Jude never did get a chance to ask him what that meant and how long she would really be staying here, but the answers came as everyone sat down to dinner and started talking. At which point it became obvious within three sentences that no one conducted business at a formal dinner for receiving a guest. She wasn't seated near the Queen, although she was seated at the high table, as was Raven. No one could accuse her of slighting important guests even if she was hazy on what their place in the order of local nobility was.

Samael was nowhere to be found. No one spoke his name; she didn't hear so much as a whisper of him, despite the fact that he was the impetus for the evening's festivities.

If festivities was the right word for it. She wondered for a second if Samael would have had a feast for her like this, because it had the same tone as the detritus in his throne room. The Queen had fastidious, impeccable manners. The two nobles at her side were polite and dignified, but still had accidents down the fronts of their shirts at which they dabbed with napkins, aware of their transgressions. Then there was her and Raven, and she was just trying to make sure she didn't make a mess and used the right spoons and forks, though she seemed to be doing better than the people down at the ends of the table, which curved in a semi-circle. Since they were seated at the periphery, the whoevers they were seemed to feel they could talk with their mouth full, shovel food into their mouths, fling their glasses around and spatter their neighbors.

"Is this on purpose?" she asked Raven, though she didn't have to whisper very much, as loud as everyone else was being.

He cocked his head at her, smacking his lips around his fork. Was it harder for him because he had a face more like a bird's than a human's? She felt bad for judging after she thought of that.

"This seating arrangement." Not much in the way of verbal detail. She'd had a couple of embarrassing incidents where she said something stupid or nasty at just the right time for her half of the cafeteria to go quiet. She didn't want that to happen here. First she gestured with the back end of her fork at the Queen, then she gestured at the end where one person was drinking his soup out of the bowl. If that was soup and not a mess he'd made of liquid and dinner.

Raven's mouth stretched and opened in what she was coming to learn was a smile, a more natural smile than when he pretended to be human. That was good as an answer, though it didn't answer why her court, why not Samael's, whether his was different or less pretending to be civilized or more honest and she didn't know how to describe it. She started to want to know what his court was like. Under normal circumstances.

After the dinner came dessert. Pastries, sweets, puffy sugary things that dissolved in her mouth and filled it with orange, lemon, berry, and other flavors of other fruits she didn't recognize. Something cold that felt like melon but didn't taste like it. Something else more tart than berry.

After the dessert came dancing.

It was meant to shame her. To point her out as someone who wasn't cultured like they were, was shaped too lumpy to be graceful, but it would have worked better if the Queen had an accurate idea of how graceful her own people were. With the dinner display Jude was already not impressed with the coordination and movements of the court, and three quarters of the table took to the dance floor by the time she'd consulted with Raven and decided it was something she had better do.

It wasn't that she'd danced before. But she'd done a year of cheerleading before she bowed out of the social politics, she rode horses and dodged flying hooves, she'd done physical things before. She knew where all her limbs where, how all her parts worked. Better, it looked like, than they did.

"Shall we dance, my lady?"

Raven hadn't called her that. It felt like a symbol, some way to acknowledge her place or make the made-up titles real even when it was all just words. But every story she'd ever heard or lived, right down to philosophy class, talked about the power of names and words. When Samael had said those few words to her they'd reverberated and shook the whole world down. She'd had to fight to get back into her reality with the echo of those words following her. Something in her had shifted. Or something between her and Raven had shifted. She took his hand anyway, promising herself she'd figure out what had happened later. Right now, she had to pay attention to him and to the other dancers on the floor so she didn't mess this up too bad.

"It's a simple step," he whispered in her ear. That made more sense. That, she could follow, letting him guide her steps with his hands on her body and where he put his feet. It didn't feel terrible. "There you go." And it didn't sound like she was terrible at it, either. In fact, by the surprised smugness on his face, it seemed like she was better than most.

She caught a glimpse over his shoulder, once, of the Queen. Who had not joined the dance floor, who still sat behind the dinner table, alone. She stared back at Jude with annoyance and a wrinkled brow, trying to assess her skill level given this other new information. So she continued to surprise and confuse her, but she couldn't keep that up for long. They needed to find Samael and get him out. Fast. By jailbreak, if she left them no other option.

The party ended late enough that by the end of it Jude was no longer thinking clearly, and worrying instead about how much time had passed, whether or not her parents would go looking for her, what the school would think. Whether she would be able to make it to college if she missed too much school. What her friends would think.

