Chapter Fifteen
Robin
The meeting could’ve gone worse.
Dinam still had a stick up his ass. There were snide remarks about what direction their studies led them, with added concerns voiced on their bias toward old magic—and how fucked they were, if they were right. Metara tried to dismiss the idea of fae having less innate magic entirely.
“What do you call changelings, if not as near to Gates and Monarchs as we have?” she had asked, all luring, lyrical voice and narrowed eyes.
“The only consistent adherence to the ancient magics the fae can say they’ve kept up in the last two thousand years,” was Robin’s answer, with Zyr’s clipped, “Uninterrupted tradition, until the last century.” on its heels.
They spoke of the Monarchs connection to Faerie. And how, to kill them, even with the Wild Hunt, that connection would need to be severed.
The room went quiet at that. Even Dinam shut up.
Still, no one died. Robin counted that as a win.
The office hadn’t gone to shit in his brief absence, much to Robin’s surprised delight. He’d be able to return to Faerie half a day earlier than planned, if he got through reviewing everything he needed to by Thursday.
At the house, Jan took one look at his arm, where Zyr had kissed his tan skin black and blue, and said, “Bo mentioned a dragon. He didn’t say you were close.”
“He doesn’t know.”
“I thought I warned you about getting attached, Birdie,” Jan said, cross-legged on the couch with him, laundry piled around to keep hands busy. “About not making this your fight.”
“Then you should’ve probably not raised me to have so many feelings about cultural genocide and forced assimilation,” Robin answered, knocking his knee with hers. “It hit a little too close to home.”
Robin had never known his grandfather. Hadn’t known his grandmother—Jan’s sister—either, both of them dead before he arrived on Jan’s doorstep.
He knew that his grandfather had been a couple decades older than her, Tlingit, and had scrawled stories from his time in a federal boarding school in an old journal Robin had found. Left Robin with nightmares.
It didn’t matter that, where Robin had grown up, the government hadn’t kidnapped thousands of Seminole kids.
Local teaching mostly stayed local, and Jan didn’t have horror stories of her own.
Didn’t matter, either, that Robin wasn’t entitled to claim either side of where he came from.
Shit still hit, and home was still home.
“That’s not what I meant, and you know it.”
“He likes books,” Robin said. “And gets my jokes about call numbers.”
That got a laugh from her. Encouragement to talk about more, too, and when Robin told her of Zyr’s obsessions, he left himself out of it. That treasure among treasures would’ve freaked her out. Worried her the way it should’ve worried him when he was first told.
Zyr wouldn’t try to make him stay anywhere he didn’t want to be. Robin was his own person, and Zyr knew that. Liked that about Robin, even if it meant he wouldn’t be a trophy in his library.
Robin told her enough and that satisfied her. She didn’t even look at him with that searching, sharp gaze before she left to meet Bo and Talia at the mall. She’d promised to take Talia to a hockey game, after.
Robin had the night to himself, laundry done in neat stacks next to him on the couch, the hockey game on the living room television turned low.
Thoughts of Zyr, still and serious, desperate and loud, tucked away in favor of Robin’s work laptop, perched on his knees, and spreadsheet open.
Only a few minutes passed before he heard a soft noise from behind him.
Robin glanced up to see Everil, all human looking and still, there in the doorway.
“May I speak with you?” Everil asked, fingers clasped together. “It isn’t anything … unpleasant. Only, I overheard your conversation. And while I’m glad to hear you and Zyr are getting along, it would be wrong of me to make assumptions based on eavesdropping.”
The reassurance stole the wary tension from Robin’s shoulders, let him shrug and put his laptop on the coffee table, offering the very nervous kelpie a thin smile.
(Okay, so, it wasn’t like Everil looked nervous.
Everil rarely looked anything but infatuated, fond, or calm.
But if he were willingly talking to Robin without the protective shield of Bo at his elbow, asking to talk about literally anything without Robin starting the conversation, fair bet that he was nervous.)
“Sure,” he said. Then, after a beat, knocked over a pile of hand towels, and grabbed the first one to start the folding. And, hell, if Everil could make the effort, Robin could too. “Thanks for waiting until Jan left. What’s up?”
“I do my best not to trouble your aunt overmuch about fae matters.” Everil stepped a little closer, then a little more, almost to the couch. Probably because Robin didn’t make any sudden movements. Laundry wasn’t all that intimidating.
