Ballad: A Gathering of Faerie

“Why are you looking at me?” Sullivan asked. Both of us were.

“Because I get this feeling that you are the most informed about faeries at this table,” I said. “Which is pretty incredible, considering present company.”

He sighed. “I spent seven years with Them, so I should be pretty informed. I was a consort to one of the queen’s ladies.”

There were plenty of faeries he could’ve meant, but somehow I only thought of one. Nuala and I were apparently on the same wavelength, because she said, “Eleanor.”

“I don’t want to know how you know,” Sullivan said. “Tell me it’s not because you saw me with her.”

“No,” Nuala replied. “Why, were you besotted?”

Sullivan rubbed harder at the wrinkle between his eyebrows. He looked at me. “Anyway, in seven years you can learn a lot, if you’re paying attention. I found out when I was with Eleanor that nobody was looking at me. So I got to pretty much look where I wanted to. And I didn’t like what I saw. Them using humans to kill other humans. Black magic. Rituals that would make your toes curl. Humans losing themselves to just … just … soulless pleasure. Nothing had any meaning there, for me. No time. No consequence. No … the worst was what They did with human children.”

He didn’t shudder, exactly. He just sort of half-closed his eyes and looked away for a moment. Then he looked back at me, at my arm. “You have a mosquito on your arm.”

I slapped in the direction of his gaze and checked my hand. Nothing.

Sullivan’s voice was tired. “That’s what we are to Them, to the court fey—that’s what I found out. We’re not an equal race. Our suffering means nothing to Eleanor and the rest of them. We’re nothing at all.”

Nuala said, “The court fey, maybe. Not us solitary fey. Not me.”

Sullivan raised an eyebrow. “Really? You didn’t want to make a deal with James at all? You were just filled with the milk and honey of friendship?”

I wanted to defend her, even though I knew he was right. I’d been just another mark to Nuala when we met. But I was just as guilty, wasn’t I? Because she’d only been another faerie to me.

Nuala just looked at him, lips jutted a little.

“Look,” I said. “I realize that both of you could happily strangle each other across the table, but I don’t think that’s the most effective use of our time, and frankly, I don’t think I have enough money to tip the waitress for that kind of clean-up. And look, here’s lunch. Let’s eat that instead of each other.”

After the waitress had left the sandwiches and we’d rotated them looking for the one without mayo on it, I asked again, “So why does she need to eat now? If it’s not because she’s not taking anything from me—which is what you said before—then what is it?”

Sullivan picked the lettuce out of his sandwich with an unconsciously curled lip. “I’m just telling you that she ought to be fading—getting more invisible—if she’s not taking anything from you. And if anything, she looks even less … ethereal than she did when I last saw her.” Nuala looked about to protest, so he added quickly, “I saw your sister fading between victims, once.”

Nuala shut up. She didn’t just shut up, she went totally quiet. Like a total absence of sound, movement, blinking, breathing. She was a statue. And then she just said, real quiet, “My sister?”

“You didn’t know you had—well, I guess you wouldn’t, would you?” Sullivan worried the tomatoes out of his sandwich and laid them in a careful pile that didn’t touch the lettuce. “Of course, she didn’t look like you when I saw her—since you can look like anything. But she was a leanan sidhe as well. I wouldn’t have thought you were related if Eleanor hadn’t told me. Same father. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you.”

The last bit seemed a little incongruous with his previous attitude toward her. Maybe her struck silence had softened him.

“There are two of us?”

“Both called by the same names,” Sullivan said. He looked at her as if this was supposed to mean something to her. “Overhills. As in, the opposite of under hill. As in, human. It wasn’t a nice term.”

“Wait,” I said. “So They called Nuala human?”

I didn’t think I’d put any hopefulness in my voice, but Sullivan said quickly, “Not literally. Only because the leanan sidhe spent so much time with humans and often looked like them. Even picked up human habits.”

I thought of Nuala sitting in the movie theater, imagining herself as a director. Very human.

I realized that Sullivan was staring at Nuala and turned to look at her. She had her eyes closed and one of her more wickedly pleased smiles on her face. In her hand was a half-eaten chip.

“I told you you’d like chips,” I told her.

Nuala opened her eyes. “I could survive on nothing but them.”

“You’d be four hundred pounds in no time.” Sullivan swallowed a bite of sandwich. “I’ve never seen one of Them eating human food. Well, there are stories of some of the diminutive sorts eating beans and things like that, though I’ve never seen it. But—when did you start eating human food? Do you remember the first time?”

The memory of sucking a grain of rice off Nuala’s lip made my stomach kind of twist.

“James gave me some of his rice. A few days ago.”

Sullivan narrowed his eyes and ate several more bites of sandwich to aid his thought process. “What if it’s a reverse of what happens to humans in Faerie? It’s pretty well known that if you eat food offered to you in Faerie, you’ll be trapped there forever. I’ve never heard the reverse said for faeries and human food, but I can’t think of many situations where a faerie would be in the position to accept food from a human anyway. Except, of course, for the lovely, ulcer-causing scenario you two have developed for me.”

“I can’t become human,” Nuala said. Her voice was fierce, either with anger or despair.

Sullivan held up a defensive hand. “I didn’t say that. But you have a dual nature anyway. Maybe you’re just swaying toward one or the other. James.”

I blinked, realizing he was addressing me. “What?”

“Paul already told us he hears Cernunnos every evening. You remained tactfully silent on the subject but I had my suspicions.”