What friends. Be honest.

She went to sleep on those maudlin thoughts and woke up with a slight headache and the sun in her eyes, the blankets and canopy smelling musty and of odd things. There was no one else in the master bedroom, but when she sat up and looked into the room beyond she could see her new friends draped over various pieces of furniture, dozing and snoring. She saw no sign of Raven, and she thought she was glad. He was still a man, whatever species he might be, and she was pretty sure she didn't want him sleeping in the next room when the only thing separating the two was an archway.

"I hate castle living," she muttered, tip-toeing down a cold stone hallway till she found what passed for a bathroom. Which was a small closet with a couple boards with a hole in it. "I really hate castle living." As though she'd ever lived in a castle in the first place.

At least there was a basin to wash her hands in. And a basin to pee in, but the hell was she going to use that, she could make her way to the closet. The sooner they got Samael out of there the sooner she'd have to forgo indignities like splinters and suspicious stains touching her butt.

"We have indoor plumbing in our world, you know. Do you know what that is?"

Diggle chuckled. "Of course we know what that is, we got taps of our own, don't you remember?"

Now that she thought about it, she remembered taps in the city square that she'd passed on her way charging through to the castle. And she remembered hearing the unmistakable sound of water dripping, so there might well have been other taps inside the castle itself. "Then why doesn't she have it here?"

"Oh, she might. But likely that's a luxury she keeps for herself." Her new friend brought up a towel to dry her with, and scrubbed her down as she did. "Most people here don't bathe as much as you do, though. She'll be put out when she sees how much water you're using."

Jude froze as she stepped out of the tub. "Is it rare? Is there a drought?"

"There's no drought, she'd just like her people to think there is. Scarcity brings conflict between themselves, brings them to look to her as a source of water and power." Raven spoke from the next room, where he'd been pacing for the last five minutes of her bath.

"I think I read a comic book like that once," she muttered. All right, she was out of the bath and getting dressed in something that did not include what she thought of as underwear, and therefore was very uncomfortable around the crotch area, but also something that had more layers than she wanted to wear in this environment.

Raven came in once she was half-dressed, impatient and ready to be done with this as she was. Well, Jude considered herself dressed, all the important bits were covered and Bowman was lacing her into her corset, but everyone else in the room look scandalized. She rolled her eyes, and Raven grinned his sharp, slightly open smile. "Ready to discuss today's petitioning?"

"No," she gasped as Bowman pulled the corset laces tight again under Diggle's instruction. "Urk. But it's not going to wait for me to be ready, which would be about ne-ver." Another gap in her words as the upper, then the lower corset strings were yanked. The goblin was far, far stronger than his small self looked. "Not sure the back support is worth the clench."

"I thought these things were coming back into fashion," Raven chuckled. "All right. She'll most likely make you wait again, to bother you. You'll be sitting on a bench which, I'm afraid, will be even more uncomfortable in formal clothing."

She wouldn't be able to slump, he meant. "Oh goodie."

"The good news is she will only be able to make you wait for so long, especially with the anticipation you've built up for your argument. There will be many in the audience who are there to watch and listen rather than make petitions of their own, so the wait may be shorter than it looks at first. When she comes up to you, give greetings with all of her titles and greet her with all of your own. Don't worry, we'll give you some and you'll memorize them."

It was starting to sound like high school again. A combination of high school and Law & Order, the palace guards who investigate kidnappings and the noble fairy people who persecute the offenders. Or the kidnapped, either one. "Wait, you'll just make up titles?"

"Half of their titles are made up," Diggle sniffed, tying Jude's blouse onto her rather lightly by comparison to the corset.

"I guess politicians are the same in fairy land as they are in my world," she sighed, then nodded to Raven to indicate she was shutting up and listening now.

"She will ask you what your petition is, you will tell her that you request the return of Samael to his kingdom and his people alive and unharmed, in this moment and with no geas or lien or other constraint upon his person. It's a bit convoluted but there's a history of dealing with each other that makes this kind of series of caveats necessary."

She'd read the fairy tales, she understood the principle. "What, like how no one reads the terms and conditions? She's not going to just give him to me."

