RYAN. STORY TIME.

Megan chuckled, shame and nervousness wrapped in the sound. “Yeah, I guess I have,” she said, color touching her cheeks. She looked at her sandwich, then back up at them. “Well, what have you guys been up to, then? You said you’ve been visited by members of the Gentry’s Courts?[1] For real?”

[1] The Gentry is the most frequently used Fredonian term for the nobles of the courts of Faerie, the mystical otherworld which was home to the Fae. WIzards like to call them the Archfae, but most people have better sense than to do anything that might offend the most powerful of all the Good Neighbors. (The denizens of Faerie are often called the Good Neighbors, again, in the hopes of not offending them, though they are that only in comparison to the Beasts, and it’s never really a term used when speaking about only the Unseelie courts, who are mostly pretty bad neighbors.)

“Well, vassals,” Angie replied, then she equivocated, “I mean, it was some summer pixies and a rat-headed kobold, so it’s not, like, that amazing. No actual Gentry. Not even an elf.” Ryan couldn’t help his nose wrinkling at the mention the pixies. “And that is, we saw the kobold during the autumn, so we assume it was a rat-headed kobold and thus an Autumn vassal, but still.”

“That’s still amazing!” Megan said. “What happened?”

“With which one?!” Angie said, laughter burbling up out of her as she did so. “They weren’t all together. Oh, and I met this storm owl last Spirit’s Feast, and I’ve got a salamander tail, but those aren’t Court connected.”

Megan’s eyes were bugging out a little. “What now? Wouldn’t a salamander tail be made of fire?”

“Kinda. It sort of crystallizes,” Angie said, “But if you hold your thumb just right, you can put it on a big candle and it’ll start to burn again, and it burns the candle wax at, like, halfish the rate of a normal flame. Really useful if you’re using a nice candle. And you can grab it back off and it crystallizes again.”

“Maybe you can,” Megan said, pursing her lips. “I’m not going to try.”

“Hmm. Fair point,” Angie replied, blinking. “I hadn’t really considered that.”

Ryan blinked in surprise and peered at his girlfriend. “Wait, what, really?” he said. “You don’t see me grabbing that thing. Or feeding my nail clippings and hairbrush leavings to it.”

“Good way to get rid of potential mystic links[1],” Angie said. “And it’ll help the little guy grow.”

[1] A term of art in magical fields of study—it is much easier to impose a magical effect on a subject from a distance if one has an integral piece of the subject to use as part of the casting (which is to say, something that used to be part of the subject, such as a piece of brick out of a structure’s wall, or a person’s blood, hair, or nail clippings).

“I thought we were talking about a tail,” Megan said, her tone and countenance equally baffled.

“Because people are so likely to be targeting you with hostile magic after digging your nails out of the trash,” Ryan said. “Happens all the time these days. You don’t think that being able to use a salamander tail as a candle flame is unique to you?”

“My mom showed me that it was possible,” Angie said, in her pointing-out-the-obvious voice. “So not exactly unique.”

“Rare then, exclusive to you McMillans and similar magical folks,” Ryan said, trying not to let it come out sounding snide, with mixed success. At least, he certainly could have sounded snider, so Angie’s eyes only flashed a little.

“Maybe don’t need to be too high and mighty, Ryan,” Megan said, her eyes flashing a little too. “I don’t hear about you talking to birds and grabbing salamander tails. It’s easy to think that you’d figure out magic right away if you had it, but—”

Ryan couldn’t stop laughter from bursting out of him at that. Angie laughed too, a half second after he started, her giggle melodic as the birds she talked to, and hearing her laugh made Ryan laugh harder, and soon they were draped over each other, no control over their laughter.

“Guys,” Megan said unhappily after an indistinct number of moments. “People are starting to stare.”

Ryan caught control of himself, and he looked up at Megan, tears blurring his vision. “I apologize, Megan,” he managed to sort of wheeze. “That was so rude of us. No, you certainly don’t hear about that, do you?” Came out suspiciously insincere sounding, but what can you do?

“Well now I feel like you aren’t telling me something,” Megan said, her eyes narrowed and her expression flat.

“Of course,” Angie said between chuckles. “Ryan doesn’t tell anyone about anything personal.” Ryan wrinkled his nose at her as she continued, “We were dating I think six days before, uh, um, context clues in what I was saying to Evan... when I was over the next Saturday, so six days, finally informed him of the fact. Evan. Of the fact that Ryan and and I were dating. That got away from me. Words are hard.” Megan giggled.

Angie shook her head, presumably at herself, and continued. “Ryan sure hadn’t mentioned it. Though, the fact that we’d gone out for dinner without him on my fifteenth birthday, which was on a Sunday, apparently didn’t clue him in.”

