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“Sure, why not? They have portals. They also got stories, but they’re not so nice. The light fey were the ones the gods interbred with. The dark fey were the ones they experimented on. Guess who was treated better?”
I did not have to guess. Dory had dark fey friends who had fled to Earth, where they were thought of as monsters. Yet they had better lives there.
I looked up at the glimmering constellation, sailing across the heavens. It resembled a Viking ship, with a long body and a raised prow. But judging by what I’d seen today, I doubted it had looked like that at all. Probably a case of the fey interpreting the idea of a ship in a way that made sense to them.
Was that all the gods were? I wondered. Just space vagabonds looking for an opportunity, and finding it because of a happenstance of physics? Like a human walking on the moon could suddenly jump higher because of the difference in gravity.
“What if God was one of us,” Ray suddenly sang. “Just a slob like one of us?”
I laughed; I couldn’t help it. He always seemed to know what to say.
“And then Great Artemis’ spell banished the gods and blocked the breech behind them, preventing their return,” I said. “But it had to encompass Faerie as well, since the ley lines connected it to Earth. Thus, cutting Faerie off from the rest of the heavens.”
“Pretty much,” Ray agreed.
I watched the stars wheel above us. There were so many here, and so close. Maybe it was just the lack of light pollution, but it looked as if someone had pitched a great, glittery tent in the heavens.
One the fey could no longer reach.
I wondered what they thought, looking up at a sky cut off from them forever. At worlds they’d never visit, at a universe they would never explore. I couldn’t imagine what that must have felt like, to be suddenly so alone.
Or perhaps I could.
“I don’t know what I want,” I said to Ray.
Chapter Twenty-One
Dorina, Faerie
“That’s a cop out,” Ray said.
I frowned. Slang sometimes threw me. It was what came from having very few conversations over the years. “What does that mean?”
“It means that you don’t wanna tell me, so you’re evading the question.”
“I am not evading.”
“Look, I get it. You just don’t wanna talk about it. It’s okay—”
“I do not mind talking.”
Talking was strange after a lifetime filled with silence, but nice. I had discovered that I quite liked talking. It was so much easier to gather information that way, than by merely observing.
And yet it required putting into words concepts that did not always seem to fit.
“Then do it however you like,” Ray said. “We’re pretty simpatico mentally. Just send me the images.”
Yes, but of what? I thought. There was so much . . .
“I got nothing but time,” he pointed out.
I nodded, but then just lay there for a while longer, saying nothing. Pondering how to explain the thoughts and feelings I’d been having over the last few months. It felt odd to have someone ask.
It felt odder to want to answer.
“My life . . . isn’t mine,” I said slowly. “I live in the house of Dory’s friend. I do not have a house; I have never had one. I grew up in my father’s house, and since then, my sister has decided where we live.”
“But I thought you liked—”
