[Wild Roses] Alternate Earths
Title: humans totally come in 'ish'.
'Verse/characters: Alternate Earths; Yasha, Screen, Dutch, Aodh, Arianhrod
Prompt: 63A "photographs/snapshots"
Word Count: 2542
Notes: So the poll said 'Yes' to both the Sun Queen bit and this one. So hey. Have a double post.
This is after switching houses, before unexpected connections. Nidavelir, Captaens Screen and Dutch-door, the meadhall (and denizens thereof), and that tall scary gentleman with the dreadlocks hang out at klgaffney's.
---------
Dutch and Harrier had been chasing the Banifaen for Ceannard Shanghai all day, so I was spending my afternoon lessons with Screen. Trap still hadn't freed up the processing time to find me the books she'd promised, but I couldn't exactly fault her for that. Nobody'd expected what'd happened--if I hadn't already been in Nidavelir I sure wouldn't have been allowed in. Loki'd fucked everybody on that one.
But there I was, and I'd even swung being useful.
I still wasn't thinking about the other things that'd happened. The last time I did I'd had nightmares about talking skulls and I really didn't want to find out I could still sleep-open. I hadn't in months, but that didn't mean I couldn't, which was part of why we were still maintaining the lesson pattern around everything else.
That and we'd all kind of fallen back onto patterns because everyone was tired. My calculations put Dutch's supply of coffee running out in another four days. Two if Harrier kept stealing cups, and then where would we be?
So I didn't jump when my area ping told me Aodh had wandered in, and it wasn't until after he'd ruffled my hair, chirruped a greeting I didn't catch the details of, and wandered off again that I remembered why him being around was worth noticing. I blinked a couple times across the top of the lesson-book at the wall, until Screen delicately poked me in the side of the head with her fingernail, repeating her question, and I tried to get back on track.
By the time we got through the last exercise, she was suppressing a scowl, and I had a headache. My control had dropped nearly thirty percent with the distraction, and I hadn't recovered as well from it as either of us had been expecting. I sighed, doored myself a couple of pain pills from the bottle in my pack--I wouldn't touch the Doc's stash at the moment for anything less than a promotion to godhood--and dragged myself to my feet. "Can I talk to Dutch?"
Screen nodded, eyes slipping closed as she ran rapid calculations, then opened her eyes again and said "Hey, Kid," in Dutch's inflections.
"Hey," I replied, saluting my technically-absent teacher. "Aodh's back."
"Headed off?" he asked through Screen, and I nodded. "Think so. I'll have coffee by tomorrow afternoon Nidavelir-local, if you want to swing by?"
Screen grinned down at me, hooked me in for a gentle hug that pressed my head into her belly. She really wasn't that much softer than Dutch was, though she didn't smell like leather and dust so I had a little bit of cognitive dissonance anyway. "Will do, assuming I can get leave from Trap--
"You will be off-duty for a period of two hours," Trap interrupted, hijacking the line briefly and including the precise timeframe I'd need to have coffee available tomorrow.
Dutch was laughing when he got the line back, the tiny dry chuckles that meant he was tired enough to laugh out loud even without the externalised processing the System did for my sake. "See you tomorrow, Kid."
I saluted again, and did one more when Screen was back to being herself, as a thank you. She sorted out a smile for me, and I wondered if Glass had been teaching her expressions again as I took my leave.
Gathering up the detritus in my assigned room and either putting it away in the chest at the foot of the bed or stuffing it into my pack took a while, so by the time I left my pack leaned up against the inside of the door and trekked down towards the meadhall, it was trending on towards evening.
"Salve," I said to the nearest server who wasn't carrying a tray full of mead or using an empty tankard to threaten a guy wearing Viladr pins once I got inside the hall. "I'm chasing Eld'foa?"
"Tá!" she said, and I waited. Waited some more, watching her eyebrows squinch together.
After some more waiting, I said "I can't feel you."
"Oh," she replied, looking a little horrified, then, pointing awkwardly and kind of tentatively with her whole arm, she aimed me towards the back of the Hall where the dice games tended to congregate. I nodded thanks and didn't bother saluting her. I hated being headblind.