"No, she'll ask what she can expect in return for him. We can do one of two things at this point, if you think you have something she wants," and Raven's face made it clear that he found this doubtful, but that he was willing to extend the benefit of the doubt to her was something. Helped a lot in building her confidence, even if she panicked a little racking her brains trying to think of a fair value trade when she owned the contents of her room back home and nothing in the fairy world. For those who had nothing a year and a day's service or a first-born child or a true love for something was also an option, but she didn't want to give any of that up either. "Or we can stand on the fact that she has taken a rival ruler hostage and while there is no body politic that will hold her accountable for it, she might be seen as taking hostile action and starting a war against a smaller demesne, at which point stronger lords and ladies might take her for inviting her own invasion."

"And she can't afford to be seen as losing to me because of the same reason as she took Samael," Jude put it together with a nasty, terrified grin. "So that ought to make her both more scared and more likely to make mistakes, and also more scared and, you know. More likely to rip my throat out."

Someone should have said that wasn't literal, or she wouldn't go that far. No one did. Diggle looked up from the hem of her skirt she'd been pinning up for a quick fix, Raven gave her a somber look as though waiting for her to say something or back out.

"Okay, now I have a better idea of what the stakes are. What are the words I'm using to threaten her with other people's authority?"

They went over the various powers. They made her recite the names, the formal phrases, until her head hurt and her eyes were tired enough to blur and water. A bell rang that sounded like lunch, but Raven said it was the bell to start the audiences. "You have a bit of time, they're not going to expect you to show up immediately." But she stepped into her skirt, almost before Diggle had finished hemming. "What is the authority over this part of the world?"

"The House of Ravens. But the House of Red and White may also have an interest in keeping the peace north of their borders, although not likely because we're awfully far north of them."

"Good. And who are the local houses who might take an interest in her kingdom and the fact that she sees fit to encroach on others' territory?"

"The Sky Wardens are most likely, given that they rule a good chunk of the north, and plus they have the forces to come down and stomp her into little fairy cakes." Jude grinned. "There's the Bear Clan, they don't have a single enclave but they have pockets all over the place and one of them is, what, an hour or so's drive away from here?"

"No one here drives and we don't measure time in the same way you do, not consistently, but yes." Raven nodded. "And?"

And? She'd missed one. There was an and. "And..." They'd made her memorize the whole damn North American group list. "Wide Mouth River Clan is too far south, they're Gulf Coast territory. Echo Callers are the Rockies, Windward is the Midwest, Ice Bears isn't actually a thing I pulled that from a book..." It hit her because it was the thing she hadn't wanted to think about. Because it made her wonder things she didn't want to consider. "The Ghost Talkers."

He nodded. "The Ghost Talkers. They're distrusted even among us, no one's ever entirely sure of where they stand. Talking to the dead for too long drives you mad."

He said it like it was a fact everyone knew, and the rest of the room nodded in chorus, but that got Jude thinking. Even if the subject of her thinking sounded a lot like desperation.

She didn't miss another question. They went through the rest, and then the phrases again, and then there was no more time to stall.

"I knew it. This is hell. It's underground, it's hot, it's sticky, it's full of tortures. I'm in hell."

"Shhht."

Raven's shushing couldn't keep the belligerent clench from her jaw, nor could it keep her from slumping as best she could with the skeletal steel fingers wrapped around her ribs and holding her upright. She hated the corset, she hated Diggle and Bowman for lacing her into it, she hated Raven for making it necessary. She especially hated the Queen for taking so goddamn long to resolve a dispute over borders between a dairy farmer and an apple farmer. The cows were eating all the apples. The apples were on the ground and going to rot regardless. The apples were fermenting and getting the cows drunk, affecting the milk. The debate made Jude want to scream.

Of course, the moment she took her attention away, that'd be the moment the Queen would pick to call on her petition. She had to be watching for it, that's how mean chicks worked, they waited for you to show weakness and then they ripped you open at your belly and pointed out its insufficiently virtuous contents to the world. So she wouldn't show any. She would just come up with creative ways to murder the woman in her sleep instead.

And she would run over the plan. Because it was a crazy, last-ditch plan and it hinged on a few things being true that she didn't like. One thing in particular that she really didn't like, but she had to admit the possibility. And if that were the case, playing these cards would be the only thing that would get her out alive and with her sanity intact. She'd seen all those movies and TV shows and read a lot of books involving fairies driving people mad. They made songs about that shit. She would not be the next airy one-woman-wail ballad.

