9

TWO YEARS EARLIER

Fashions in the human realm have changed since I last looted from the storeroom buried deep beneath the High Court.

Chunky necklaces adorn every female's neck, and I mean every one of them. I wear no necklace. The dresses they wear have an extra layer over them that sticks out over their hips like a lampshade. My plain breeches and cropped top seem too ordinary, too bland, for the dazzle around me. Even those dreadful shoes that the human women have strapped to their feet, stout heels that go on for days, click clacking all around—they are too much, and my flat sneakers are too little.

I take such great care in appearing as human as possible when I visit these lands. So maybe I'm a tad annoyed—and that's shown in the side-glowers I shoot Eamon every other moment—that my dearest friend blends in better than I do.

He's not even from human blood, so how dare he fit in with them better than me, in style alone? It's not fair. All he had to do to blend in with the male humans was tug on a pair of blue jeens and a white t-shirt with a tiny green crocodile stitched onto it.

Tell me how that is fair.

Under my dozenth glower, Eamon's eyes roll back before he deflates into the wooden chair with a sigh. "Nari, won't you let it go? It is my duty to know these things about the humans."

The truth of it does little to loosen the hard set of my mouth. I just fold my arms over my prickled chest—this stupid crop top is much too sheer for the cold winds of the human lands—and tuck my glower down to the wooden table between us.

I eye the empty beer bottles and decide that my next drink will be something sweeter than this ghastly stuff that reminds me too much of ale and mead.

"I'm a recruiter," Eamon goes on, his tone dull, his gaze wandering the terrace around us—the outdoor terrace of the bar he's taken me to. "I must keep track of their fashions, their music, their slang, even their dreams. If I knew you were going to be stuck in a foul mood, I would not have brought you."

The scowl digs deeper into my face.

Eamon snatched me through a bridge closer to his home in the Light Court. I won't lie, I was speechless for the first while in this bustling town… maybe a city? I'm not so certain of its title, but I'm sure that it is so wildly out of my league that I wouldn't dare come here alone, like Eamon does when he needs to recruit humans for the Queen's Court. Whether those humans are to be thrown into the Eternal Dance, given to the unseelies, or used to fuel the magick of the High Court with their Forever Slumbers in the dungeons, it doesn't matter. The humans that the recruiters take have a grim fate.

This night, he is not to recruit. He is only here to observe, to learn, and apparently to drink a lot of beer since he snatches up his fifth bottle.

My mouth puckers on my silence and I turn my gaze around the terrace.

Only some of these square tables have humans hunched around, drinking beers. Over the other side, beyond a stack of metal barrels, there's a sticky and creaky door that leads into the bar. That's where the booming comes from, a bass so thunderous that it aches my ears and shudders the floorboards under my boots.

I watch as a girl, maybe just nineteen, leans over a bush and sicks up whatever she's had to drink so far. A friend—who can barely keep her own balance on gigantic heeled shoes—holds her hair back and I think it's sort of sweet that she does this.

This place is a lot. Too much, maybe.

I think if I had brought Daxeel here, not the quieter town he followed me to some years ago now, then the dark male would have just set the whole place alight.

"It's very loud," I say and drag my attention back to Eamon.

The sight of him startles me only a little, for only a moment. A glamour, one done by Prince Angus himself, and a glamour strong enough that it will last a full day and night, unlike my own that I'm sure has just some hours left in it.

Still, to see my Eamon with his bronzed eyes a dimmed brown, a dullness to his usually glistening golden skin, rounded tips of his ears, all those sharp teeth gone—to see him muted like this is a startling thing.

Some of his fine braids rustle over his shoulder as he nods. He keeps the other side of his head freshly shaven, and I think he must be one of the most beautiful males I have seen, even in human glamour.

"It's not so bad." He lifts the beer bottle in his loose grip, then gestures it around. "I might like a place like this one day."

My eyebrows lift to my hairline, all the chestnut waves pulled back into a limp bun atop my head. "A tavern?"

"It's not quite a tavern, is it?" His gaze drags around the terrace, lingering over the few humans who can brace the icy air out here as well as we do. "Not quite a bar, either. And that—" He flicks his gaze up to a flag painted the colours of the rainbow, the flag that flaps loudly in the breeze. "—means that same lovers are welcome here."

Same lovers, like Eamon. Males who bed males, females who bed females, the ones who like both.

"It means," he adds and pushes aside his now-empty bottle, "that this place is for them. Ones like you are mere guests."

"Oh." I blink on it, the surprise slackening my face as my thoughts whirl. A tavern-bar-party place, but for same lovers.

I find it like it.

I like it enough that a smile tugs my lips. "You should have a place like this," I agree. "And call it Nari's. Oh, Nari's Haven. No," I make a face and shake my head. "Nari's. Just Nari's."

Eamon's grin splits before the chuckle rumbles deep in his chest. The adoration that glitters in his eyes isn't lost on me. "There you are," he sighs softly.

