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“There?”
“At the mill. What would you have done if you hadn’t . . . seen me?”
He thought about it for a moment. “Had a bath?”
“I’m serious!”
“So am I.” He picked up a bowl of little smoked fish and offered it to me, but I shook my head. I have a problem eating anything that is able to watch me do it. Pritkin apparently didn’t have that issue, crunching bones and all with apparent relish.
“Those damned fey ran me across half a mountain range!” he told me in between bites. “And used me for target practice besides. I finally lost them and made my way to the nearest source of water. It’s my element, and boosts spell casting. I had every intention of blending in and hiding out until I was sure they’d left. Sorry if that disappoints you,” he added, “but I had no intention of fighting them.”
“Hiding out is good,” I told him fervently.
He nodded. “Just my luck they were coming the same way.”
“Didn’t you expect them to be? There can’t be that many portals to faerie scattered around. If they were trying to get back—”
“They weren’t.”
“How do you know that?”
“When I met them, they were headed toward the city, not coming away from it.”
“The city? You mean . . . they were going to court?”
“Possibly.”
“Arthur’s court?”
Pritkin looked confused for a minute, and then he grinned. “Oh, Arth Aur.”
“That’s different?”
“It means ‘Golden Bear,’ in our language. It’s his nickname. He doesn’t like it much, but it fits him. Big and blustering and golden-haired—and dangerous. But a good man overall.”
“A good man who hangs out with the Svarestri?”
Pritkin shook his head. “That’s just it: he doesn’t. He has an alliance with another of the major fey houses, and you don’t get two of those!”
“But they were going to his court.”
“Probably.”
“With a weapon.”
“Definitely.”
“You think they planned to hurt him?”
“I have no idea what they planned,” Pritkin said. “I have no idea what they were even doing on earth. Rumor is that they despise the place, and everyone in it. I’d never even seen one of them before today.”
“Then how did you know who they were?”
He shrugged. “The way they looked.”
“They looked like men.”
“Did they?”
