Over the course of a couple hours, I had slowly drunk from my one glass, and I was still feeling it. The alcohol left my stomach hot and tingly, and my head was light and floaty, the words slipping from my lips with an ease I wasn’t used to.
“Thank you for coming here with me,” I told him emphatically, and I put my hand over his—his skin felt so much cooler than mine; how could he stay so cool when my whole body flushed with heat?
“As I’ve already told you, like, a thousand times—you’re welcome.” And that really had to have been at least the tenth time he’d said that.
“I’m really glad that I don’t have to do this all by myself. And I don’t just mean because I don’t know where I’d be staying,” I said, and he laughed again—a quiet, warm rumble. “This is a whole lot to sort through, and I don’t know how I can make it up to you for enduring this.”
“Enduring this?” He laughed and shook his head. “Yeah, it’s so brutal. I’m researching a history that really intrigues me, while hanging out in the beautiful—albeit wild—wetlands, and I get to hang out with a very cool girl while doing it.”
“Aw…” I started to say, when something hit me. “Wait. You do mean me, right?”
“Yeah, of course I mean you.” He rested his head on the back of the daybed and looked at me. “You always gotta make me say how I think you’re funny and smart and beautiful. Who else would I be talking about?”
“I don’t know.” I lowered my eyes and I was thankful for the dimness of the room hiding the blush on my cheeks. The only lights in the room were a kerosene lamp hanging from the ceiling and a few citronella candles.
I wasn’t looking at him, but I could feel his eyes, studying me.
“You thought I was talking about Rikky,” he realized quietly.
“Maybe.” I shrugged. “I don’t exactly know what your relationship is with her.”
“She is my ex-girlfriend,” he admitted slowly.
“How long did you date?”
“A little under a year.”
“Wow. So, it was a serious thing?” I asked carefully, and he nodded. “Why wouldn’t you tell me? You didn’t even say that she was a girl.”
“I don’t know. It was a dumb thing to do, not telling you, but I didn’t know what to say about it.”
Pan fell silent, long enough that I looked up at him to make sure he hadn’t passed out, and he was staring off into the night. I sat up, pulling my legs off his lap and hugging my knees to my chest.
“Okay, so I don’t know how to explain it to you without putting it all out there, so here goes.” He took a fortifying breath. “I like you. And I think you might like me.”
He looked at me out of the corner of his eye, then quickly looked back at the swamp. “And I feel like we’re in this weird spot where we’re not an item but we’re … I don’t know. We’re not really nothing either. And life happened, and the stuff we’re doing to find Eliana and to find your parents, that obviously—and it should—take precedence, but then it makes our non-thing-thing even more confusing to me, and I guess I don’t really know how to act or what the proper etiquette is in this situation.”
“I don’t really know either,” I admitted. “But I think being honest and not keeping things from each other is a really good start.”
“Smart.” He looked at me with a relieved smile. “See? That right there is exactly why I like you.”
I laughed and leaned in closer to him, but I kept my arms around my legs, holding them to me. “So, if we’re being open and honest, is it okay if I ask you about Rikky?”
“What do you wanna know?”
I shrugged. “Nothing too personal. Just the normal basic stuff. How’d you meet, why’d you break up? I mean, I assume it was mostly amicable, since you two are still so friendly.”
“Yeah, I mean, it really was,” he said. “Everything I told you about her was true. We met through the Inhemsk Project. I was going through a rough patch, and we grew closer and we started dating.”
He rubbed his jaw, waiting a beat before continuing. “We had fun, but we moved in together pretty fast, because she didn’t have a place to stay in Merellä. But the truth is that she didn’t really want to stay in the city, not after she connected with her Trylle family.
“She stayed about as long as she could handle it,” he went on. “But I cared too much about the work I do, and I didn’t want to give up my life in Merellä. And that’s what it all came down to. She wanted to go, and I wanted to stay. So, she went, and I stayed.”
I waited a moment before asking, “Do you regret it?”
“No.” He shook his head. “I never have. When we first split, we both left the door open—if either of us changed our minds, we could pick it back up. But neither of us knocked on that door. Not in all the months and months since she moved here. So, I guess neither of us regretted it.”
He groaned and rubbed his hands over his face. “Is anything I’m saying making sense or is this the incoherent ramblings of a semi-drunk man?”
I laughed. “No, I get it. I think.” Then I yawned loudly.
“It’s been a long day. We should both get some rest. We’ve got another busy day tomorrow.” He stood up and stretched. “You’re having brunch with a Queen.”
“It’s not brunch. Just a meeting. But yeah.” I took a deep breath. “I should rest up.”
He looked at me a moment longer, like he was thinking of something more, but instead he said good night and headed into the main room, turning off the stereo before crashing on the couch.
6
Crowns
To get to the palace, we had to go through Fulaträsk. Rikky’s place was way outside of the city limits, which was why a human-maintained road went right up to her dock, and the Postkontor office I had gone to the day before was on the outskirts, so I hadn’t yet seen the city proper.
Fulaträsk was sort of like a backwoods Venice mixed with an Ewok village, where everything was only accessible by water or wooden bridges—some of which connected the treetop homes and shops together.
The Omte didn’t have the psychokinetic powers that the other tribes did, and they didn’t have the strength to rely solely on magic cloaking the city, the way Merellä did with the Ögonen, or even to lesser degrees like the Kanin, Trylle, Vittra, and Skojare did with their larger cities.
That left the Omte utilizing more basic forms of camouflage. They lived far from humans in an overgrown, virtually uninhabitable swamp. The homes were hidden high up in the tops of the massive cypress trees, and the buildings on the ground tended to be masked with mud and overgrown vines.
The other part of their defense were the archers. Rikky pointed them out, or I wouldn’t have noticed them otherwise. They were perfectly camouflaged and hidden behind blinds in the trees. Rikky wasn’t sure how many there were in total, but she said they had archers guarding the city limits at all hours of the day and night.
Sometimes I wondered if it was worth it, the lengths we went to in order to live separately from the humans. Yes, historically humans reacted very badly when they discovered a troll in their midst, leading to whole troll villages being destroyed back in the Dark Ages. And there were also situations where the humans were justified in hating us, especially considering the practice of changelings was really an extended con involving kidnapping, robbery, and fraud.