She had, nonetheless, almost fallen asleep when they called her up. Her ass had definitely fallen asleep. Raven laid a hand on her back in a way that was meant to be comforting and to help her up. All it did was make her want to break every one of his fingers.

So maybe she got a little violent when she got nervous and had to speak and hold her own in front of people. So what.

Jude stood. Wrapped one hand firmly around the other as she stepped forward, back straight, chin lifted. The whole series of posture adjustments ran on a loop of reminders in the back of her mind, and she hoped it wouldn't come out of her mouth as she spoke.

They'd called her The Human Girl from the Goblin Underground, but she stepped forward and gave her titles that they'd made up earlier. "Lady Judith of the Realms Above and Below, Friend of Ravens and Favored of Samael and Knight Protector of his People, here to seek the return of Samael, King of the Lost, Keeper of the Forgotten Wisdoms and Warden of the Underrealm in the North, to his people. I come under auspice of treaty and with the full authority to represent the people of the Lost, as bestowed by Lord Allan of the Ravenswood, Steward to the King. Having been received by you and eaten of your bread and honey, I request that you release Samael into my custody, alive and in full possession of his mind and spirit and all parts of himself, without coercion or compulsion, in the same state as which he arrived. Failure to do so will convey a warlike intent upon the people of the Underrealm in the North as indicated by the kidnapping and imprisonment of its rightful and appointed ruler and we will respond suitable to that intent."

Behind her she heard Raven hiss warily. That last part hadn't been agreed upon specifically, for all that she'd gotten the idea from him. After they'd agreed her position was weak she'd tried for something else in the middle of the night, pulled that out of her head and it sounded good, didn't it? She hoped. She'd remembered to put in all the specifications, so that they couldn't send him back under the influence of some sort of spell.

Her speech caused the entire room to go silent. It didn't get any response from the Queen at first, except a tiny smile of amusement. It did nothing for the tension around her eyes, and her fingers clenched at the arms of her chair rather than drummed as Jude had seen her do during some of the earlier petitions.

"I am truly sorry if the people of the Goblin Underground took a warlike intent from our actions," the Queen started. Slowly, and Jude waited for her to somehow explain the kidnapping in a way that made it sound different from what it was. How did you explain kidnapping away? "It was certainly never in our thoughts to instigate a conflict between our two kingdoms. Had I known that you were an acknowledged Lady of his courts I would of course have left his care to you."

Jude blinked once and then stopped herself before she could gape like an idiot. "You might have asked," she said softly, seeing where this was going after a second to be terrified and wonder if she'd missed something. Two things occurred to her in all the panic. Firstly, the memory of someone, a famous person or a relative she didn't remember, pointing out that if you spoke softly and forced the other person to speak softly in order to listen to you, that was like winning. And second, if she was claiming she had taken him for his own good she had to also be claiming that he wasn't capable of acting in his own good.

There was a woman, Nellie Bly, who Jude had read about on a whim. Nellie had gotten herself checked into a mental institution and, once there, had found it far more difficult to get out than anyone who had checked themselves into a hospital should have. She'd had nightmares for two weeks after that. It had been a part of her ongoing resolution to appear normal no matter how many fairylands she was abducted to.

If the principle here was the same, if that was what the Queen was trying to use as an excuse for her behavior, she might have to adjust her thinking some. The Queen continued to stare at her, and too long had passed between her one comment and any follow-up. She was being silent to punish her and make her look in the wrong, awkward and unacceptable.

Jude lifted her chin and stared at the Queen, and let the silence draw out further. One one-thousand. Two-one thousand. "Well?" she asked into the space between. Still in the soft voice, received pronunciation starting to creep in as the stress made her corset tight in all the wrong places and loose where she didn't want to feel gaps and the danger of things shifting. "Now that you know, why haven't you presented him?"

Eyes swiveled to her, like a tennis match. A very slow, nail-bitingly polite tennis match. "And how do I know you are capable of caring for him in the manner to which he should be?" the Queen asked, very tight and measured, hands opening over the clawed arms of her chair.

"I have the faith of his people, which is more than I can say for his caretakers here, given that they sought me out to recover him," she replied archly. It was even true, she hadn't thought about it in those terms till she had to believe it with enough force to convince the crowd, but if Raven had come looking for her to rescue Samael he must have some faith in her that she could pull this off.

