Small creatures needed any advantage when they lived among giants like the Green Man and the Harvest Mother, and Rey had picked up more than one trick over the years. This one was dangerous—he could get caught up in it, losing his sense of time and place—but he was starting to tire of seeing Eli sink deeper into the belief that he should have died before he ever climbed into the back of Rey’s cart.
Rey sniffed the air, seeking out threads of Story.
Story was important to a small spirit; being remembered kept him alive. He could sense his own stories easily enough. People in cities loved tricksters—they pranked nobles and unsuspecting rich people, pulling off their masks to show, however briefly, that there was no difference between them and a commoner when the gold ran out. Some even thought that Rey had stolen King Adrien’s crown, which was news to Rey. Stories had ways of coming to life on their own these days.
But he wasn’t looking for his own tale. He sniffed the air as he left the stable, red tail swishing furiously. There was the faintest familiar scent mixed in with tales of tricksters and kings—Eli’s scent, like steel and dirt and blood. Rey followed it, weaving through the streets faster than any fox could run, becoming just a flicker of color in the corner of an eye.
“And every night,” someone was saying, sitting on the lip of a fountain with a gaggle of street kids watching her, “the seven princesses would go to sleep and be taken away from their beds, where they danced with demons until their feet bled and their bodies ached. On the tenth morning, a knight with a collar of scars came to the king and swore he would save the princesses if he could have the oldest princess’s hand in marriage.”
Rey ducked through the crowd. The story was…interesting, but it wasn’t quite right. There was something behind it, thethread of a different tale winding past the storyteller and out of Duciel. Rey followed it, appearing in the shadows of a bar near the gates of the city.
“Seven girls he found in there,” a man was saying. “Chained up by the postman. And when he let the last one out, the scars around his neck went tight like a rope, and his head popped clean off.”
Someone else in the bar groaned, and the storyteller laughed.
Closer. Rey was closer. He followed the thread again, and stopped in a small hamlet, where a teenage girl was sanding down a newly-made table in the grass.
“You know I don’t like talking about it, Dad,” she said. She was a skinny thing, but there were hints of muscle in her shoulders and back as she worked. “He set us free and he left, that’s all.”
“But if you like the boy, you should seek him out, that’s all I’m saying.” Her dad watched her from the window, leaning over the sill. “I wouldn’t say no to a son-in-law who saved my girls.”
“It’s just a silly crush, Dad. It doesn’t mean anything.” The girl sighed, staring into the distance. “And I don’t think he is the kind of guy to settle down, anyway. Sometimes I think I dreamed him up, and the cellar door opened all on its own.”
“You wouldn’t say that if you saw what he did to that monster,” her father said, in a grim tone.
The girl gritted her teeth and turned back to the table. “I wish I had.”
Another story tickled Rey’s nose on the breeze, and he darted out of the shadows and through the magical wind that carried it through Staria. He found a woman kneading dough in a public kitchen, telling a story about a knight with a ribbon around his neck who wandered the countryside.
“If you ask for help at the right time of night, sometimes he’ll come. That’s how he found the girl her father bricked up in thewell down by Hamnet. Carried her out and married her the next morning.”
In Hamnet, the girl Eli hadreallyrescued was certainly not old enough to marry. She was about seven or eight, and she was holding a worn cap to her chest as she slept, curled up in a bed in the corner of her aunt and uncle’s bedroom. Her aunt sat up, whispering to her husband in hushed tones.
“It worries me how attached she is to it.”
“Hegave it to her,” her husband said. “After everything she went through, I’d say sleeping with her knight in shining armor’s ‘helmet’ is the best we can hope for.”
“Sweet of him to give it to her, I suppose. Sometimes I remember how many times we passed that well looking for her, and he went right for it. Like he already knew.”
“Fucking bastard probably told him before he died,” her husband said, and Rey slipped back into the night.
The more he chased stories through the countryside, the more Rey saw of Eli—for a mortal, he gathered stories around himself almost unknowingly, like a cloak trailing in the grass. In one town, he was a sixteen-year-old who dragged the body of a poisoner to the mayor’s door and had to have his wounds stitched in the mayor’s garden. The next town over, he was a ghost who drove the poisoner to starvation. The truth hid beneath the stories that people told to reassure themselves, stories that said that there were still those who did good for the sake of it. No one knew that Eli was just a traitor cursed to wander Staria in search of a ghost king’s sword—but if they did, even that would become something noble.
He dug deeper. He followed the threads quickly, quietly, until he lost track of where he was and found himself stepping out of the grass and into a place that was halfway between real and unreal. It was like a dream, drifting in the current of stories like a cool pond in a glade.
He was standing in a field, and it was dusk. The sky was just beginning to darken—which was odd, because it was quite late in the real world—and fireflies rose from the long grass. They hovered around Rey as he searched the field, and they moved slowly toward a figure staring into the horizon.
Rey approached, moving silently through the grass. The figure was a man, a little indistinct even up close, and his hair blew about in the breeze. He wasn’t a group of storytellers or the source of a rumor. He was something else, something with the scent of pure magic, and Rey shivered.
“Who are you?”
The man was silent for a long time. “I don’t know,” he said at last. “I am becoming. Will you name me?”
“I’m not sure I should,” Rey told the man. “Whereare you? What is this?”
“I am all of it,” the man said. “I am the field and the sky, the fireflies. I am becoming.”
Rey waited, curious to see if he would say anything else, but the man returned to silently watching the horizon. Rey leapt back into the currents of Eli’s story, reappearing in an ordinary field at night.