But I don't care to talk about me now, I want to talk only about Nari's Tavern. Folding my arms on the edge of the table, I lean closer to him, and feel the life alighting my eyes. "You could have quarters above the bar and live there. I could help recruit you some dancers! Oh, yes, dancers—you should have those."

His smile fades on the dream. "If your husband lets you help."

My face crumples. "Husband," I echo the word like it's unknown to me, foreign—because I am so far from one. Daxeel left Licht some years ago, ignored all my letters and hates me from a distance. Taroh has thankfully abandoned my contract, and so now I am left with no threads of a future in a husband. "Maybe that isn't in my future."

Although I'm not sure what I will do if I don't get a husband. It's what I have been raised for. Birthed for. This is my purpose.

It would disappoint father if I did not marry.

Eamon is quiet in answer, a pensive and distant grim set to his firmed expression.

"Would you like to marry?" I ask him in a hushed voice. "A male, of course. If you could."

He shrugs, all elegance and slinking muscles. "Marriage is for the validity of heirs and nothing more."

It is true. Marriage is no thing of love. It is for lineage. But still, litalves are romantic, we are dreamers, and Eamon is half that.

I do wonder sometimes, how much he sacrifices to be in our realm, how much more he would need to sacrifice to be in Dorcha. Either way, he loses, doesn't he?

It's sad, it tugs on my heart and my downturned mouth. "Would you marry Fern?"

His grin dazzles me. "I would sooner bed a cactus."

A laugh escapes me, and I fall back onto my creaky chair. To marry a woodlander is a wild thought indeed, they are so unpredictable and untrustworthy. Might just eat their spouse in the middle of the night because they pulled the blankets too much.

I wouldn't wed an unseelie. Even if I had a say in who I will marry, I would never marry one of them.

Before we can speak anything more of useless dreams—of same lover bars and choice in marriage—my moodiness returns like a storm cloud coming home.

I pucker my lips as the waitress pushes through the sticky door, an empty tray balanced perfectly on her flattened hand. Ignoring the other patrons out here—the humans—she heads straight for us at the back of the terrace.

Eamon turns his chin to watch her advance, and I do not like at all the way they smile at each other. A mutual smile that, if I did not know Eamon at all, I would think was a flirtation, the smile shared before a bed is.

But it is secrets that they share, not lust.

Bee, her name is. And as human as she looks—with her mousy hair that's brightened by the tones of icy blond highlights and her dim green eyes that border more on grey if you ask me—she is not what she seems.

Bee is kinta.

A halfling born broken; a halfling who should have been born like me, but instead came out as a fully human babe.

They are a great shame among all fae races.

Most are banished as newborns, so that they do not taint the future bloodlines with more breeding. Some are traded for healthy human babes, the changelings.

But Bee is unusual that way. Her mother, a fullblood litalf, did not banish or abandon Bee. She kept her until Bee decided to move to the human realm and stay with her mortal father.

I find it strange.

Stranger still, that she is friendly with my Eamon.

I don't like to share.

Bee lets the empty tray clatter onto the table. Her smile turns on me, then she glances around at the empty beer bottles, all of them on Eamon's side of the table.

"Not a fan of it, then?" she asks, and there's nothing unkind about the way she addresses me, but I still don't like her. "What's your drink at home?"

"Honeywine," Eamon answers for me, a teasing drawl to his tone.

"Good stuff." Bee starts collecting the empty bottles. "I know what to bring you," she says and nods to herself, satisfied. "You'll like it, trust me."

I say nothing, and she leaves with the tray of bottles. The moment the door creaks shut behind her, Eamon tuts at me but his eyes glitter with amusement.

I frown at him. "What?"

"You and your mood tonight," he scoffs, shaking his head. "Remind me to not bring you along ever again, Sour Nari."

I huff and kick my shoe over the floorboards. I have no answer.

"Are you jealous of Sunni-Bee?" Eamon asks after a beat.

"Yes." The honesty strikes through me before shame sags me in my chair. "Not just because her mother still loves her though she is kinta, and not only for her freedoms, and not only for her beauty despite her humanness, but because she is your friend… and I did not know about her."

His smile is soft. "I love you most. I love you as though you are my dearest sister. Even in your moods."

A heat steals my cheeks and I look up at the fake vines above. "I love you too, brother. And maybe I do not wish to lose you to anyone. Ever."

His grin is lazy. "You won't. And you should be kinder to her. Bee is the one who will help if you ever find yourself in need. Lost in the human lands? In need of an update on your fashions? Or maybe you want some human drinks at a human bar… Bee is the one you go to."

I think on it a moment before the door swings open again and the kinta returns. Her tray is stacked with a few more beers and some taller bottles of pinkish liquid.

I watch the foamy surface of the pink drink slosh around the necks of the bottles as she approaches.

