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“Something I feel confident you can do entirely on your own.”
“Mean.”
“That’s me,” I agreed in a cheerful tone. Hopefully she wouldn’t be miffed that I’d sent Sean packing. In an ideal world, she’d be so glad not to see him about that she wouldn’t care why he wasn’t. Even if she did find out and get annoyed, I didn’t regret the move for an instant. Life was too short to risk conversations with boneheads.
Larch returned with the blue-ringletted dragonfly girl. Her round lavender eyes dominated her heart-shaped pixie face. With anxiety giving them a dewy sheen and pinching her little bow-shaped lips, she could be right out of anime. She crumpled into a heap at my knee, begging to know how she’d displeased me.
“What did you say to the poor thing?” I asked Larch and he sighed, stoic as ever.
“That you wanted to ask her some questions, my lady sorceress—nothing more than that.”
“Why did you pick this one?” I peered dubiously at the pile of shivering ringlets and ostentatious weeping.
“Do you doubt my judgment, my lady?”
Frankly, at the moment, I did. But he had a point. I tugged one of the long powder-blue curls. “You haven’t displeased me, girlie. Sit up. I just want to ask you some things about the tributes.”
She obeyed immediately, tucking her slim little legs together and shaking her head so her hair tumbled around her girlish frame, Thumbelina come to life. I caught a flash of calculation from her, before she opened her eyes wider—more lilac than lavender—and gazed at me soulfully. Something about the deliberate guilelessness of her expression reminded me of Rogue when he worked to sucker me into one of his tricky bargains. A subtle flavor of his magic about her too. What had he said? That my magic had marked Starling as mine.
“What’s your name?”
“What you called me is fine, your magical powerful highness.”
“Yeah…not so much. How come none of you girls have names?”
“We don’t really need them until we serve a grand person like yourself. Until then we’re like blossoms in the field—all more or less alike.”
An astute explanation for a brainless blossom. Surely this was the one I’d pointed to, who Rogue and I had wished smarter. And now, as if one of his by-blows had come looking for him, here she sat, looking at me with much-too-canny lilac eyes and talking like me.
“So, Thumbelina, what do you know about my tribute collection? I’m looking to find out the origin of particular items.”
She slid a sideways look at Larch, who remained impassive. “I would never take anything, Lady Sorceress.” She said this with the tone of a vow, with a titch of guilt.
“Thank you, Larch. I think she’ll do nicely,” I told Larch, who bowed and discreetly withdrew. “You’ve been through it, haven’t you? There’s a reason Larch thought you might know where things came from.”
“I like to look. To see the pretty things. I always put them back.”
I caught an image from her mind, of looking through all the strange things and dreaming about their origins, while the other dragonfly girls giggled and danced. It had been a disservice, to make her smarter than the others. I’d thought improvement couldn’t cause too much harm, but our whim had yanked her, a lily of the field, from a life of blissful idiocy to one where a newly restless mind sought stimulation.
“Do you have a way of knowing where the things come from?”
“How would I?” She looked down, cagey.
“Starling—would you mind getting my grimoire from the carriage?”
Starling, who’d been listening to the conversation with great interest, jumped up much too quickly. “Sure! Actually I have to answer the call of nature—” she gave the phrase great significance, “—and will fetch it on my way back.” She walked off slowly, making a great show of whistling as if she had all the time in the world.
“Okay,” I told the petite fairy, “spill.”
She tilted her head and gave me that innocent wide-eyed look, then, assessing me, she cast it off like a mask. Her expression sharpened. Gone was the sweet waif, replaced by a shrewd and sharp miniature woman. Fluffy kitten to spitting alley cat in an imperceptible, instantaneous shift.
“I hold things in my hands and I just know.” She said it quietly for my ears only.
“Have you always been able to do this?”
“No. My kind—we don’tdomagic like that.”
“How did you find out you could?”
