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Goose leaned against my leg and never looked away from the Fae.

“Well, my golden friend, will you buy any goods?”

Green Man had wandered off and was already eyeing a book and a bow and with its lonely arrow.

“I don’t have any money,” I replied flatly, distrust swirling in my belly.

“Surely you do. All of you humans seem to always be flush with currency.” His goatlike eyes darted from Cora to me in confusion.

“Friend, the Fae don’t take dollars and pennies as money,” Rook offered, deciding to honor my wish not to give Pops my name, even my chosen name. “They’ve got two currencies. The older Fae, like Pops, only trade in sentiment. The tears of love lost. A teddy bear laced with fond childhood memories. A hair ribbon steeped in a young girl’s first heartbreak. The hook a fisherman used to catch the largest fish he’d ever caught and lost. Things like that. Some of the younger Fae, or the courtiers, buy and sell with baubles invested with stable magic.”

“So I could just go grab a rock from the river and say oh yes this is the skipping stone my dad taught me to skip stones with? And that would what, buy me a house?” I crossed my arms over my chest as I watched Rook skeptically. Goose sat down on my foot, his eyes never leaving Pops.

“Not entirely. The older Fae are sensitive to emotions. They can feel the power of strong emotion radiating off something.” Rook looked back to Pops who was also watching Goose. “As for stable magic, well. With the fall of the House of Magic, it went a little haywire. It’s why the Fae don’t use magic willy nilly anymore.”

“Oh, we still use it—we must—it’s just risky to do so. I could reach in to conjure a nice bouquet of roses and come back with a hand full of noodles. Or I could attempt to shield myself from attack with a shield made of an oak trunk, and my enemy’s arrows could pierce it through like it was nothing more than tissue paper because it was just the illusion of a shield and not a true one. Or I could seek to build a cairn from the stone around me, just a simple little dribble of magic. Yet, my entire essence explodes and instead of a cairn I have built an entire fortress, leaving me drained completely of magic and unable to live.” Pops shrugged. “So, we buy and sell with stable magic. Magic that has been distilled, controlled, compressed down until it is pure, devoid of will, and ready to be sculpted by whomever unleashes it.”

There was something unwholesome about the way that sounded. It felt wrong in every aspect. Magic was a living, breathing thing and should be just as capricious as the beings it had spawned. And yet they shackled it, enslaved it, just as sure as they had the humans around me. I frowned, thinking of the star-shaped beads stashed in the bag stuffed under our bed.

“But I’ve seen Fae use magic. Several times. None of them seemed to have any sort of issues controlling it. Just seemed like they willed it, and it happened. I thought that’s how magic was?”

“Oh, sure. Used to be. Used to be that any one of us could breathe into existence anything we could imagine. Nature, the cosmos themselves, were our playthings. But our connection to it was damaged when that abomination of Árus Láigh destroyed the source of our magic.”

“The House of Magic was what made all the magic in Magh Meall?”

Pops nodded. “Made, distributed, and fed all the magic in the entirety of the world. With it destroyed, we are all at its ghost’s mercy.” Pops pulled his gaze away from Goose finally and looked into my eyes, scrutinizing me even though his face was sweet and kind.

“So rebuild it? What’s the problem?”

A chuckle was my answer.

“Oh, dear, sweet, golden friend, if only it was so easy! None of us can even get near it! The ruins of the House of Magic are a wasteland. Any Fae that steps foot in their territories feels sick, and the closer they get to the ruins themselves, the more their bodies degrade and decay. It’s said that the last Fae who reached the bones of the old manor house melted the moment he touched one of the old stones.” The image of Chernobyl and its infamous Elephant’s Foot burst as a warning in my head, and Pops pushed on. “They say the witch goddess herself placed a curse on the land and the only one who can walk safely in its boundaries is her daughter, the Lady Sapphire Speaker.”

Annoyance. The Lady Sapphire Speaker was a fucking fraud. She was as much the heir to the House of Magic as I was the Ard Banríon. Who she really was, I had no idea, but the memory of her in the salon room that belonged to my rightful court, looking up at my parents like she missed them, still boiled my blood.

“Sounds like you guys are fucked then,” I grumped, dismissing the conversation about the House of Magic so that I wasn’t pulled down into it and reveal who I truly was. Green Man was staring at me, watching to see if at the first opportunity I would reveal who I was to this stranger of a Fae.

I really must have been acting like an absolute idiot while I found my footing at the palace. Telling Pops anything but the barest minimum of details would have been the ultimate stupid prize. Even if Cora and the humans in the village trusted him, I did not. There was something about him that felt false. Some itch in the back of my mind that whispered Rule #2: the sheep are just as deadly as the wolves. And this deer might be smiling with his glass teeth glinting in the sunshine, but he was definitely a wolf somewhere under there.

“Oh, I like her very much,” Pops said to Cora, drawing me out of my brood. “Do you plan on keeping her?”

“I’ve told you a hundred times Pops, the humans here are all here by their own choice.” Cora looked over at me. “She’s free to make that choice for herself any time she’d like.”

Pops turned his attention back to me and snickered. “Yes, yes, it was only a figure of speech. Tell me, golden friend, will you stay?”

“I haven’t decided yet.”

“Well, will you at least buy some goods? I’m sure you have plenty of sentimental pieces. Perhaps a lover’s token? I’m sure you have hundreds of them.” His gaze raked me up and down, and the knife buried in my chest twisted to remind me just how few “lover’s tokens” I actually had. All I had was the book I had stolen from him. Nothing more.

My mind raced back to the bag. Everything in it was irreplaceable. Nothing I could give him would be something I could walk away from. Every single piece I had liberated from the palace would leave an even larger hole in my heart.

But the beads.

“I think I have something to trade with.” I said to Green Man. “Did you find something you wanted?”

“Cookbook. And this bow and arrow could probably come in handy too. Got anymore arrows?”

Pops smiled wide and leaned in toward him. “Shamefully, it is but the one. You will need to be clever and skillful with it. Are you clever and skillful?”