On her way, two humans at a table down the terrace raise their hands and call out to her, but she just shoots them a seductive wink that has them blushing. She comes to us, and I think more on Eamon's words of advice.

"Moscato for you," she says and sets the tray down. She hands me the two bottles of pink drink, then sets down a stemmed glass I won't be using.

Before she's even handed out the beers to Eamon, I've already unscrewed the strangely thin metal lid of my Moscato—whatever that is.

"How old are you?" I ask, and though it's a blunt question, it's only because I am trying to make up for my sourness towards her.

She smiles at me, a look beneath her lashes, and I find that her greenish grey eyes are much too pretty for a kinta. "Twenty-one."

I nod, as though she tells me something greatly important and I must consider it. Then I bring the rim of the glass bottle to my lips—and she watches as I take a tentative sip.

I frown on the burst of sugar that sizzles my tongue. I smack my lips together once, twice, then hum something of an approval.

Very sugary, very bubbly—but exactly to my tastes.

I guzzle down more.

Her eyebrows raise with an I-told-you-so that vanishes as she turns to Eamon. "I'll be in the village visiting my mother next weekend—your weekend," she amends, because time between the realms runs differently. "I'll stop by for a visit?"

"Are you in the mood for merfolk trapping?" Eamon drawls, his voice razored with his dokkalf growl, but also the dread he feels at what's to come. Merfolk season, a tradition that is practiced in only the Light Court and the Sea Court, in which fleets of civilian boats take to the waters and—predictably—capture merfolk. Whichever settlement, town or city captures the most merfolk per boat is awarded a bounty by the lords of the courts.

"Oh, I forgot about that." Bee bares her teeth in something of a grimace, and I find it absolutely fascinating that she has no sharpness beyond her very human canines. No traces of her fae blood whatsoever.

Even the generous swell of her hips and bottom is decidedly not fae. I'm as slender as a beanstalk beside her. Makes me feel a tad better.

"Mother doesn't care for the sport." Bee sighs, but the disappointment is still slackening her face as she adds, "I hate the release of them into the lakes, though. It's the sound of it all. Their cries." She shivers something so human that I can only stare with a newfound interest in her. "It's… haunting, you know?"

I haven't attended one of these traditions before, but I know enough about them to understand what she is speaking of. Merfolk belong to the open waters, not to lakes and rivers. They suffocate and dehydrate on land, so once they are released into enclosed waters within the courts, they aren't ever able to claw and scrape and flop their way back to their homes out in the open seas. So many merfolk stolen away from their loved ones, their children, their lovers, their parents, their homes—and separated for the rest of their lives.

When they are released into those lochs and lagoons, the cries are harrowing.

"I hear them from my village," I say, and maybe I'm a bit surprised that my words are spoken softly. "It's on the edge of the border," I add to explain the distance away. "But I hear the cries, all night."

Bee nods, her face something grim. "It's fucking awful. Always made me feel a bit sick when I was little."

Eamon sets an empty bottle down and trades it for another. "Then you won't be visiting?"

"I'll visit my mother," she says, whacking a stray blonde strand from her face, one of those highlighted pieces that brightens the dull mousy shade of her hair. "I need some gold to cover rent next month. But I won't stay overnight."

"Your mother gives you gold?" I blurt out the words with a rush of disbelief and shock. Her litalf mother, a fullblood, gives her—a kinta—gold to fund her life?

I find it all so strange, but also fascinating.

Eamon smiles. "Not all litalf parents are so awful."

I raise my brows and nod something slow and stupid.

"Oi! Can we get some fucking service or what?"

Three gazes swerve to the human man down the way, and each of us must look every bit fae in our glares alone, because he flinches as though we've all struck him with daggers and spears.

Then Bee curses under her breath, a word I would never speak without my face burning hotter than the sun, then steals the tray into her hands. She throws us both a withering look about the human man, and I smile.

Maybe she's not so bad.

Might have been different if I'd met her in our realm, if she'd stayed in the Light Court. I adore my Eamon so much and so much more. But sometimes I wouldn't mind having a female friend.

I wonder what sort of friend she would have made as I watch her approach the human men. And as we finish up our night in these lands, I wonder if I will ever have another friend who isn't Eamon.

I do worry.

I worry he will meet someone he loves and leave to be with them. I worry he might return to the dark lands and leave me behind or abandon me for a place in the Midlands.

I worry so much—and it all ends with me alone.

Maybe that's why I hold on so tightly. Too tightly, I suppose.

But Eamon doesn't complain, not even as we leave the bar and head back to the bridge, and I literally hold onto him with a vice grip. My hand is firm on his, fingers threaded, and my side pressed up against his, as though if I keep close enough then this strange, large and loud and bright human city won't devour me.

I think of Daxeel. My lost love. How you would hate this city. How you would further hate the humans for the stink of poison in the air—how I am so grateful to have loved you.

Maybe one day, you will love me again.