While Ryan muttered, “I’d figured it was obvious,” Megan leaned in, clutching the remains of her vada pav under her chin, and said, “Oh my spirits, tell me about that! How thrilling!” The sandwich popped out of its wrapper up into the air, but Megan snatched it back out of the air as it dropped, getting one hand all vada pavy.

“If it’s all the same I’d rather not,” Angie said, giggling at Megan’s unintentional physical comedy routine. “It was a nice time for us, that’s all. You were asking about spirits and stuff?”

“Aw,” Megan said, looking at her slightly squished sandwich with an air of disappointment. “Sure, I guess that’s cool too.” She turned her attention back to Angie. “How did you end up with a salamander’s tail, then? And what was that about getting it to grow?”

“A salamander appeared in my enchantment kiln back in April, a little after my birthday,” Angie said. “They do that sometimes. Just appear in fires, especially when magic is being done nearby. So I tried to catch it and it dropped its tail, like salamanders do, and I ended up with a crystallized tail and no salamander.” She shook her head. “I should have just addressed it politely. Anyway, the tail will grow into another salamander if it’s fed enough. In the meantime I’ve fashioned this little clip that I can attach to it and wear it in my hair when I’m not using it as a candle flame.”

“O-kay,” Megan said, sounding less than impressed by the idea. “You wear a tail in your hair.”

“It looks less like a tail than like crystallized fire,” Ryan said. “It’s quite becoming.”

Angie smiled at him. “Thank you, Snow.”

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“Snow?” Megan asked, delight in her tone.

“He doesn’t like Snowball,” Angie said before Ryan could interject, “And I tried Icicle for a little while, but it’s not a very good pet name. It kind of sounds like an insult, like I’m calling him frigid.”

Ryan made a face. “Let’s keep talking about spirits, huh?”

“Okay, sorry,” Megan said. “Okay, tell me about the other things!”

“Just all of them?” Angie said with another little chirping laugh. “Not a tall order or anything. Well, I guess chronologically, we ran into the pixies last summer, between eighth and ninth. I was out in Bridal Trails looking for sticks and branches that would be good candidates for making wands to help out my mom. I’d dragged the boys along with me to keep me company.

“We’d been almost all the way around the dumb park,” Angie continued, “Which took hours, and had found one candidate, but my mom wanted at least five of the dang things. I was starting to be afraid we’d have to get deeper into the park, which I didn’t want to do, and I said so out loud.”

Angie made a zooming, flying motion with her hand and flew it above Ryan’s head. He only flinched a little. “And this pixie,” Angie continued, “Just flew out of nowhere and landed on Evan’s head. Just took a seat and started kicking his feet, like a little kid on too-tall of a seat. Only he’s kicking his feet right between Evan’s eyebrows, which Evan doesn’t, you know, love.”

“I’d imagine not,” Megan said, her expression and tone solemn, her eyes focused elsewhere, picturing what Angie was describing.

“And he just goes, ‘Whyyyy?’ at me, like a toddler” Angie said. “So I told him that we were looking for potential wands, and he called a couple friends of his and within like ten minutes we had twenty-five good ones that they’d collected just from the immediately surrounding area.”

“And then, in payment,” Ryan said, finishing his ramen, “We had to spend four hours of my life that I’ll never get back having a tea party. Not with the pixies, but with the pixie’s human-sized, hyper-realistically carved, unpainted wooden marionettes. Which they expected us to converse with, even though they were hovering right there a meter above the marionettes, puppeteering them while failing to manage any semblance of actual ventriloquism.” He shook his head. “Never experienced anything that was both that creepy and that annoying at the same time.”

“Well,” Angie said, an apologetic expression gracing her visage. “There was that. But we didn’t have to find the wands ourselves. Better than working for it?” She was now on her last cinnamon roll.

“We definitely worked for it,” Ryan replied. “I would argue we worked much harder than if we’d just searched.”

“Maybe you did,” Angie said. “I kinda had fun. It was weird, no doubt, but it could have been worse.”

“Yes, it sure could have!” Ryan said, feeling agitated. “That’s a truth-fact!”

“Oh shush,” Angie said. She leaned toward Megan across the table, reached out and elegantly touched her on the wrist with two fingers. “Ryan doesn’t like it when I deal with the Fae,” she said, in an exaggeratedly confidential tone.

“That’s because it’s crazy dangerous,” Ryan said, aiming for darkly. “You’re lucky you haven’t ended up a Fae-bound slave, or that that tea party didn’t last for four-hundred years.”

“It was just a few pixies. I can tell the difference between a pixie and elves, you baby,” Angie replied.

