Chapter 6 In Which We Experience Community Theater #2
More silence.
I glanced from the Princeling to Sahir, expecting some sort of punishment.
But the Princeling seemed to have forgotten his anger—or he’d never really been angry.
“It is done, then,” he said, nodding once at Sahir.
He looked around the room. “I have ridden out today, and visited my people on the river reaches. My Red Knight has letters and news, from those who wished to share messages.”
The Princeling swept forward, the others behind him like a flock.
Still in disbelief at seeing my coworkers actually worried about me, I tried to reset my brain with something else.
My eyes landed on the Princeling’s legs; his leggings hugged his calves.
I bet that guy can ride a horse, I thought, because I grew up with internet access and Regency romance fan fiction.
I followed his legs up to his muscular thighs and the edge of his tunic.
Maybe faeries chose their rulers based on who could throw a log the farthest. He definitely had the thighs for it.
And oh my god, my brain needed a muzzle. I looked away as he passed me.
The Gray Knight, who had caught me looking, smirked.
As the Princeling passed each table, faces turned to follow him. The Red Knight left the group and stationed himself by the door, a stack of papers in his hand. A few of the faeries at the near tables stood up and made their way toward him.
The Princeling’s retinue approached the buffet counter, and Sahir came up beside me.
“What—” I started, but he took my wrist and squeezed in a way not conducive to my health.
I yipped. He stared at my face with such intensity I almost thought I could read his mind. Later, his eyes said. Or I want soup. I couldn’t entirely tell.
Though I was tempted to ask anyway—it couldn’t get more dangerous for me, right?—I held off. Instead, I jerked my head toward the food. His fingers loosened on my wrist, a bracelet instead of a manacle. We walked together to the buffet.
This time, the first faerie gave me a plate of stew over a ruffled brown grain that might have been rice, if I squinted.
The second pushed a bisected bowl toward me: half roasted vegetables, half salad.
And the third, grinning with those blue eyes like lamps in his golden face, plopped a slice of cake as big as my forearm onto my tray. I stared at him. He stared at me.
“Lady,” he said, in what sounded like a southern brogue.
“Thanks,” I said.
“Do not thank people,” Sahir snapped, and led me to a table full of strangers.
When we approached, the table went silent. Sahir and I slid onto the last two empty stools. He slammed his tray down so hard his stew slopped into his salad. This was remarkably restrained, given the day he’d had.
I looked away from him, at our other tablemates: a cluster of sharp-faced people with naked curiosity in their eyes.
Most of them had a humanoid skeletal structure, but there was at least one faerie with six limbs, another who looked like a giant sea squid, and one who was most definitely on fire but calmly eating the salad.
“Hello,” I said, because everyone was staring at me.
This sent a wave of titters and squeaks around the table.
I glanced at Sahir, who had gripped a fork with fervor and was trying to eat his stew with it.
Instead of picking up a spoon, he flicked his pointer finger down the stem of the fork, and the wooden tines wove together into a teaspoon-sized basket.
“You have to teach me how to do that,” I said, awed.
“Humans cannot do magic,” one of the faeries at the table said. “Except for witches, but they have been gone a long time.” I looked up. She was smaller than most of the others and had reflective feline eyes with slit pupils. Her face was furry. “Did you really ask for your cat?”
“I’m Miri,” I said, refusing to eschew good manners in the face of adversity. “It’s nice to meet you.”
“Why,” groaned Sahir next to me, in the tones of a man having an unmedicated appendectomy, “why must humans lie in greeting?”
“It’s not a lie,” I said, looking at the cat lady. “It’s a pleasantry. It’s a way of expressing gratitude for your time and conversation.” I almost asked for her name but remembered the Gray Knight’s explanation. “How should I address you?”
“You may call me Lene,” she said. “But tell me truly, for you have been here but one rotation of the Earth upon its axis. Did you ask for your cat?”
“Yes. I was worried no one would feed him,” I said, looking down at my tray. I stuck my fork in the cake, ignoring the healthy-looking options. How many times is a girl kidnapped into Faerie, anyway? I deserved cake.
“I had heard humans could not eat cake,” said the man next to Lene. “Or they would grow horns.”