Back to the Queen. A point for her side, she thought? There couldn't be any way she had the faith of Samael's people when they'd organized a rescue mission for him.

"But it was one of his own people who recommended him into my care," she said, smiling, one hand beckoning someone to come up from behind her. Jude didn't turn around. "What was it you said, Sir Bran the Brave? He needed the comfort of a warm bed and a loving hand after his rejection by the mortal girl."

With the name dropping she didn't have to turn around. Sir Bran, the knight who barely came up to her knee, padded up alongside her with his black-capped head hanging down and his tail drooping along the floor like a wilted broom. His beak hung slightly open in distress. Murmurs broke out all over, and it was all she could do not to turn and glare daggers and punt him into the nearest stone pillar for selling them all out like that.

"Sir Bran was in error," Jude said coolly, forcing her hand to stay open and the other hand not to squeeze her wrist too tight. "An understandable one, given that he was close to both of us and may have wished a different outcome than that which precipitated my return, but an error nonetheless. Twice over in error, knowing as he did that he could have called me to the castle at any point." There were a few pauses in there while she tried to wrap her mind and mouth around the speech. A couple of the girls in Drama had been able to ad-lib Shakespeare if they forgot their lines in mid-play; she'd never managed to do that, but she could come close. She could try to put the pauses where they sounded more natural and less like a William Shatner impression.

Beside her, Bran shuddered all over. Ashamed, at a guess, he was now pulling at the tawny feathers on his chest and she had enough friends with parakeets, all two of them, to know he was bad off. And apart from that, how bad off had Samael been, to scare him to the point of going to someone she wasn't even sure was an ally? Or was this another kind of a trick. If so, who was playing it? How much attention did she have to pay to their excuses?

Enough, she answered herself, to deal with them in this mannerly combat. She'd made her little announcement denying that Sir Bran could be relied upon for good judgment, now she had to see if the Queen decided this was enough of an indictment of her actions that she had to turn him over. If things got desperate, she reminded herself, she always had the Ghost Talkers.

"And now?" the Queen asked, quiet and polished and smiling more. Jude saw that she thought she had her trapped a second or two before the words came out. "If I turn you away, will you trust that my people are able to care for him in a way that you will not? And if I do not, will you declare war on us for only having his best interests at heart?"

Oh god, that argument again. "His best interests are best determined by himself and himself alone. It is not your place, nor anyone else's, to determine what will suit his needs and how he may be served in such a manner as to please his temperament and his health." That didn't sound coherent. She rushed on through. "If you bring him out and he tells me from his own lips and uncoerced in any way that he would rather remain here, I will abide by his wishes."

Raven sucked in a breath again and, again, couldn't object without seeming unreasonable or drawing attention. Jude didn't look behind her, either.

"Do I have your word on that?" The Queen asked, lowering her voice as well and all but purring.

"You have not produced him yet, so I am not inclined to give you my word on anything. Is there some reason you have not brought him out as early as the night we arrived? If I speak to the Ghost Talkers, will they tell me what he says?" That was her trump card, played too soon but she was starting to be scared of not playing it at all. The room was so quiet everyone heard Raven's beak clack shut, and the Queen's skirts rustle against her legs as she shifted position.

"You silly girl, I have not ordered his death, what do you accuse me of?"

She had an answer for that, too. "I accuse you of nothing. I merely suggest that he is dead, either by the cause of some intervening event or by one of your followers, perhaps, becoming a bit too enthusiastic." That came from the advice of her friends, always leave the monarch an out, so that they could save face and wouldn't blame her for their loss of authority. She didn't think that was at all fair to the scapegoat, but right now she was more interested in getting Samael back. They could worry about a less resource-consuming rescue later.

No, but she had hit a nerve somewhere. No one in fairyland had any kind of servants with any kind of sense, or that was Jude's impression of things. Which was doing an unkindness to Raven, so maybe she should say that it was the rank and file who had no sense and the brains of a five year old, and the rest of them were left to pick up the slack. Either way, whoever the Queen had left Samael with was in real danger of murdering him, or at least she thought so.

"You have no allies amongst the Ghost Talkers," she said finally, playing a visible gamble. "You have no allies anywhere but in your quaint little kingdom..." And she stopped there as all eyes turned to her again, taking it a step too far.