Megan had a strange look on her face, wonder and apprehension warring across her sweet features. “That sounds like it was amazing, despite Ryan’s grouching, but he’s not wrong, Angie. That’s why we have Faerie tales, to warn us about the Fair Folk.”

“Well, also to make Dorsney billions of dollars,” Ryan said, “And in the process give everyone in Fredonia unrealistic expectations for love and romance.”

“Yes, and that I suppose, but that’s not really what we were talking about,” Megan said, giving Ryan an exasperated look. To Angie she continued, “Well, I’m kind of jealous. You…” she trailed off, reading something in Angie’s face. “What about the kobold then? I somehow doubt it was as fun as a pixie tea party.”

“Significantly better, actually,” Ryan said.

“Yeah, it was kind of nice, just really confusing,” Angie said. “Last autumn, we were out for a run just after daybreak, when there’s not too many people out, and we were sort of on the outskirts of Bridal Trails where there would be even fewer people, and—”

“All three of you?” Megan asked, glancing between Angie and Ryan.

“Yeah, Evan and I dragged Ryan along,” Angie said. “We manage to do that like once every couple a weeks.”

“Running’s just such a time commitment,” Ryan said, wrinkling his nose. “Put on workout clothes, then go for the run, which sucks, then because you’re all sweaty and tired it’s hard to even take the workout clothes back off, then you gotta shower—”

“I get it. I don’t like running either,” Megan said, smiling a sweet smile despite cutting him off. Ryan was a little annoyed, but supposed he’d probably made his point.

Angie continued as if she hadn’t been interrupted. “And we were just starting to head back toward the Grove, when a manhole cover like ten meters ahead of us pops up off of its hole and this kobold starts climbing out of the hole. You know much ‘bout kobolds?”

“Um, a little,” Megan said, hesitant. “There’s the four kinds right? Rat-headed, dog-headed, um, lizard-headed… and… and…”

“Stoat-headed. Or weasel-headed, but most people say stoat. Yeah, and they belong to the autumn, spring, summer, and winter courts, respectively,” Angie replied, nodding, “But I’m here to tell you, it’s not really that clear looking at them. Like, this guy had a pretty elongated face, with some fairly rodent-like nostrils, but the jaw was dog-like, and the eyes were lizard-like, unblinking, just that lizard blink with the weird membranes. And his hands looked pretty scaly, but there was this, uh, sparse, fine, long hair growing from between the scales, and like…” she shook her head. “He was wearing a waistcoat, old-fashioned trousers, boots, and gaiters.”

“I’ve never really been sure what gaiters are,” Megan said, blushing a little.

“I didn’t know what they were until I asked Ryan about what those things were,” Angie said, with a sly smile and a wink at Ryan. He winked back. “They’re like little boot and pant covers, sorta up to the knee. I guess some people riding horses or mules might use them rather than long riding boots or chaps.”

“Oh yeah, I think I know what you’re talking about,” Megan said, nodding and beaming.

When Megan had beamed like that when they were kids, it seemed like more than half her whole face had been taken up by that grin. Ryan’d found it cute, charming, even infectious, sometimes, when she was laughing at some dumb thing one or another of them had said. Everyone had.

Now, it transformed her from pretty to radiant. Ryan was taken off-guard, a catch in his breath. He briefly felt guilty and then dismissed that—Megan was too much a sister to tease for him to really be attracted to her. She was beautiful, but not his type.

Nonetheless, Ryan abruptly recognized, where he hadn’t before, that she was literally breath-taking now. It was an unsettling, disorienting epiphany. He didn’t understand how he hadn’t recognized it before. It ought to have been impossible not to. He actually felt dizzy. He found himself suddenly shocked that she was single.

Angie, too, had gone silent for a moment when Megan beamed, but she finished whatever her own thoughts had been and continued. “So the kobold climbed out of the sewer as we all stumbled to a stop like five meters away from him. He was humming a… I think a Beat-Nicks[1] song?”

[1] One of the first rock acts to get mega-famous across the whole of multiple continents, The Beat-Nicks were a band composed of Nick Lennon, Nick McCartney, Nick Harrison, and Ringo Starr (the stage name of Nick Starkey).

“It was ‘Hard Day’s Night,’” Ryan supplied, trying not to seem thrown. “Also I don’t think kobolds have gender the way we think of it.”

“Yeah,” Angie replied with a nod. “That was it. Also, really?”

He nodded.

She shrugged. Then she frowned at him. “You okay?”

He nodded, which was a lie. The change was still there. It persisted even now that Megan wasn’t smiling. But she didn’t look different at all. She just—his perception had shifted, somehow. He saw that she was extraordinarily beautiful, now, when he hadn’t noticed it before. How the fuck hadn’t he noticed it before?

Why the fuck hadn’t he noticed it before?