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Briarheart(4)
Author: Mercedes Lackey

“It’s all right,” I said, wiping my eyes, blowing my nose, and looking up into his concerned face with a watery smile. “I know you didn’t.” I choked up again, and he held my head against his shoulder and patted my back until I got control of myself, and Odo left us alone without yelling at us until I did. This wasn’t the first time I’d fallen apart in the bakery because something had reminded me of Father, after all; and Odo was probably one of the nicest people you could ever have in charge of you if you were working in a kitchen. When Liss, the girl in charge of cleaning vegetables, got her heart broken by a flirtatious stone carver’s apprentice, Odo had someone leave a big pile of clean rags next to her so she could stop and cry whenever she needed to, and he wouldn’t let anyone tease her, either.

When I stopped feeling like my throat was too tight to breathe through, I pulled away from Giles, and he let me go with a last pat, and we got back to work.

When Odo dismissed me for the day, my arms were good and tired, but my day wasn’t nearly done yet. There was still christening business to attend to, and as one of the people who could read and write, I was needed to help with that. If there hadn’t been christening business to do, I’d have been going over the accounts from my manor with Papa’s seneschal. One of the things Papa had done for me when he married Mama was to give me an estate of my own, which would give me my own income. Which was lovely, but that meant I also had to learn how to take charge of it, which involved… well, an awful lot of work. Things like finalizing orders for the work on my property (even though all I was doing was signing off on them, it was important to keep track of what was being done). If I were living there instead of here, I’d be doing even more work—keeping track of the household by taking reports from my chamberlain, my gardener, and my stable master, as well as taking care of the business of the manor properties with my steward or reeve. I’d have to know when the food budget didn’t match the food accounted for and be able to inspect stock and crops to know they were healthy and prospering and what to suggest if they were not. For now, Papa had assigned a trusted man as bailiff to tend to all that for me, but if I ever went there to live, I had to know how to do all of that for myself.

But christening business took precedence over everything else right now. Today, it was checking off replies to the invitations on the master list. I was just one of a small army of people doing that, an army that included some of Mama’s ladies and several borrowed secretaries, while Mama and the rest of her ladies greeted the incoming guests, saw that they were settled, made sure that they had everything they needed, and oversaw the rest of the arrangements. Of course, not everyone who was invited and intended to come would send a reply, but most would. And there was another reason for sending out invitations.

The Dark Fae.

Every kingdom has Fae, Light and Dark. The Light ones are said to live on human joy, the Dark on human sorrow. Obviously, the more of that sorrow there is, the happier the Dark ones are—which is why they seldom actually kill humans. They do things to make us as miserable as possible when we are alive. Fortunately, all the Fae have to obey the Rules, and one of the big ones is that they cannot act against humans unless the humans have harmed or offended them or are experiencing certain very specific times of vulnerability, times that usually correspond either to their ages or to rites of passage like—say—getting married. It’s as if there is some sort of protection around us humans for most of our lives, but during those moments, those protections get weaker. For most people, those times don’t matter. It’s not as if the Dark Fae are keeping track of every single farmer’s birthday. But for anyone with rank—people whose misery could impact the lives of dozens to thousands—you have to be mindful of those vulnerable dates because that is when the Dark Fae will jump at the chance to do some harm. Birth, christening, thirteenth birthday, sixteenth birthday, and wedding. And although it is rare for them to go that far, your entire first year of life can be a vulnerable time, as can your third and twenty-first birthdays. The more important you are, the more likely it is that you’ll have a lot of vulnerable periods. Wizard Gerrold has a theory that this is because the expectations around you thin out whatever protection you have. The seneschals have a theory that it has to do with prime numbers. They often get into long congenial arguments about it during state dinners, enlisting whichever guest is nearest if they can.

And there are the Rules. We know that a long time ago, there were no Rules, that the Dark and Light Fae fought with one another indiscriminately and that the Dark Fae could pretty much do what they wanted to humans. That is, until the Light Fae allied with humans, and together we fought the Dark Fae into a corner. And for a while, it seemed that they were perfectly willing to destroy everything rather than surrender, but they finally agreed to a permanent truce. That was the Fae Compact. It was bound in place on all of us by the most powerful of magic, and it laid out a lot of Rules about interactions between Light and Dark Fae and humans. Some of them are simple: Dark Fae can’t attack humans or Light Fae unless they have been attacked or offended. Light Fae can’t attack Dark Fae (or their human allies, because there are some) unless attacked first. There are more Rules: Unless also attacked, a Light Fae cannot directly aid a human against the Dark Fae, but indirect help is allowed. Those are the main Rules that affect us. There are more, because the Light Fae wanted to give the Dark Fae no loopholes (they find loopholes anyway), but humans don’t know most of those Rules and aren’t directly affected by them. Breaking the Rules destroys the offender’s magic. All of it. Which means that if a Fae breaks the Rules, he or she can end up with their home turned into dust and with every curse and spell they have ever cast broken—and there will be a long list of people and Fae they’ve hurt who will now find them fair game. That’s the force of the Fae Compact.

Obviously, you would offend one of the Dark Fae terribly if you were inviting all the important people in the kingdom to a celebration and didn’t invite her. Or him, though the worst Dark Fae, insofar as holding grudges goes, seem to be female. The female Dark Fae tends to attack individuals—the male tends to ally himself with really terrible humans and get involved in tyrannies and warfare. No one knows why that is, although Wizard Gerrold once told me that it’s because men don’t like to hunt alone.

But, of course, they are Fae, which means that the next day they could decide to do the opposite. Or both—back up a tyrant and act as his personal assassin, taking out his enemies one by one.

So before you held some great celebration or event, you first had to scour the kingdom for all the Dark Fae and be sure to invite them. Since Dark Fae can’t resist announcing themselves by erecting lightning-shrouded towers and gloomy castles, it’s not that hard to find them if you go looking for them.

But you could still offend them by only inviting them by themselves. So if you were smart, you invited the “Fae Sinistressa and guest(s).” That almost always guaranteed they wouldn’t come because the Dark Fae were generally quarreling with one another as well as preying on humanity. You really did not want to live anywhere near one of the Dark Fae, given that they were prone to sending storms and plagues of insects and poisonous miasmas at one another—or calling one another out in mage duels, and you definitely did not want to be within a mile of one of those.

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