I paused, fork in the air. The man next to Lene was on fire. I took my cue from the other people at the table and didn’t worry about it.
“You will not grow horns,” Sahir said to me, “as that is anatomically impossible.” My fork resumed its course toward my face.
Lene stretched a hand out and touched my forearm, stilling me. “It is unusual to grow horns,” she said.
Since faeries couldn’t lie, either they’d been on the receiving end of a baffling disinformation campaign or I was about to be the coolest human I knew.
“Gaheris,” Sahir said to the cake-horn-man who was on fire, “even you, who remember no sciences, should know it is anatomically impossible for a human to grow horns from eating cake.”
“I do magic,” Gaheris said, and wiggled a bone-white hand in my direction. Even with only that gesture I could tell he had an inhuman number of bones. “I could enchant the cake.”
I couldn’t help it. I smiled at Gaheris, who looked as pleased as a man who looks like two bushfires had a baby with a beech tree could possibly look. The flames licking up the sides of his head shot out as he smiled back at me, and Lene yelped, her claws digging into my forearm.
“I did not enchant the cake,” Gaheris assured me.
“Thanks.” I pulled my arm out from under Lene’s hand, in no small amount of pain.
I stuck a forkful of cake in my mouth. It tasted fresh, and more like a sweet bread than a dessert. No one said anything. I took another bite.
Silence. Every eye remained focused on me. My cake consumption continued apace.
“So, what do you do? All of you,” I added around a mouthful of cake, because the entire table was motionless.
“This is another human question,” Sahir said, like my own personal and worse David Attenborough. “A greeting like the first, which assumes employment in some meaningless repetitive task or debauchery with wine and dancing to be the only options.”
Too tired to argue, I ate a bite of stew. Despite a startling variety of shapes and colors, everything had the texture of a boiled potato.
“We are Fae,” Lene said. “Sometimes I sit in the trees and watch below me for those that come and go.”
“I sing to the rivers,” said Gaheris, which didn’t seem to mesh with his appearance. Don’t judge a book by its cover, I reminded myself. When he saw my raised eyebrow, he added, “So they do not forget their path.” As if that were the explanation I required.
“I scream in the courtyard at irregular intervals,” offered a third—the one with two extra arms protruding from his midsection.
I blinked. “Why—what purpose does that serve?”
“Purpose?” The faerie had a very human face, a snub nose and brown eyes and brown hair, and behind his back long green wings folded down like a cicada’s. “I like to do it.”
We blinked at each other in mutual bafflement.
“Eat,” Sahir muttered to me. I shoveled another huge bite of stew into my mouth. Though texturally deficient, it was warm and thick and very comforting.
“We will leave you, Lady of the Cats,” Lene said. She rose, as did several of the others. “But if I may, I would like to visit you.”
“Please do,” I said, “but please don’t call me Lady of the Cats. It’s not, uh, it’s not got great context.”
“Apologies,” Lene said. “I hope I did not give you the name of some great sorceress, dead for her misdeeds but much feared in life. Please tell me if I did this.”
Since this seemed oddly specific, and also to give her great joy, I didn’t say anything else.
Our table was depleted but not empty. None of the remaining faeries seemed interested in engaging with us.
“Sahir, I have a lot more work,” I said, sticking my fork into the stew. “Can we bring the rest back to the room?”
“We do not eat outside this hall,” Sahir said. “Roaches,” he clarified when I stared at him. “They’re better than most at getting beneath the hill.”
With that reassuring thought, I plowed through several bites of stew, shoved the tray away, and stood up. “I’m going back,” I said. “I’ll see you tomorrow, I guess.”
Sahir grunted and didn’t look up. An auspicious start to our relationship as a knight and his lady.
Four hours later, I knelt on the cold stone of the bathroom, one hand on my work computer keyboard and the other clutching the rim of the toilet. The noise of the constantly running waterfall shower—which I’d come to find soothing—was an unyielding soundtrack to my pain.
I retched again and then tapped the spacebar so the computer didn’t lock, turning my head to look at the PDF open on the screen.
Food poisoning on day one didn’t bode well. Nor did the little voice in my head whispering poison, yes. I wondered if the Princeling would consider food poisoning harm, and if this meant he had broken his promise.