“She’s not anti-fae,” Robin said, plucking at a towel, “but yeah, me being knee deep in things makes her a little squirrely.”
“To love is to worry, I find,” Everil murmured with a ghost of a smile.
He rested his fingers tentatively on the back of the couch, steadying his gaze on Robin.
Serious, but, well, yeah, that was Everil.
“Robin, I— It’s my duty to ensure you are treated with respect.
And fae can be highhanded, where humans are concerned.
I need to know that he hasn’t overstepped with his … attentions.”
High–
Oh.
Robin grinned. Probably not the right response, he knew Everil wasn’t wrong with how a lot of fae could be, and he’d already told Robin about how Zyr was with others. The dragon things. The unseelie stuff.
“You’re asking if he pressured me into messing around, right?”
“Essentially, yes. If…”
“I would’ve snitched to you faster than he could blink,” Robin said which, also, probably not the right thing to say.
It was true, though. He would’ve. “You’d already issued the warning shot.
Besides, Bo suffers quieter than I do. I’m not saying that as a bad thing. Just that there wasn’t any suffering.”
And if Robin glanced at his arm, then back to Everil, well, Bo always said that Everil liked clarity. Robin was good at clarifying. When Everil followed his gaze and lingered on the bruising, his fingers relaxing a little on the couch, Robin knew he’d made his point.
“I’m glad to hear that you would ‘snitch’ if the situation were less than agreeable. I…” Everil looked away, eyebrows furrowed. “Should that ever change, if he offers you insult or attempts to control you, find me. I am on your side, always. And I mislike coercion.”
Translation: I’ll murder the ever-loving shit out of him without remorse or hesitation.
“You’re why I can be so cocky in Faerie.
Bo doesn’t stop talking shit until he’s so freaked out he can’t, right?
” Robin held up his hands, shrugging. “Not me. I don’t tell people off until I know I can get away with it.
I know you’re on my side. That’s been a fact since you showed up. So, yeah. I’ll find you.”
Four hand towels done. Robin reached for the second to last, thin fingers moving without looking, eyes on Everil. Probably making a mess of the towel too. That wasn’t what it was for, anyway.
“I told him to,” Robin added, since he’d already decided to lay down the truth for the kelpie. “The arm. And everything else that might or might not have happened.”
For a moment, Everil studied Robin in confusion, a small frown added to the wrinkled brow. Robin met his gaze with as little edge as he could, for all he found himself smiling. Just a little.
After a long pause, Everil offered a faint smile of his own, expression smoothing out to calm.
“How potentially generous of you,” he murmured, with a hint of dry. “Should you ever require fae insights into what might or might not be happening, well, I suggest you seek out Declan. He’s much better at people. But still, I’m here for you.”
He joked.
Robin knew that he could, that Everil did. Bo kept trying to tell him that Everil was secretly hilarious, but Robin rarely saw it. Not that he could blame the guy; Robin didn’t exactly incite mirth with many people.
Suspicious, jaded people, mostly. Antonio. Zyr. Isobel, sometimes.
He laughed, short and full of teeth. Genuine, which had to count for something.
“Noted. Appreciated. Did you hear anything else in the conversation?”
Everil fell still again, ease gone in a blink. “I—”
“Not a bad thing. Not in a bad way.” Robin moved the once-again folded towels to the coffee table next to his laptop, then twisted to face Everil better. “Just, like, I have some questions about fae stuff. You make sense when you talk about it.”
Plus, he had probably the closest to a ‘normal’ upbringing than the other unseelie Robin knew.
“I will endeavor to remain sensical, in that case.”
Everil moved around the couch, sat at the edge of the far cushion with more caution than he needed to. Robin really needed to soften his approach. Jesus.
“I’m probably not going to make sense for a minute.
” Robin huffed out a humorless laugh, tapping his fingers on his knee.
“Declan was taught all sorts of radical stuff, and Zyr is almost pre-convergence. But you were raised as… third generation from the convergence? Right? Your grandparents were probably there for it, they had your parents afterwards, then you, what, sixteen hundred years later?”
“Nearly, yes. Fae generations aren't quite so well ordered." Everil seemed relieved that the subject had shifted. “My paternal grandparents were born around the time of the convergence. Great grandparents, on my mother's side. Death aligned don't tend to live so long as our life aligned brethren.”
Systemic and systematic murder would do that, yeah.