“Doesn’t look good for the fairies, does it?” said the controller, checking every corner of the dark room.
Valencia flung the heavy navy drapes open so they could see better. There was no sign of the fairies that had lived and worked there for the past seventy years. All their belongings remained.
“I can’t understand it. Where would they go? I don’t think even they know what happened. Why would they leave without taking anything with them?” She asked, rechecking the same corner for the fourth time.
“They’d have good reason to leave if they put poison in the fairy cakes - that only fairies are allowed by law to make,” said the controller.
“But why, though? Why do it?”
“Murder’s a funny thing, sometimes the ones you least think will do it - do it, and not always for a strong reason, either. Maybe they weren’t happy here?”
“They were happy, or they wouldn’t have stayed so long. These were their quarters. Yes, they baked fairy cakes every night, but they weren’t prisoners. Unlike some master bakers, I let them come and go as they please and they had as much food as they could eat, as well.”
“Sometimes it’s not enough. If the desire for something more, someplace else, burns deep enough it usually wins the argument. One day, something snaps and … we get a murder.”
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“I don’t believe it, not for a second. Fairies don’t murder people!”
“I’m afraid they do. Not very often, I’ll admit, but it has been known.”
“We don’t even stock that sickly lilac dye.”
“If they were free to go and get some … it’s looking likely they did just that. It’s not your fault. Fairies go rogue sometimes. You did your best.”
“I can’t … My fairies are murderers?” She said, spinning on her heel and feeling the room was like a hollowed-out hole without the happy, bustling fairies in it.
Usually when awake, the room was a hive of activity. Some would work on the various intricate stages of baking delicate wish slices and their signature fairy cakes. Some would collect the fragile, precious stardust off the raven flock, and some would do daily essential tasks like build up the oven fire, collect water, knit, sew, some would write – and all would sing.
Even when asleep, their snores created a melody that soothed the soul. Valencia loved to sit with a good spell book and a cup of honey coffee, listening to them.
Life without them seemed muted. A world of silence and stillness.
Valencia couldn’t bake many of her magickal products without the fairies - and fairies were hard to come by. Most were inherited - as hers were.
“This morning I had a successful business. I had fairies to bake for me. Now, I have no business and no fairies and all because a girl I’ve never seen before buys some cakes from here but eats someone else’s cake then gets poisoned by it. And everyone assumes this bakery has something to do with it. And I have no idea why any of this happened.”
“It’s likely the fairies put the other poisoned cakes on your counter. They had the opportunity, they were already in the building,” said the controller with the look of a man who felt confident he’d solved the murder single-handedly in one sentence.
Valencia couldn’t argue with that, but deep in her bones she knew it hadn’t happened that way. She had to find her fairies and bring them back and she had to clear their name – to clear her own.