Jannet could taste the palace on his tongue—resin and sweet powder and the sour edge of nerves. Poppy clung to the king’s air like a veil. Fear and vanity hung on the courtiers in equal parts. The watch smelled of oil, horse, and duty ground down to habit. It was all familiar to a home a lifetime ago in a way he wished it wasn’t. They turned toward the South Gate.

  “Magnus,” Leth tried, falling into step beside him. “We can plan once we’re outside the walls. Don’t bolt.”

  He kept walking.

  “Mangus,” Fialla said, softer. “Please. Talk to us.”

  His stride stayed even. His tail cleared barrels and cart wheels by inches and never brushed a thing.

  Torren came around to walk backward in front of him. “If you mean to make a point, make it plain. Silence is easy to twist.”

  Jannet looked past him, over his shoulder to the long stripe of road that led out and away. The gate towers were ahead, banners hanging obedient in the still morning. Crossbows watched them from the gallery. The same smell as the palace lived up there—poppy’s cousin, paperwork’s dust.

  Gerrin, still pale but steady, caught his breath and tried once more. “You don’t have to leave alone,” he said. “We can—”

  Jannet stopped three strides short of the arch and the party rippled around the sudden lack of motion. The watch ranks tightened out of reflex, then steadied when he didn’t lift his head.

  He turned at last and faced his own.

  “I’m disappointed,” he said. He didn’t raise his voice; the stone did that for him. “Not in you. In this place.”

  Leth’s mouth pressed thin. Torren’s hands were quiet for once. Calis watched the angles above. Gerrin stood as if breath was still a new gift and he didn’t want to use it wrongly. Fialla’s fingers were packed into her cloak’s hem and refused to come back out.

  “I thank you for walking me this far and speaking for me,” Jannet went on. “That counts and it always will.”

  “Magnus—” Leth began, soft warning wrapped in the name.

  “Listen. If you’re Guild-registered and come on your own, Newscar will take you. You’ll be welcome. The king’s men are not after today, they’re enemies to me and mine. They won’t be welcome in our jungle or our towns. Not after this morning.Thank you for bringing me this far.”

  “He drew a breath. ‘I’m sorry it’s come to this,’ he said. ‘Your king is weak and he rules by fear. He commands by making others fell small. I know that kind too well.”

  He let the weight of that land and didn’t explain it. It had already been explained once, in another life. “Magnus,” Leth said again, but there was no plea in it, just genuine sadness.

  “Thank you,” he told them. “For last night. And for trying.”

  Torren opened his mouth to argue and thought better of it. The party stared in silence, each dealing with the grief of a departing friend in their own way.

  Jannet dipped his head, turned, and walked out under the arch. No horns sounded. The watch let him pass and as he left made the sound of metal armor unclenching.

  He took the road until the city noise thinned and the winter light found a way into the ditch. Cobble surrendered to ruts; hedge took over from wall; the air lost its perfume of powder and wine and began to smell of fresh water again.

  He climbed a low rise and tasted the air without rancor. The stink of the hive fell away. Human fear is a sharp, sour, learned taste and it uncoils from the back of his tongue. He was thinking about nothing, which is to say he was finally thinking clearly, when the world at his shoulder made a bright, dry sound and delivered a creature the size of his palm.

  Jannet flinched. Claws cut dirt. His tail came up, then down, as the little thing righted itself with a neat flick of wings and hovered, upside down for a heartbeat, grinning.

  It giggled—the kind of laughter that ignores size.

  “Don’t do that,” he said, letting breath back in.

  “I waited until no one was watching,” it said, pleased with itself. “People tend to reach for boxes when they see me.”

  It hovered at his eye-line, knees tucked, a point of light that made the hedgerow look drabber by comparison. It looked like something he knew from a life with movie nights, cheap takeout, and a husband who hated “kid flicks.” He let the analogy come and didn’t apologize to the part of him that winced at it. It looked like a Gelfling, and it wasn’t one, and he loved it at once because it was beautiful and alive, really alive!

  “You’re hard to see inside,” the faeling went on, cheerful about the limits of its own trick. “Like a desert mirage or a rippling reflection.”

  Jannet couldn’t help the childlike glee that came with seeing something so beautiful, so utterly magical. The old, hidden girl in him surfaced, and he began giggling; the faeling giggled back, pleased with itself. Their laughter bounced once along the empty road, then faded as they walked on. “That’s fine by me,” Jannet said finally.

  It spun, righted itself, and drifted along at his shoulder. “You carry two names,” it said. “Both fit.”

  “They’re both mine.”

  The creature made a sound that might have been a yes. The road bent toward a plank bridge; ice held in the shadowed seams.

  “People here call us faeling, but your word yokai is closer.”

  “Yokai,” he said, feeling the weight of the old word from a past life. “Where did you come from?”

  Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.

  “From a court, not a country,” the faeling said. “We called it Green Willow’s court, one of the old dream domains. It belonged to a fae elder who had slept and crystallized long before I was made. We were born from her stories. The halls were all lantern-light and hollow roots, and the doors opened where the world thinned.”

  “How did you leave it?” Jannet asked

  “When we gather enough tales of our own, we range,” it said. “Six of us stepped out together. It is a long tale full of greedy hands making trades, the court I came from was far far to the east in a place humans called the spirit lands.”

  Jannet walked a few steps in silence. “Why hunt your kind at all?”

  “We’re valuable,” the faeling said, plain.

  Jannet kept his eyes on the road. “Then why hunt your kind?”

  “Because of what we turn into,” the faeling said. “When we’ve carried enough stories, we go still and sleep. A court grows around that sleep. Whoever keeps the sleeper, keeps the court.”

  He glanced over. “So they try to catch you before that happens.”

  “They try to keep the seed,” it said. “It’s easier than earning one.”

