“Here I thought you were going to pull out the strong stuff.”
Another tsk. “Don’t underestimate it. It may seem like kotikalja,48 but it will build on itself.” Esteri slid a glass to Avery.
Avery eyed it before picking it up to delicately clink her mug withEsteri’s, both of them chiming a hearty “Kippis!”49 before taking a drink. It was a welcome warmth, sweet to the taste and nostalgic.
“Fiore told me you met at the Irregulars’ grave.”
Avery’s gaze dropped and she nodded.
“You all right?”
“No.”
“They lived full lives.” Esteri tried to assure her. “Goodlives.”
“That’s not the point,” snapped Avery.
Esteri took a patient breath. “Tell me.”
A simple request, yet it lit such a blaze of irritation within her. The emotion became a knot in her mouth, unable to find its way to words. She growled and frenetically rubbed her face. “They were all I had.”
“Averoinen,” Esteri repeated the nickname, and Avery resented how tender it sounded.
She may have been younger, she may have been just a changeling coming to the advice of an Archfey, but she was not a child.
“This day was always going to come,” Esteri reasoned. “That’s the regrettable nature of mortality. You would have had to watch them pass, just as one day, though far from now, I will have to watch you.”
There it was. The words she’d been unable to find, the point she’d struggled to grasp. “But that’s just it, Essi, Ididn’tget to watch. I didn’t get to be there. They were barely more than kids then, but we werefamily. And now they’re just gone.” She stared into the deep rich color of the wine in her glass. “I have a single sketch in my home that Tilde drew, and that is all I have left. No goodbyes, no mementos… After two hundred years of nightmares, I’m struggling to remember what little I did have. Every time I try, all I can think about is what I would give to go back.” One admission led to others, intimate confessions that choked their way out of her. “I missthem. And I miss the life we had. It made sense to me. None of this makes sense to me now. It is loud and bright and yet still so in the dark about everything around it.”
For a long moment, Esteri remained silent. She took a long sip of her drink, then retrieved the decanter to pour them each more wine. “What do you want to know?”
It was a simple offer, but it was sincere, and Avery reciprocated with an equivalent answer. “What happened to them?”
Esteri leaned the heels of her palms against the edge of the bar, collecting her thoughts. “Thomas and Tilde finally told each other how they felt.” There was a slight roll of the eyes accompanied by a smile. “Got married. Had far too many children.Olivernever stopped the work—he and his partner Alec started their own agency to help the people the police laughed at. Made a small name for themselves as vampire hunters among the locals.”
Avery’s lips twitched, pleased by this.
“Isabella opened a little book and tea shop near Fleet Street. After she passed, the family sold it to make ends meet. It’s moved, but it’s still open, actually. Levine’s Book Sales & Trade, just outside Notting Hill.” Esteri considered her friend a moment, weighing the other information she had. “As for the world… You really did save us.”
Avery scoffed and drank her wine.
“He would have waged war on them. He might have reopened the gates to Faerie, but it would only be when our numbers had dwindled so the Aos Sí would feel forced to join.”
“One tyrant—our worlds are full of countless others.”
Esteri persisted. “Yet with him out of the way, the council chose to work together. They reached out to the other courts. Made a plan. Not to harm humanity, not to squash them for the path they would have set us on…but toguidethem.”
Thatgot Avery’s attention, though perhaps not in the way Esteri was hoping. Fey to mortal “guidance” did not particularly have the best historical track record—for humans, that is. Fey “guidance” had incited countlesswars and seen the end to kingdoms—Camelot and Troy among them. Fey guidance led to the disappearance of 130 children in Hamelin, Germany. Fey “guidance” fueled crusades and burned human witches. “What are you saying?”
“I’m sure you’ve noticed some changes… Technologies you wouldn’t have expected given the London you left behind.”
Avery remembered how surprised she’d been by the windmills, as well as the panels that absorbed sunlight and… What had Saga called them? Something to do with storing the kinetic energy of rainfall. Part of the…Green AgreementLahiri had mentioned. She sighed in realization and shook her head. All that she had been so proud of humanity for achieving, the result of the Court’s unseen machinations. “Methods that wouldn’t bring about the blight…”
“We chose more subtle methods of influence than the late Erlking would have us use,” Esteri explained.
“Bymanipulatingthem?”
“Gently leading them in the right direction,” Esteri corrected. “Things aren’t perfect, but I think you’ll agree they’re better. Better than they were, and better than they would have been.”