Jude dragged herself as upright and as haughty as she could, then abandoned it in the next instant for the quiet confidence with which she had spoken words that got her free of Samael's games. It had to be effortless, and she wasn't haughty, she was confident. "You don't know that. You don't know anything more than he did when he and I first met. You know that he was defeated in a trial of games by a mortal woman," woman sounded better than girl. "And you thought to take advantage of that, that he was somehow ill or not as strong as he used to be. Don't," she added, shaking her head. "Offer excuses. I think we're past that now."

She could hear Bran chirping with distress next to her. Sweat broke out on her palms and she moved her open hand a little further out from her dress, her other hand down and away from the edge of her sleeve. It was one of those moments where everything could go right or horribly wrong. Either way, there would be a cost for humiliating her like this.

There had been a cost for humiliating Samael, she realized. She was paying that cost now, coming to get him when no one else could.

"You lie," the Queen said. Everything stopped. The only sounds were the drip of water and the slow creak of light fixtures on chains. That was in the stories; they might accuse each other of equivocation or being mistaken or misjudging something, but you had to be very sure you were more powerful to accuse someone of outright lying. There was a specific TV series she was now thinking of, twice other characters had accused the evil monarch of lying or wrongdoing in some way, but because they'd made a full accusation of it they'd died horribly in ways her mother hadn't wanted her to watch. She decided not to tell her mother those episodes had been very educational.

Jude smiled. It was manic and terrified and angry, angry that she was being used and condescended to, angry at the whole thing. "Look again."

The Queen looked, not at her, but past her, to one of the mirrors on the wall. Then down at Jude's hand. She didn't know why, and she didn't dare ask or look around.

The Lady of the Fen broke first. She was, after all, the Queen of only a very small portion of fairyland, and Jude had forgotten that in the midst of all that bluffing. She didn't dare take her eyes off the other woman while the Queen beckoned for a servant, who nodded and scurried off in the direction of somewhere behind the wall against which her throne was sat.

And then he was there. In five short minutes he was there, looking ragged and exhausted but not much worse for however many days in confinement. Jude made herself not react to that too, knowing some part of her was going to explode later. "My lord," she bowed her head. It was all a play, they were just doing a play. "You are well?"

"I am as well as can be expected," he replied with caustic gentility, so he hadn't changed much. "Your retinue?"

Now, finally, she looked back over her shoulder at Raven, who nodded and turned to fetch them. Something moved in the mirror next to the archway, but when she shifted her focus it was just her reflection, though she hadn't realized she was making a fist. Maybe the Queen feared being punched in the snoot. She turned back in the other woman's direction, who looked in a thunderous bad mood. Samael took up a position at her side, with one hand behind her back. He also took over the talking, for which she was deeply grateful.

"I thank you for the extension of your hospitality," he said, with a smile of tiny fangs and a bite to it that she hadn't heard before. "But now I will take my leave. I trust Sir Bran is in good hands here," he added, and though her back stiffened at the thought of leaving him here she couldn't very well argue against it. Not with her limited knowledge, and not without potentially breaking half a dozen other things. "He certainly seems to have made some new friends, I expect he'll be wanting to stay, if that's all right."

"Of course." Her voice promised that Bran would come to regret promising a delivery he couldn't ultimately make.

Everyone had assembled behind them. Samael turned and, feeling as though she was opening herself up for a good solid stab in the back, Jude followed him. "My lady," he offered her his arm, which she took. They swept out of the hall with her back straight and her head high, as if she'd known what she was doing the whole time. And as if she wasn't about to collapse into a pile of pee and nervous sweat, which she was seriously thinking of doing once they got back to his castle. Funny, too. She'd never thought of his castle as a safe place, and she wasn't sure she thought of it that way now. Safer than here. That might be the best she could hope for.

She smoothed her free hand over her skirt as they swept through the hallway and thought that her hands were surprisingly un-cramped from the fists she hadn't been making.

Jude didn't feel like she could stop looking over her shoulder until they were out of the city entirely. The thorns closed behind them so closely that several of them scratched the hindquarters of the last few ponies, who squealed and capered forward. She gritted her teeth and didn't say anything. It wasn't as though she'd expected anything else.

