossbow. I took a half step closer to her; the belt only materialized when she was feeling threatened. Though I wasn’t sure about the weapon—based on my extensive reading experience, Ipersonallywouldn’t have used a crossbow for close-range combat.
“Oh, okay,” I said. I gathered that “magic” was going to be the answer to a lot of my questions.
The Builder stopped at the near corner of the site, where two deep trenches met. “We plan to add a moat,” he said.
The Red Knight glared at the Blue Knight. The Princeling looked from one to the other, and then at the Builder.
“A moat.” He brought a hand to his jaw. “Interesting.”
“If this is our first chance to show humans our workmanship, we want to display waterwork as well,” the Blue Knight explained. “We should show them the full capabilities of the Fae.”
The Princeling nodded. “Proceed.”
The Red Knight, who had the Crone on his arm, flushed but didn’t speak. Instead, he shot a glance at me, as though expecting commiseration. Two wolves warred inside me: One wanted camaraderie with anyone willing to give it, and the other wanted to be in constant agreement with the Princeling, who scared me. A lot.
In the end, I smiled at the Red Knight with all the conviction of a flavored sparkling water. He seemed satisfied enough, though, and actuallysmiled backin my direction.
We followed the Builder along the perimeter. I couldn’t really understand some of what he talked about—magical reinforcement spells for the foundations and the casting technique for adaptive climate control spells.
“You kind of just pile materials up and hold it together with magic?” I asked the Gray Knight, whose fingers were twitching toward the handle of the crossbow at her hip. Did she looknervous?
She made an exasperated noise. “How else would one construct a building?”
“Well, humans don’t have magic,” I said mildly. “So we use complicated mathematical principles and innovation. I can’t do it, but it’s really quite clever.”
“That sounds tedious,” the Builder said. He raised his hands above his head. The Red Knight let go of the Crone and stepped in front of the Princeling.
The Builder cackled, a sound like a dryer full of pennies, and turned to face the construction site. “Cower, then,” he said, and brought both arms down in a slicing gesture that gathered the sky between his palms and flung the entire atmosphere forward before him, an unfurling carpet. He followed the motion like a man in prayer, onto his knees, until he lay prostrate on the ground and streams of blue light shot down across his back, along the tops of his horns, and into the dirt before us.
I fell to my knees, too, gasping as the sheets of blue light fitted themselves into the dirt imprint and solidified, until they looked like gray concrete foundations in the earth.
The Builder sat up on his heels and looked at me over his shoulder.
“That is magic, lady,” he said, panting.
