iron to deal with the changeling workshops, and get her eyed with suspicion in the border communities. It was a tough break, no matter how you wanted to slice it.
“You have no idea.”
“That’s where you’re wrong.” I felt sorry for her. That wasn’t stopping me from getting annoyed. “I’m Amandine’s daughter. You knew that, didn’t you?” When she nodded, I continued, “Well, everyone knows that. I’m just a changeling. I’m not even as fae as you are. But her reputation precedes me everywhere I go, and I spend every damn day failing to live up to it. So don’t tell me I don’t know how hard it is to deal with the hand your parents dealt you. My cards may be different, but they’re just as bad.”
Gordan glared at me. I glared back, and she was the first one to look away.
I relaxed marginally. Victories, even small ones, are good things. I’m petty enough that they matter to me, and as long as that’s the case, I’m still human enough to stand a chance. “It’s okay to be mad,” I said, as gently as I could.
She shrugged. “Is it?” she asked. I took that to be her way of getting choked up. The Coblynau have never been very visual with their feelings.
“Yes, it is,” I said. “I’ve been mad since I got here. People don’t help when they say they will, they keep wandering around on their own . . . I’m pissed.”
“So why are you here?”
“Why?” I shrugged, settling on the truth. “Sylvester asked me to come, and you need me.”
“You don’t care if we die,” she said, tone turning bitter. She looked back at me, eyes narrowed. “You’re just here because your liege ordered you to be.”
“He didn’t order, he asked. And you’re wrong.”
“What do you mean?”
“I do care if you all die, because Faerie cares. I care because no one needs to die, and,” I raised one hand in mock melodrama, “Sylvester will kick my ass if I don’t care.”
It worked. She bit back a smile, half-turning to keep me from noticing. Ha; too late. I can be pretentious sometimes, but I know it, and knowing your flaws means you can exploit them. “This would work better if we weren’t fighting,” I said.
She looked back. “You’re right,” she conceded, “it probably would.”
“You don’t have to like me. I mean, April doesn’t.”
Gordan grinned. “April doesn’t like a lot of things.”
“I noticed. Why is that?”
“She’s distanced.”
“Distanced?” I asked. I wanted Gordan to relax, but I had a job to do, and part of it was learning everything I could about the remaining inhabitants of Tamed Lightning. Most of them were probably nice folks, but one of them was a killer.
“She used to be a tree. She did tree things—she drank water, absorbed nutrients from the soil, photosynthesized—the good stuff.” She leaned back in her chair, now on familiar ground. “You want to talk ‘cycle of nature,’ trees have it down. Everything nature does is in a tree.”
“True enough.”
“So she’s a tree. Only suddenly she’s not a tree, she’s a network server. It’s cold there. It does server things, not living things. Instead of sunlight, she has electricity. Instead of roots, she has cables. It’s stuff she didn’t need before. So she starts to learn these new things—how to be a good machine—and she forgets about sunlight, and water in her roots, and photosynthesis.”
“Oh,” I said, realization dawning. “The Dryad is the tree.”
“Right. The more she knows about being a machine, the less she knows about being anything else.”
“But she still likes some people.”
“No, she likes Jan. The rest of us are tolerated as functions her ‘mother’ needs to remain operational.” Gordan shrugged. “It’s no big deal. We’re used to her.”
“Doesn’t it seem a bit . . . strange?”
“Have you ever met anyone with a cat they’d adopted from the pound?”
I blinked, a little thrown by the conversational shift. “Yes.”
“Let me guess: the cat was devoted to them and hated everyone else. Am I close?”
“Yeah,” I said, thoughtfully. Mitch and Stacy adopted a kitten from the SPCA once. It was a little ball of fluffy feline evil, set permanently on “kill.” Every time Shadow saw me—or Cliff, or even Kerry—he launched himself for whatever tender bits were closest to hand and started trying to remove them. But he never stopped purring when Stacy was around.
He died of old age two years before I came home. According to Mitch, he never mellowed: even when he was toothless and half-blind, he kept