Eventually, the conversation turned to Abby.
“I wasn’t surprised when she decided to move completely to the Sidhe.” The hare tapped at a card and Tanis discarded it for him. “She was the quickest to unlock her abilities. The girl took to dryads like roots to water.” He groomed his whiskers slyly.
Ian rewarded him with a disgusted grin. “Yeah, Abby always was a tree-hugger.”
“Ugh,” Emily groaned. “I forgot about the puns. I’m so glad the rest of you didn’t turn out to be things that were such easy targets for grandpa jokes.”
“I wish I’d been able to meet her.” Tanis drew a card for the hare, re-ordering her hand by his direction. “She was your age, right?” Her eyes flickered over to Emily, then back at the cards.
“In the end, yeah. Or practically was, anyway. She was starting up her senior year when I came back. How old she is now, I don’t know.”
“I don’t even know how age matters to trees.” Ian shifted, stretching a leg out.
“What does age matter to any of us here?” The hare leaned forward, bracing a paw on Tanis’ arm as though she were a wing chair. Emily smiled and Tanis sighed, the hare ignored them. “Even the human could live as long as she wished.”
Tanis snorted. “Clever wording. Depressing and clever.”
“It objectively is terrible, but yeah. Even so, Abby was always about utopias, or at least she had that change-the-world optimism when she was nineteen. She wanted to inject life into the Sidhe.” Emily shook her head. “She has a thing she says,”
“Uh, ‘the Folk need a catalyst or they’ll stagnate.’” Ian showed his hand and they all groaned. He grinned. “I was like, check your human privilege!”
“No, you weren’t. Not that eloquently, anyhow.” Emily dealt new hands. “Not that I was that pleased by her reasons for moving here, either.”
“None of us were.” The hare squinted at his cards. “The girl wanted to rearrange things she couldn’t understand.”
“At least she has a good glen, they seemed to, ah, ground her.” Emily explained for Tanis, “a glen would be like her family unit. Abby’s was a ‘wandering glen’, dryads who could range a fair distance from their body trees.”
“She had to pick who she’d be living around forever? Like, hella forever? Or can’t a dryad um—”
“Uproot themselves? Only with a considerable amount of pain, difficulty and hassle.” Emily threw a sidelong glance at Tanis. “It’s no different than getting hitched, really. For richer or poorer, in dry rot and in health.”
“It seems more permanent.”
“Both seem like traps to me.” Ian made a face. “Forever is a long time. Especially here.” Emily and the hare nodded in agreement.
“I am starting to understand your commitment issues, Emily.” Tanis tried to shift her position while keeping the hare balanced in her lap. “At least, where they come from.”
Ian smiled over his cards. “Hey, hare, you ever have a special somebody?”
It turned out that he’d had several. They played almost a dozen more games while he told them, stopping for a while in the middle so Tanis could eat and stretch her legs. Emily called him a little Scheherazade and regretted it about an hour later, when she was still explaining One Thousand and One Nights.
***
They tried to deal the sylph into the game, but he barely acknowledged them. That didn’t stop Ian from talking at him.
“Do you have a use name?”
The sylph didn’t stop pacing.
“Did you catch all of ours? I’m Ian, that’s Emily, Emily’s lady and the hare.” As Ian pointed at each of them with a hand full of cards they tried to see what he held. Ian was winning this round. “Obvs, you don’t want to chat, but do you have any like, interest in where we’re going and why? Speaking of which, why were you in that bag?”
The sylph glared at Ian. “I am not going to answer your endless questions.”
“It was only three.”
“Four,” corrected Tanis as she laid down a card for the hare.
Emily glanced up that the sylph. “Willingly bound or not, you’re stuck with us. Fuming and pouting is something I don’t give a shit about.” She drew a card. “Ian’s needling you because you’re an easy mark—”
“True.”
Emily threw Ian a teacher glance and he returned his focus back to the cards. “In short, let’s all play nice and try acting like genuine people instead of righteous assholes. I imagine it is no fun being in this mountain, all out of the free breeze or whatever. But you’re not the only one at a disadvantage. This lady here,” she gestured with her chin at Tanis, “is equally out of her element.”
“I think the lot of you probably have enough in common to be polite, if you’d crawl out of your ass about the situation, Aeric.” The hare sat up tall. “I think I have a straight!” He pushed at Tanis’ wrists. “Show them my cards.”
Tanis collapsed the hand and peered down at the hare. “You know his use name?”