Samael was uncharacteristically quiet, so she spent the ride back watching how he sat on a horse, how stiff he was in places, how it seemed less like he didn't know how to ride and more like he didn't know how to behave in front of her anymore. He looked straight ahead and didn't answer Raven's questions except in monosyllables, to the bird-man's disgust. Eventually she pulled up in front of him and across his path so he had to either pull up short and go around her or stop entirely.

"You could be less of a dick to the people who went after you, you know." She bit her lip as soon as she'd said it, when he turned a look her way that was full of churning and confusion and some anger, yes. She saw similar looks from news videos of refugees and survivors of natural disasters, never up close like this. Blurting things out came naturally to her. "It's okay. You're safe now, right? We're heading back home."

"I know that," he snapped. She rolled her eyes and nudged Pucker forward. "Sorry," came the murmur from behind her. "I don't like having to be told things which are well known to me already."

She opened her mouth, stopped, took a second to think that over and let the habit of thinking over what words meant sink in. "You..." she started. Stopped. Pucker slowed down enough that he pulled up next to her. "Well." Jude swallowed. "I guess someone or another will be around to tell you for a while."

For as long as you need it, she thought, but it smacked way too much of cuddly reassuring she didn't want to do. And he didn't want to have done, given that he was stiff as a beanpole.

They rode on in silence. Everyone took up positions in a rough circle around them as they reached the territory border, even if some of the riders had to pull ahead to do it. Samael looked up and around as the last of them trotted into place, then laughed softly.

"What? Shut up," she added, the second she got the message. They were treating the two of them like reigning monarchs, which put her at his level and she liked that. It also put her as his queen or lover or consort, and she hadn't even decided whether or not she wanted a boyfriend yet. Even though she was in her last year of high school, which sometimes bothered her. But all the high school boys she knew were so dumb.

The King of the Lost wasn't dumb, he didn't say anything, but he had a knowing look on his face that was almost as bad. It was the same knowing look when he'd made his offer the first time, when he'd taunted her all the way through the quest.

"I see you're back to normal," she said finally, because she couldn't stand the combination of the knowing grin and the silence.

The grin faded, to her reluctant satisfaction. "Am I doing so well?"

At faking normal, she guessed. He could be convoluted to the point of being impossible to understand sometimes. "It'll get better," she said, after a couple minutes of groping around for anything else to say and not coming up with anything.

"You think so."

Possibly she shouldn't have implied there was anything wrong in the first place. Not in front of other people, but they knew already. Should she not have rubbed it in their faces? "I know so. You're the goddamn ruler of a bunch of fairy land, it'll get better or you'll hex it or something." It sounded ridiculous, but that was sort of the point. Something ridiculous to break the tension, make him laugh. Make someone laugh. She thought she saw Raven's crest lifting.

"Fairy land?" That wasn't the part she'd meant to make him laugh, but anything in a pinch.

"Well, aren't you?"

"I suppose so." He looked forward again. His fingers played over the reins, clenching, unclenching as his horse's head pulled to its chest in response, then closing tight again when he'd forgotten.

Jude sighed noisily. "Spit it out."

"Beg pardon?"

"Whatever it is you're trying not to say to me. Or ask me. Just spit it out, I hate when you're cryptic and all-knowing like this."

He didn't say anything for several minutes, but since he looked as though he were coming to grips or steeling his nerves for something, she allowed it. "The two of us together make a formidable force," he started, and then she knew what the rest of it was before he said anything else. Fortunately, he glanced at her and shut his mouth, reading on her face what she thought of that idea.

"I'm still in school," she said finally, alternating a firm stare between the pommel of her saddle and the point between her horse's ears. "I'm going to college, Samael. Let me at least get through college before you start going all Prince Charming on me. Let me... Twenty seven."

He blinked again. "Beg pardon?" In front of them, Raven was almost doubled over laughing, but his King didn't seem to notice. Or if he did he found it funnier to play oblivious.

"Twenty seven. You have to wait until I'm twenty seven. That's a big magical number, isn't it? Three threes." It seemed right. And by then she might have grown up enough to know what she wanted. High school boys hadn't seemed dumb, she discovered, until she went through fairyland and came out realizing how much she didn't know. About the world, and about herself.

He shook his head, less in negation and more in wonder, if his smile was anything to judge by. "You would make a formidable queen, you know that?"

"You offered already." She drove her horse into his side. Gently. "That's my counter offer. Nine years." Nine years? Almost, yes. Damn. "Take it or leave it."

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