The fairy snorted. She sounded a bit like a sheep when she did it. “That’s who I want you to tell. Rupert’s the one who most needs to hear this, but he’s also the one most likely to get fixated on what I am and where I came from and how I got here. Not my first choice. And Grytt, well, no. There’s too much metal on her now. If Two or Five had come—but of course not, no, Send Three, she travels best,” the fairy muttered. “But you can tell her what I say, too. She’s sensible.”
The fairy paused.
Ivar supposed this was the place he was meant to ask tell them what and continue the conversation. He said nothing.
The green woman grimaced. Her teeth were definitely pointed. Ivar revised his opinion about them looking like pearls. They were yellower. More like bone.
That was not comforting.
Then the fairy began to speak, and that was even less comforting. Ivar listened without interrupting. And when the green woman was finished, he ran down the hill to find Rupert and Grytt.
* * *
—
“I can stay, if you want.” Grytt stood by the door, balancing on her mecha foot while she tugged her boot over the other. The polysteel toes flexed like claws, scoring tiny gouges in the tile.
“No,” Rupert said, and then, regretting the terseness of the syllable, “Thank you. I will be fine. I can handle Samur.”
“Huh.” Grytt shifted her weight, one side to the other. The mecha limb had its own special boot, more for tidiness than for necessity. The mecha joints were hexed against moisture and cold and heat, but not as much against mud. Grytt’s boots were an appalling, deliberately bright yellow, in contrast to her practical, drab coveralls. Her mecha hand winked from the frayed grey cuffs.
She frowned at him. “I’ll be right outside.”
Rupert nodded. Then he turned back to the quantum-hex viewing ball. It looked like a plain, polished glass globe at the moment, sitting on a base of plain iron which was etched all over with hexes. He had already fed it the appropriate coordinates. He made eye contact with his distorted reflection, composed his features, leaned forward, and whispered his personal code.
Quantum-hexes are as close to instantaneous communication as the laws of the multiverse permit. Still, it felt like minutes before a tiny white light appeared in the viewing ball’s center, which meant there was contact on the other end. He supposed the delay was a matter of routing. There had been a time his code would have gone immediately to Samur’s office. Since those days were long over, he expected that he would have to spend some time arguing with minor functionaries, or perhaps her personal secretary, or maybe whoever it was had replaced him as Vizier of the Thorne Consortium.
It was even possible the Regent-Consort would refuse his call altogether, at which point he would have to try plan B, which involved formal requests and triplicate paperwork and very possibly a bribe, if the clerk’s assistant in the communications office was still amenable to such persuasion.
The viewing ball’s glow shifted from white to live-coal red. A three-dimensional projection began assembling itself inside the viewing ball, pixels drawing together like cosmic dust, swirling into the face and features of Samur, Regent-Consort of the Thorne Consortium. There were lines around Samur’s mouth now that had nothing to do with smiling or laughter, and the Kreshti fern on her desk had dark-edged leaves, as if it had been scorched. The last time he had called her, that fern had been out of frame. He wished it was this time, as well, and resolved not to look at it.
“Ah,” Rupert said. They had not parted on genial terms. He was no longer certain of his permissions with her name, and chose to err on the side of formality. “Regent-Consort. Thank you for taking my call.”
Samur (for that is who she was in his head, and if he allowed himself to consider it, his heart) tilted her head to one side. “Rupert,” she said, in the same tone she might have said, I appear to have developed gout. That was, he knew, not a signal that they were on first-name terms again. He had renounced his titles when he had chosen to stay on Lanscot. She had nothing else to call him. “What is it you want?”
The fern flared a nervous yellow, at odds with the frozen blue of her tone. She was worried about something, probably Rory, and too proudly furious with him to ask.
So of course, Rupert answered that question first. “Rory is fine, as far as I am aware. I’m not calling about her. Is this communication secure?” He knew as well—and probably better than—Samur how simple it was to weave a few surveillance hexes into a quantum-communication viewing ball. He had, at one time, made sure of Thorne’s arithmantic security.
“It is on my end.” She permitted an eyebrow to float up her forehead. “What is this about, then?”
“I wanted to ask . . .” Rupert trailed off. He had grown unaccustomed to the circumlocutions of diplomacy with only Grytt and Ivar for company. “Regent-Consort, have you heard of a xeno-people called the vakari? Or a political entity called the Protectorate?”
Rupert had cause then to be glad of the fern. Samur was not out of diplomatic practice. Her face might well have been a mask, for all the expression she showed. The fern darkened to a bloody orange with white striations. She glanced down at it and made a move to nudge it out of the projection. Then she paused, withdrew her hand, and grimaced.
“If I asked how you came to know those names, would you tell me?”
Ah, yes. Answer a question with a question. Rupert found his own face assuming that porcelain blank of the professional advisor, ambassador, and handler of prickly personalities.
“Of course, Regent-Consort. Ivar told me.”
“Ivar?” Samur blinked. Her mask cracked. “Prince Ivar? I thought he was dead.”
Rupert composed his face into a noncommittal smile. “He is not. And today, he encountered an unusual personage in the south pasture, and it was from this personage he learned these names.”
“Pasture,” Samur said under her breath. She leaned forward, crowding the fern most of the way out of the projection. It remained a twinkling, kaleidoscopic testament to ire and amusement in garishly equal measure. “What sort of unusual personage?”
“A fairy.”
Samur stared at him. Her mouth opened, then closed, then reopened. Rupert could sympathize; his own had done something similar, when he’d first heard that word.
“The green one,” he added. “Number three. You recall her? Small, perfectly proportioned, entirely green.”
“With pointy little teeth, yes. I never understood why she gave out harp-playing.” Samur shook her head carefully. Her earrings, elaborate confections of gold wire and holographic pearls, shimmered like rain. “Are you certain? That the fairy was real, I mean. Wasn’t—isn’t—Ivar . . . a bit damaged?”