“Mother,please,” Kol groaned into the table.
“I will spare you additional details,” Eyv went on with a light chuckle, “except to say that it is almost unheard of for elves to breed outside of our own kind regardless of our fertile seasons, and yet, Kolariel came into being.”
Piper pressed a hand to her chest, seeing the pride in Eyv’s otherwise stoic features. “Wow, you’re like a…a rainbow baby.”
“More like a mule.”
Piper clicked her tongue and placed her hand on his back, rubbing it. “Well, maybe, but mules are strong and smart and hardworking, right?” He remained face-down on the table, so she looked to Eyv for help.
“Kolariel’s spark was insistent, and so he is here in exactly the way the planes meant for him to be.” His mother reached out slender fingers and hesitantly pat the back of his head. The touch was light, but Piper could see affection in it even as she pulled back, so strange to have not learned after hundreds of years, but she supposed Kol had only been in Eyv’s life for a tiny fraction of its entire time.
Kol finally lifted his head. “And here I am, making promises to forest guardians I can’t keep and losing track of trees that should be rooted in the ground. The planes are really brilliant, aren’t they?”
“This is true,” she stressed, eyes narrowing. “How else might one explain two beings originating from disparate worlds and fated for such divergent lives finding one another?”
Kol shrugged. “Tequila?”
“Kolariel,” she said with the tiniest threat of frustration, “the circumstances under which your father and I met were extraordinary. Two beings, engaged in temporary recreation rather than their typical lives, intoxicated by a lack of responsibility? I know you are displeased with our choices, but our incongruities were not exactly a recipe for eternal happiness.”
Their food was delivered, breaking through the awkward moment, and Eyv’s eyes changed when a heaping and messy plate was placed before her. Very carefully she took up a fork and with a grace Piper could barely conceive of, began to eat the sloppy, fried food as if it were some otherworldly delicacy. They ate in silence for a few moments until Eyv pat at the corners of her mouth with a paper napkin to remove bits of food that weren’t even there. “I must, of course, inquire, Kolariel, what it is that called you to this human village during your winter holiday?”
Kol stuffed a forkful of fries into his mouth and chewed, and both women waited. “Tree,” he finally said.
His mother sipped at her milkshake, unblinking eyes never leaving him.
Kol hefted a sigh. “Okay, so, somehow I overlooked Everroot Grove’s alcyon spruce count. Jeb and the others didn’t turn it in, and they’re already done for the year, so I came to do it myself, found out one of the trees accidentally bonded to this one,”—he jerked his head toward Piper—“and I’ve been trying to figure out how to sever that so I can turn in my numbers with everything accounted for.”
Piper chewed her straw, eyes darting between the two. It wasn’t the whole story, but she could tell from Kol’s tight jaw that she wasn’t supposed to say anything more.
“That is all?”
“That’s it.”
Eyv’s lips drew down slightly. “Well, if you would like me to sever the bond while I am here—”
“I’ll do it myself.” Kol cut through the air with a French fry, chili dripping off it. “When I figure out which spell to use.”
She nodded, took a dainty sip, and then leaned in. “Number one hundred and sixteen should do it, but be sure to replace the ruby nightshade with sapphire.”
His jaw tightened further, but he eked out a believable, “Thank you,” anyway.
Piper sat uncomfortably in the tension for a long moment and then grabbed onto Kol’s arm. “Kol rescued me from a flock of hell geese!”
Eyv’s eyes slid from one of them to the other, and then Piper dove into in perhaps slightly embellished details about how brave, how skilled, and ultimately how kind to their aggressors Kol had been, and under her hand she could feel his muscles relaxing. He interjected more factual details, but Piper brushed them off, focusing instead on how frightening the pixies had been until he saved the day.
It was a little easier then to speak, and Eyv asked Piper polite if sometimes odd questions about herself and her family. Piper laughed through most of them, especially Eyv’s wonder that there are humans who devote their whole lives to studying trees—“arborists” she said with a reverence and a smile—until it led to the inevitable. “So, you are one hundred and ten seasons old, a third of your life,” Eyv confirmed, nodding to herself, “but you do not have a mate?”
As Piper tried to find a tactful way to explain, Kol broke in, “Mother, humansdon’tsay things like that to one another.”
“Actually they do. A lot,” Piper muttered.
“I am only clarifying that she is, in fact, an adult human, and she is not mated, Kolariel.”
The two stared at one another for a long moment, piercing eye meeting piercing eye. Kol snapped a few words in Elvish, and Eyv responded just as quickly, and then Kol announced that dinner was over, and they needed to return to Piper’s family.
They said a stilted farewell to Eyv at a tree behind the diner during which the elven woman looked to want to do more but only took one of Kol’s hands between her own and said something else in her dreamy language. Kol nodded, face going red, and he hurried her off before anyone could see the woman stepping into a tree.
Piper and Kol met up with the MacLeans just at the edge of Santa’s Village as they were preparing to leave. Kol wasn’t very talkative, but Piper kept herself nudged up against him when she could, and he seemed better for it. When they were finally in her room a few hours later, washed and ready for bed, Piper ventured, “I like your mom.”
