Chapter 10 In Which I Am Forbidden from Eating Toast #3
“Um, no,” I said. “And please raise your hand before asking a question here. As for your question…” I glanced at Kellen. “Kellen, what do I mean when I ask how someone is doing?”
“It’s a greeting!” Kellen exclaimed. Kellen was a fantastic student. “Humans use it as part of a formulaic exchange whenever they meet.”
He turned to Caraya, who joined him with increasingly feigned reluctance every class. “Caraya, how are you doing?” he asked, tilting his head.
“Thank you for asking, Kellen,” she replied, affecting a British accent. “I am well. And how are you, Kellen?”
The British accent was my only guilty pleasure.
“It is well that you are well,” Kellen concluded. Since they were mimicking me mimicking a posh London accent, he sounded like he had a mouth full of cotton. “I, too, am well.”
Kellen stopped and looked out at his bewildered audience. “After this exchange, you may discuss whatever you please,” he said in his normal voice. “However, humans will not be receptive to your communications if you do not begin in this way.”
Someone else raised a hand—a very tall woman wearing a dress made out of cobwebs: gossamer-thin and so gray it seemed to suck the light from her corner of the room.
“Please say your name when I point to you, and then ask your question,” I said, pointing to her.
“My name is Triathe,” she said. “What does this exchange mean, though?”
“Nothing!” Caraya said, exasperated. “Nothing the humans say means anything.”
“Well, no, it’s kind of like… an opportunity to let them tell you if something is wrong, before you start asking them questions.”
“But you said we have to say we are well,” Kellen interjected. “And if we cannot say that, we must say good, and if we cannot say good, because it is a lie, we must smile and nod noncommittally.”
“The humans do not want to know if you are not well,” Sahir added.
Several faeries nodded, as though that were expected.
“We do!” I said, feeling defensive. “Just not right away. We like to ease into it.”
This declaration set off a fierce storm of muttering.
“Why are all of you here today?” I asked. “It’s more crowded than usual.”
Caraya raised her hand and then spoke without waiting for me to call on her.
It had been such a battle to explain hand raising that I wasn’t inclined to belabor the point further.
“They want to know why you stopped the Gray Knight from killing Karame,” she said. A few feet away from her, the Gray Knight looked smug. She was probably just pleased that her performance this morning had made my life so much more difficult.
Seated next to her, the Princeling also looked smug, though he was doing a much better job maintaining a solemn expression.
Explaining humans to the satisfaction of seven querents had been painful enough.
Another eighty were unlikely to simplify my task.
I needed to talk to the Princeling; it had been a month.
If he expected my class size to keep growing, he had to show me some sort of proof that he could help me find a way out of Faerie.
As it was, the four hours I spent a week on this were already eating into my sleep.
And, because he’d been unable to find any errors in my recent decks, Jeff had sent me several increasingly rude emails about my inability to create compelling PowerPoint footers.
I glanced at Sahir, who shrugged. He stood with his hands clasped in front of him, face expressionless. He still wore his suit from the workday.
“I… didn’t want someone to die because of me?” I said, but it was a question and not a statement.
Someone else called out from the side of the room: “Death was fair return for the attempt on your life,” they said, hummingbird wings trembling behind them. “Kamare expected to die.”
“Rhesus did not raise his hand!” Caraya exclaimed, flinging her own hand up a second time.
“Ah, yeah, Rhesus, again, we try to raise our hands when we speak,” I said, scratching the back of my neck. “But thank you for your contribution to our conversation. I didn’t know that death was the fair return for the attempt on my life…”
Everyone was silent.
“So, yeah, thanks for… enlightening me,” I finished, dropping my hand and then violently twisting my ring around my finger.
“Perhaps death was not her expectation,” Rhesus’s pearlescent neighbor argued, thrusting their own hand skyward. “Kamare was not truly of the Princeling’s Court.”
“Kamare was born in the Princeling’s Court!” a third person said from across the room, both many-fingered hands in the air like an emphatic sea anemone.
“Her fealty shifted!” Rhesus said, flinging his second hand up and then hovering a few inches off the ground.
“How could her fealty have shifted?” I asked.
“Is this human class or faerie class?” the Gray Knight interjected, her silver eyes flashing. She hadn’t raised her hand, but none of the other faeries pointed this out.
Anger bubbled in the yards of negative space between us.
I clenched and unclenched my fist, flexed my fingers to shake out the phantom feeling of her hand on my palm that morning.
Instead, I tried to concentrate on the Princeling’s mask of a face, staring at me implacably from that damned silver throne.
He quirked his brow at me, startling me out of my reverie.
“Sorry, right. Well, the reason I didn’t want her to die is…” I trailed off. “Her feelings were valid?” I tried.
This set off a storm of raised hands and raised voices. I couldn’t understand any of them, so I looked back at Sahir.
“The general tenor of the commentary is confusion,” he explained.
“Look, Kamare is right that humans could fundamentally alter your way of life,” I said.
The expression on the Princeling’s face could’ve pulverized stone. But I wasn’t stone. I was a human, and squishy, and really fucking annoyed right now.
“Faeries prize honesty, right?” I said. “Faeries must be honest.”
“We prize deception,” Kellen called out, waving his left hand like a stoner at a concert. “We prize lying through truth.”
I turned and thumped my forehead against the wall next to Sahir.
“Why is she doing that?” someone asked—I obviously didn’t see who.
“I’m expressing frustration,” I said to the wall.
“What if I don’t have hands?” someone else called out. “How can I raise my hand and speak?”
“If you can put an appendage upward, please do,” I told the dirt in front of my face. “And if you can’t, you may just call out.”
This emboldened all of them. I shut my eyes tight as a swarm of voices rose up.
“Do all humans express frustration by hitting the wall with their faces?”
“It must be a way of connecting to the earth and recentering themselves.”
“I do not understand.”
Sahir cleared his throat, and everyone quieted. “The lady will explain why she spared Kamare, if you let her speak.”
He touched my shoulder, spun me gently around. He left his hand on my elbow, providing small support.
I opened my eyes to a sea of faces staring at me.
“I didn’t want Kamare to die for trying to protect you,” I said.
“She believed she saw a real threat to her people and tried to eliminate it. I won’t hurt you, but I can’t promise no human will hurt you.
Humans are like you—we aren’t all one thing.
To me, Kamare did what she thought she needed to do.
” I paused, and then realized perhaps I should expound further.
“And if you’re worried about me altering your way of life, you can talk to me about it, and we can resolve it peacefully.
Without killing, maiming, or incapacitating me. But I understand her motive.”
The Princeling stood up, giving me an hour and forty-five minutes of my night back. “That is all the time we have today for human lessons,” he said. “If you have more questions for the Lady of the True Dreams, you may come back three days hence for another lesson.”
Masterful. The faeries filed out reluctantly, and I suspected I would see many of them at my next class.