On my way, I spotted a familiar broad back among the tafl tables, and wove my way that direction.
I stopped on his side of the board, just within line of sight but not offensively so. I waited politely until he was at a good stopping point before saluting him, and did the version that involved touching my fingertips to my chest, not my fist.
He squinted down at me, past the pair of dreadlocks that'd got cut off short and ragged at some point recently. I was still trying to calculate the odds of it having been a serrated blade or someone's teeth, and hadn't got anywhere yet. "Fox?" he asked after a while, and I nodded.
His hand landed on top of my head, more than big enough to palm my skull--and there was something to add to the list of things not to think about--rubbing really gently at my hair for a second before he pushed me to the end of his arm's reach and let go. I automatically saluted, fist over heart this time, and his chuckling followed me as I padded back towards the dicing.
Aodh was indeed in the back, though whatever game he'd been playing had been tabled. He was arguing with a couple of captaenen, walking someone's golden die across his knuckles while he did. As I got closer I saw one of the captaenen was wearing one of Ceannard Lisbon's Rekavengr swallow-pins, and the other was wearing a pin I barely recognised. Helsvorn, maybe, or Daugdaur--one of the units who had a standard issue Doorman, not one of the System.
I didn't catch enough of the conversation to do more than guess that there were gleeful accusations of mutual cheating flying around the place, and Aodh was more than holding up his end. He even used the die on his knuckles to knock over a few of the day-glo carved plastic dice--Gaian-bought dice had been banned after somebody came back with a jokeshop set of loaded dice, but nobody had found a way to properly cheat with a hand-carved set that wasn't immediately obvious yet--to demonstrate his point.
"Salve," I said for politeness' sake, and he laughed, tossed the die to the Rekavengr captaen, and between two pings got close enough to be standing next to me.
"Tha' time?"
"Tá, sir," I replied, and he conveyed a cheerful farewell wave to the captaens without actually using his arm.
I waited on building the door until we were back out of the meadhall--he'd caught up with me at the entrance, after doing some sort of complicated obstacle course that involved swapping someone's mead for someone else's milk without getting splashed or cursed out--and doored my pack before area-pinging and Opening to the apartment's living room.
He went through first, not even hesitating, and was beginning to prowl by the time I got through.
As I let the door collapse after me, I scowled at the back of his head, struggling for words for a good twenty clicks. By that time he'd pulled a cigarette out of the air and lit the end with a thumbnail. I hadn't done so much as kick off my shoes or drop my pack.
"Why the hell don't they treat you like you're headblind?" I demanded, and he turned his head and blinked at me, cigarette dangling loose enough I almost doored a connection to the ashtray on the table at the end of the couch.
" . . 'cause 'm not," he told me, flicking the cigarette to the other side of his mouth with some weird combination of lip and teeth and tongue. It was weirdly like watching one of the fenwraiths lick their chops, and I spent a distracted two clicks running parallel calculations as to whether or not that might be related to the non-human in his ancestry before I reoriented on his answer to my question.
Observed evidence suggested what he'd told me might be true, but "Boghshit" was what came out of my mouth as I shucked off my pack and tossed it through a door onto my bed.
He grinned at me, sharper than usual. "Want to see a neat trick?"
"Astonish me," I replied, aiming for Dutch's sarcastic jibes at Harrier as I climbed up onto the couch and started yanking off my left shoe.
His grin widened, though his voice was solemn when he said "Arianhrod Sabaey. Arianhrod, Arianhrod."
I squinted at him, right shoe still dangling from my hand instead of on the floor with the left one. If that was a spell, I couldn't tell it at all--and I could usually catch at least the edges of his work. I was even getting better at telling what Harrier was up to by how my ears popped. I automatically pinged the room, got back familiar information and confirmed that he hadn't moved on me.
He took a lazy drag off his cigarette--I could smell it was one of his, not one he'd nicked off Strider, now--and I pinged the room again, just in case. Still just him and me, and the shoe I'd now dropped to the floor.