“It’s not his use name, that’s part of his real name.” The hare tried to tug the cards from her hand to lay them out himself, but his paws found no purchase on the plastic coating.
Ian and Emily laid down their hands to look at the sylph. Even in the windless cave loose strands of his hair stirred in an invisible breeze. His finely featured face looked carved from dark ice, lit from the side by a particularly blue patch of softly glowing fungus on the wall.
The hare pawed once more at the cards before giving up with a sigh. He looked at the others and shifted uncomfortably. He started grooming his whiskers.
“How did you know that?” The sylph’s words were clipped. The petulant anger as gone and what was left was very real and cold.
“I just asked some folks if they knew you and why you might be hanging around us.” The hare moved from whiskers to combing his ears. Tanis laid a soft hand on his bristling scruff.
“When?” Emily asked, but kept her eyes on the sylph.
“When I was in my basket. I was bored in there!” The hare puffed his chest. “I was trying to be helpful.”
“Appreciated, hare.” Emily stood, resting a hand on her hip, fingers by the knife. “Okay.” She glanced at him, wondering what he’d smuggled into his basket. She shook her head. “Sylph, let’s back up a little here. Why don’t you tell us your use name and we can forget the hare slipped part of your true one.”
The sylph didn’t reply. Emily’s eyes narrowed.
“My man, I recognise rules are important to you. And you’re super creepy, sure, we’re all impressed by you being a moody, professional assassin. I am not asking you to forgive the hare’s slip-up, or anything, just to step off and help us find a way to make this situation more tenable.”
“I don’t see how that’s possible.” The sylph looked down at the hare. “Though I could challenge him for my honour.”
Emily’s sigh was very tired. “I’m sure. Pistols at dawn is for babies, etcetera, whatever. I’m also pretty sure that whatever obligation you’re under bars you from doing anything rash to us.”
The non-existent wind stopped tugging at strands straggling loose from the sylph’s braid and his eyes actively focused on Emily. “I do not owe that creature, however.”
“Okay, fair. Well, he’s an idiot and won’t,” she threw a look at the hare, “he won’t do it again and even if he didn’t actively free you, he’s still one of us so I’d say technically he’s off your murder dance card.” She shrugged. “Any chance our rude little slip up negates your obligation?” Her tone was hopeful.
The sylph shook his head.
“Dang. Worth a shot.” She bit her lip, thinking. “I’m going to make a guess that you either don’t have a common use name or you aren’t allowed to tell it to us. So, I’m just going to start calling you José.”
The sylph made a face, losing anger in confusion. “Ho-say?”
“Close enough.” Emily folded her arms, bringing her hands away from the knife.
“Why not Rumpelstiltskin?” Tanis asked.
Emily answered without turning around. “Too long. And what if he’s real? That dude is way more trouble than this one.”
The sylph tried the name again. “José. You are going to call me José.”
“And to make it even, why not address us each by the use names Ian told you earlier.”
Frowning lightly the sylph, José, looked at each of them and said their name, calling Tanis “Emily’s lady.”
“Do you feel better?”
“Not really.”
“Well, better is relative, isn’t it?” Emily purposefully turned her back on him and went back to the card game. As she picked up her hand she added, casually, “y’know, Ian, my lady and I don’t have use names. We only have the names we were given when we were born. You just used Ian’s and my true names. You’ll note we didn’t shit ourselves about it.”
“And your lady’s?”
“You don’t get her name. Nobody does.” There was a soft edge in Emily’s voice.
“Huh.” Tanis smiled. “I hadn’t noticed nobody was using it.” She absent-mindedly petted the hare. “Good job guys!”
Emily winked at her. “That’s ’cause you’re my lady, baby, gorgeous, killer.”
Tanis’ smile spread into a grin. “Omigod.” She clapped her hands. “Can I be ‘Ladykiller’? That’s like, a drag name.”
Ian raised an eyebrow and Emily snorted, rolling her eyes. Tanis flamboyantly flipped hair she didn’t have, voguing the best she could with a confused hare in her lap.
Apparently forgotten, José the sylph sunk down, sitting with his back against the wall, crushed fungi outlining him in darkness.
This post is part of The Consoling Divide – Serialised. See the archive and overall content warnings here, and find more of my writing here. I’m over on both Comradery and Patreon, if you feel like supporting my creative endeavours. If you’d like to subscribe to this story, here’s a handy email box for you: