“Sorry I dropped it,” said Ceri.
He laughed. “I forgive you for dropping the tea while you were busy saving my life.” He handed her the cup, warning her it would be hot.
Ceri pulled the cup to her lips, blowing on it. She could have cooled it with magic, but it would be pushing it under the circumstances. She braved a sip.
“It’s delicious,” she said, looking at Leo in surprise. She felt instantly better. It was amazing how much the simple comforts of a warm blanket and a good cup of tea could improve almost any situation.
“A family recipe,” said Leo. “Lavender, lemon, and honey.”
“Are you close to your family?” asked Ceri. In truth, she was already feeling well enough to go inside, but she wasn’t quite ready to give up the comforts of the blanket and the tea.
Leo tilted his head, grimacing. “No, I wouldn’t say that. They are a bit—how do you say it?” He searched for the Loegrian word. “Unconventional. Different, even in Gallia, which is much more accepting of other ways of life than here.”
“How so?”
Leo reached into his pocket and pulled out a smaller hip flask. “I’ll need something a bit stronger if I’m going to talk about this,” he said.
“You don’t have to,” said Ceri, but now she was extremely curious. She held out her cup.
Leo smiled at her and tipped in the flask before taking a swig. “Wilderisen whisky,” he said. He started to speak but took one more swig first. “I told you I have no title. It’s not because my parents aren’t nobility—they are. But they’ve had too many children to pass on titles to each of us.”
This wasn’t uncommon. Like the Loegrian court, most courts gave lesser titles to the children of a noble until there were no further titles to give. Most ran out by the third or fourth child, and many couples had more children than that. “How many siblings do you have?”
He sighed. “Forty-one.”
Ceri nearly choked on her whisky-laced tea. “Forty-one children?”
“Er, well, forty-two including me. Those are my full siblings. If you count half siblings, it’s sixty or so still living. We think…”
He trailed off.
“I don’t understand,” said Ceri. “I mean, I can see you’re a full elf, and I know you live a long time—”
“My parents are over one thousand years old,” said Leo. “And my mother loves children. Every twenty years or so, she has another one. My parents are married, but a thousand years is a long time. There have been others. Sometimes several of them at once. Always with permission, never in secret. Sometimes it’s so romantic it's nauseating.”
This was so far from the world Ceri had grown up in, she didn’t know where to start. “I have so many questions.”
“I’m not surprised,” said Leo. “Go ahead.”
“You said you weren’t close. Is it just because there are so many of you? Do you even know all of their names?”
“Of course I know their names. Not all of the half-siblings, but that’s because some of them were gone before I was born. But no, that’s not why we aren’t close. Truthfully, I never quite fit in at home. My parents are all about free love and living in harmony with nature. They haven’t fit in within Gallic society for several generations, not even with most of the other elves. They live in a commune for free-thinkers, and I don’t know. I guess I wasn’t born to think freely. They sent me to Gallic schools—the first in the family to go in centuries. But I didn’t fit there either.Like I said, Gallia has turned its back on magic. But look at what you can do. It seems equally insane to me to deny the reality of that as it does to deny the benefits of science and technology.”
“So you’re from two worlds, but you’ve never fit in with either,” said Ceri. “Like me.”
“Like you?”
Ceri took a deep sip from the cup. The whisky made it even warmer. She didn’t know if it gave her courage, but at least it gave her some comfort. “My mother left us.”
Leo didn’t look surprised. He’d never heard the fiction they’d spun about the queen’s absence.
“It wasn’t her fault, not really. She tried to take us with her when I was a baby, but my father wouldn’t let her. We went to see her during the summers until a few years ago when my father stopped allowing that too.”
“I’m sorry,” said Leo. “That must have been hard.”
“My mother is from the Far East—Formosa, they call it here. But I don’t know her language. I knew some of it when I was little, but when she left and my brother went away to university, I lost it. The last time I visited, I could only speak to people who knew Loegrian. To them, I was Loegrian.”
“But to Loegrians, you’re Formosan.”
