Suspicion clouds her expression, but she wipes her hands on the apron atop her skirts and gestures for the girl to go inside. After giving her grandson a meaningful look, she shuffles from view. Iohmar tries not to chuckle. It’ll frighten the poor man. The human takes the steps from the porch with great hesitation, pulling a shirt from the back of his belt and over his bare skin. Stopping beside the stack of hay, he stares with wide eyes.
“Is the little girl your daughter?” Iohmar asks. He realizes the hidden threat in his words, unintended but likely terrifying nonetheless.
The human’s Adam’s apple bobs. “Yes.”
“How old is she?”
“Six.”
“Is that young for a human child?” Iohmar has never grasped human life spans and isn’t sure if they fluctuate as vastly as those of his own kin.
“Um . . . yes?”
“You don’t seem certain.”
He shrugs, the muscles in his shoulders uncoiling, relaxing. Scratching the back of his neck, he glances at the cottage.
“Um . . . yes, it’s young. Very young. She’ll, uh . . . be an adult when she’s sixteen or seventeen . . . I suppose.”
Sixteen or seventeen. How few years. Do they change so much within the space of a decade? Iohmar isn’t certain of the correlation between seventeen years and the equivalent of a fae child, but it can’t be more than an infant. This grandmother—a great-grandmother to the girl—is naught more than a child in comparison
to him.
“And you are how many years?”
“Almost . . . forty . . . I think. I’m not entirely sure the year I was born. It’s not important to keep track of.”
This makes greater sense. Iohmar does not ask the young man his name. Not yet.
“Have I done something to upset you?” the human asks.
Iohmar remembers this must be rather unnerving. His eyes follow the girl as she peeks out the kitchen window only to be shooed back by the grandmother.
“Not at all. I am simply curious.”
“Curious?”
“Yes, curious. Sometimes I wonder why you decided to speak to me along the road that day. Your friends fled.”
The man’s eyebrows furrow. Much of his face is covered in hair. He has a broad untrimmed beard and thick eyebrows gaining in size when they bunch into a frown. “Someone had to talk to you. You’re still interested after all this time?”
This catches Iohmar’s attention. “How long is ‘all this time’?”
The man blinks. “Five years.”
Iohmar considers. It’s longer than he would have estimated, but a few years is not much to him, and not to Lor either . . . anymore. He contemplates the man’s daughter, who will be an adult in perhaps ten more of these years, and realizes how long a time it must be for the man.
“That is not so very long to me at all,” Iohmar says, which doesn’t seem to reassure him. The man shuffles his feet and peeks over his shoulder.
“May I . . . May I ask a question?”
“Of course.”
“Are you really king of Faeryland? After that day, I described you to my grandmother. She said I’d met the king of Faeryland.”
Faeryland. How quaint. “Indeed.”
The man’s eyes roam Iohmar’s appearance as when they first met. Does the man recognize the change? It is not unusual for humans to be fascinated by the fae, Iohmar in particular, both by his physical appearance and the clothes he dons. His robes are blue this day, matching the clear of the sky, light and airy, a shock of bright in the dim human woods.
“You must be hundreds of years old then . . .”
“Much more,” Iohmar says.
Silence stretches, and Iohmar allows it. He’s curious about the man’s every reaction. In truth, he’s unsure why he decided to come, to seek out the human. Perhaps it’s boredom or curiosity or a sense of unease at all the strange little things that have happened since he took Lor from the shack.
Then the man twitches, staring into the woods. “I saw what you did to that man. The one who killed his wife. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Iohmar waits while the human shudders, a full-body shiver that would reflect in the air if any magic hung so far into the human realm. Iohmar remembers when first he saw such magic employed. Shriveled body pierced and twined with grasses and roots of wildflowers. The beauty of a patch of spring in a winter wood. Overtaking a body.
“We never found her body.”
The mother. The poor human creature Iohmar felt deep within the soil. “I did. She was lost long before I arrived, at peace in the earth.”
The man’s head snaps up. “How do you know?”
Iohmar rolls his shoulder in a shrug. “It’s in my nature.” At the even stare, he clarifies. “I did her no harm. Truly.”
The man twitches again, eyes falling to Lor. Iohmar does not wish to reveal the child’s origins to the human. It is likely to upset him.