  He nodded once. “So you’re hard to catch.”

  “Usually,” it said, as if it were listing the weather. “Iron helps.’

  “Do you hear thoughts?”Jannet asked

  “I catch the loud parts,” it said. “It’s not perfect.”

  “Practice makes perfect,” he said jokingly.

  It seemed pleased by that and let the conversation step down to the noise of wind in the hedge. They walked. A rook complained from a post having never seen anything larger than a mule before.

  “Why are humans walled off from the lands where you come from?”

  It tilted its head. “Because it is the rule of the strongest. Elves call it keeping balance. Dwarves call it honoring craft. They don’t agree on anything except that humans are clumsy with power and experience.”

  “And are they?”

  “Sometimes,” it said. “Sometimes not. It doesn’t matter. The rules keep them on their side of the wall.”

  “Soooo… you’re not supposed to be here,” he said, catching the thread.

  It grinned like a spark catching dry grass. “No. My name is Pale Buttercup by the way, and I am very bad at doing what I’m supposed to.”

  He barked a laugh despite himself. It made the faeling glow with the victory of having caused it.

  “Pale Buttercup,” he tried, tasting the name.

  “Yes,” it said, proud without shame. “You may call me Buttercup if you like. My friends call me that.”

  After a moments silence “Jannet,” he said, giving back something that mattered. The humans know me as Magnus.”

  “I noticed,” Buttercup said, pleased to have been right earlier. “Two names sit straight on you. Most second names wobble. It was smart of you to keep your true name from those pesky humans.”

  “I was human once,” he said. He didn’t expect to say it; it came out anyway. Something about the faeling lowered his guard.”

  “That explains the seams,” Buttercup said, delighted. “You stitched well.”

  “Poorly, at first I think,” he admitted.

  They walked into a patch of sun shallow as a bowl. Buttercup drifted through it and came out brighter.

  “Tell me the rest,” Jannet said. “About your people.”

  “We’re a spiritual people,” the faeling said. “We live in the seams of this world.”

  Jannet thought of

  the anime she used to sneak when her husband wasn’t around.

  “We travel the spirit lands,” it went on. “Sometimes we stray into other realms, but the old pacts barred us from human lands.

  We collect stories until they’re heavy enough to change us. Then comes crystallization—like a chrysalis. We go down into the earth and sleep. While we dream, a place forms from what we’ve gathered creating a domain of dreams, full of the adventures and monsters we kept.”

  Jannet glanced over. “When you sleep and a place grows, what is it to you?”

  Buttercup’s wings ticked. “A theater,” it said. “I’m the dreamer and the director. The domain is my stage. I set scenes from the stories I’ve kept, and the rules work like a script. Anyone who wanders in becomes part of it—some as heroes, some as trouble. I don’t control every line, but I call cues. I can change the backdrop, move the lights, bring a monster on early or send it off.”

  Jannet pictured footlights and paper moons, then the stranger, truer version the fae meant. He nodded for more.

  “Left alone long enough,” the faeling said, “that domain grows a court. New faelings wake there. Some get bored, climb out, and wander again. Then it starts over.”

  “A place,” he repeated.

  “A pocket below,” Buttercup said, hands sketching the shape without meaning to. “A domain. It’s a dream with walls. It borrows from everything they loved and everything they feared. Buttercup shaped a small square in the air. “Think of it as a playhouse under the ground. A domain. I’m the one dreaming it and calling the cues.”

  Jannet frowned, but he was listening.

  “When people wander in adventurers or monsters, they become part of my created cast,” Buttercup said. “If they take the scene the way it’s offered, solve what’s set in front of them, and play their parts well. The director rewards them with treasures from stories they can only dream of. That’s the reward for a show well played.”

  “So Dungeons,” Jannet said, “Underground mazes filled with puzzles and treasure?”

  “We don’t like that word,” Buttercup said, wrinkling its nose. “But yes. It is what other races call our mature form.”

  They took the rise. The road leveled out and the sun beamed. Jannet felt his stride change into the one he could keep all day. Buttercup matched his pace without effort, the way a leaf sometimes matches a river’s current.

  “Tell me a story,” Buttercup said suddenly, as if payment were due and had just come up in the cycle. “Not about places with crowns and evil kings. About your other life.”

  He almost said no, an old reflex. Then he remembered there was no one left to tell him what he could or couldn’t say. He tipped his head, not asking permission this time, just thinking.

  “I liked cartoons,” he said. “More than he did. He called them a child's thing. Big eyes, little mouths, everything very sure of how it wanted to move. I watched when he wasn’t in the room. There were spirits who lived in bathhouses, and cats who rode buses, and children who fell into worlds where the rules were clearer. I found myself keeping those by accident. Then on purpose.”

  Buttercup listened rapt.

  “Movies with puppets,” he said, because he couldn’t help it. “Crystal palaces and little heroes with knives bigger than their hands. I loved them when it wasn’t fashionable.”

  “That’s why you looked at me like that,” Buttercup said, very pleased. “You put me next to a picture in your head.”

  “Guilty,” he said, and found he didn’t mind the admission.

  They traded like that for a mile; he told Buttercup about the structure of a television season as if that was understandable to a magical fae. Buttercup told him about skeletons that forgot they were dead and did chores until someone sang their name. He described an afternoon in a witch's kitchen where enchanted winter light made everything feel forgiven; Buttercup described a wind that went down into stone and came up with voices on it. Jannet told them about household habits that had felt like rules. Buttercup told him about a court under an old willow where the chairs were frogs that had made different choices.

  It should have been absurd. Yet it wasn’t.

  They reached a bend where the hedge broke and a stand of poplars took over. The city was a smear behind them now.

  “Tell me another story,” Buttercup said.