Doctor Kitten had perched on the toilet tank to supervise proceedings.
I gagged against the imagined feeling of hands clawing up my diaphragm but made myself read another sentence.
Vampire founders are performing well in the lifestyle sector, I read, and vomited so violently it came out my nose. Blood-based health and wellness treatments are wildly popular, and the new ruling that the FDA won’t need to approve them will only accelerate this trend.
The bile burned my nostrils as it dripped into the toilet. It smelled like cake. I took a shallow breath through my mouth. The shower continued to tinkle musically.
We are following 8 of the most promising vampire-founded startups and have reviewed them below.
I heaved again.
Jeff wanted a report by midnight. I had no idea how I would type. I couldn’t stand. But his email had been clear.
Miri, read the latest equity reports and come up with 2-3 targets for origination by end of day. Jeff.
Why he’d asked me and not Corey, who had absolutely nothing to do, I couldn’t say.
I slid onto my stomach on the floor and opened the email reply box.
Jeff, it looks like there are three targets that haven’t worked with a big bank yet, I started, and had to lever myself up to vomit again. What had happened?
Unbidden, the cafeteria workers’ faces came to mind. Had one of them poisoned me? The angry one, or the friendly one, or the indifferent one in the middle?
I sagged back to the ground and tapped out a few sentences.
Bloods and Bruises—EV 400m, EBITDA 22E 508m, multiple range 7-9x
Bitter Bites—EV 580m, EBITDA 22E 50m, multiple range 11-13x
Visshhush—EV 200m, EBITDA 22E 20m, multiple range 9-11x
I hit send and threw my head back into the toilet with such force that I banged my forehead against the rim.
My computer dinged. I looked up.
Miri, let’s circle back in the morning to review priorities. Visshush is too small for us.
I felt rage and misery swirling in my chest and burst into impotent sobs.
The part of me that was still a child thought someone might come for me. But I cried and cried, neck bowed, arm flung along the toilet seat, and nobody came.
So, sick and sobbing, I went back to the computer and tried again.
Jeff, sorry about that. Visshush is removed.
Again the immediate reply, like he was sitting with his phone refreshing his email.
Miri, why didn’t you add any new companies? I can think of at least three I would like to see.
I stared at the screen, incredulous.
Jeff, please let me know what companies you have in mind. Happy to add them! I typed, wet snot mixing with vomit stains on my upper lip as my chest heaved.
This time the response wasn’t immediate.
I hefted myself upright, using the toilet bowl for support.
I felt a rush of affection for the toilet, worthy of a refrigerator magnet poem (ah, my intimate acquaintance, your tender caress; ah, my companion in misery).
But I needed to clean up quickly, before Jeff replied. I put the toilet lid down.
Doctor Kitten, who had watched this entire thing, scrunched his nose at me and started toward the bed.
I went to the running shower and stood before it, staring.
There was a low rim around the outside of the stall, but no walls on the sides to prevent water from ricocheting off my body.
There were also no dials to adjust the temperature, as far as I could see.
The water fell from a lip that jutted out of the rock wall above my head in a melodic stream.
I put my hand into the stream. A bit cool, but nothing unmanageable.
I shucked off my clothes—had I been wearing my work pants for thirty-six hours?
As soon as I put my face under the running water I felt better. I pushed my hands through my hair, letting the water soak my scalp. I reached for the bar of soap on the low ledge and scrubbed my arms with it.
The computer dinged. I rinsed off and stepped out, realizing only then that I hadn’t seen a towel.
I frowned, stepping out to see if there was one in a closet somewhere—or even a closet somewhere—when I was hit with a concentrated stream of warm air.
I jerked to a surprised halt. Within seconds I had been thoroughly dried.
Well then.
I went back to my computer, picked it up, and took it to the bed. My suitcase still lay there. I pulled on clean underwear and a giant sleeping dress, breathing in the familiar scent of my own detergent.
How much longer would it be familiar?
I unlocked the computer and looked at Jeff’s email.
Bloodburger, Vamp-moose, and Red Rims.
Scrunching my eyes, I opened a new browser window and started to type.