A couple of clicks later, the next time I pinged the room, with no other change, there was another person standing on the rug.
I blinked. Started running initial ping and tags, came up blank on the tags: I'd never seen this woman before in my life. She was short--approximately Aodh's height with both of them in shoes--hair multiple shades redder than Aodh's when his was red and curlier than mine. Clothes within deviations for Olfridulfr cavalry, sturdy old-gold trousers partially covered by a close-cut sleeveless bronze-brown tunic that was bloused a little over a nearly white belt-tie.
"Son of mine," the stranger said evenly, "Did you have a reason for doing that?"
"Oui," he replied cheerfully, and I lost most of my background calculations, including an estimation of the length of her hair based on how she'd draped it around her neck. Aodh's mother?
"Do enlighten me," she all but growled, and Aodh laughed, ducking in to kiss her left cheekbone and dodging a swat with the ease of a lot of practice.
"Mamán," he said, "may I present Yasha Dveri, Vaneo-Magis Kid of the Olfridulfr."
We blinked at each other, then I offered her a tentative version of the fist-over-heart salute. "Salve?"
"Enchanté," she replied, nodding politely, if visibly as bemused as Jörmungandr getting hugged on the nose for a greeting.
Aodh snickered at us both. "Yasha, my mamán, the Princess Arianhrod Sabaey."
Then he ducked fast as she tried to punch him in the head with the air in the room. I automatically doored his cigarette to a safe location when he dropped it, still brain-hung on that being Aodh's mother.
Then the rest of what he'd said caught up with my brain and I blurted "Princess?"
"I abdicated my title," she growled, glaring at Aodh like she was still thinking about punching him. "Several hundred years ago."
"I don' recall Sean acknowledging tha'," Aodh remarked, half to her and half to the ceiling as he hitched himself up onto the arm of the couch and lit another cigarette.
Tiny lightning curled between two of her earrings. "Sean wasn't even born when I left--why should anything he says on the topic matter?"
Aodh grinned at her around his cigarette. "He is wearin' tha' nice torc as says he's King."
"Whether or not my half-brother is King, he's not going to reinstate my title unless I allow it," she told him, crossing her arms over her chest.
It wasn't until they both looked at me that I noticed my jaw had dropped open. "Hang on," I said slowly, "am I hearing right when you're saying that the uncle who needed help is a King?"
"Sean needed a han'," Aodh said out of the cigarette-less corner of his mouth when his mother raised an eyebrow at him, then nodded. "Tá, m'uncle's a King."
"Which sort of makes you a prince?"
"if you turn your head a bit sideways and squint," his mother--Arianhrod, now there was a name for a mage--allowed, sounding a little amused.
" . . Every fantasy book I've ever read lies," I groused, and only realised that had been out loud when Aodh laughed himself off the arm of the couch and hit the floor with a thud.
"History does tend to be rather more boring," Arianhrod told me dryly over the sound of her son's laughter. "Hadn't he ever mentioned that his grandfather and his uncle were both Kings?"
"Nil hea," I replied on automatic, then reset my language parameters. "Non, he didn't."
"Typical," she muttered. "Can't resist calling me by a title I relinquished, but Winter forbid he mention tiny facts like he's a member of a royal family."
Weak, breathless snickering echoed up from the floor. "N'ver came up."
"I'm sure you could have come up with something," she replied, then looked over at me. "The Olfridulfr?" she considered. "I don't believe I'm familiar with the term. What do you do?"
For answer I held my hands up in front of my chest and doored a half-way-through-the-Berakalfr-game sized hole to my dragonfly's home swamp.
While Arianhrod was staring, my dragonfly--or one that looked enough like my dragonfly to pass seven-point inspection--flew out of the door and buzzed over to investigate Aodh for bugs.
He chirruped a cheerful greeting, and a smoke ring floated past the edge of the couch to ring the dragonfly like some sort of really odd rank pin.
"That's--fascinating," Arianhrod said, staring at the door, and looked like she wanted to stick her hand through it as an experiment. I suddenly saw the family resemblance. "What kind of spell--"
"'s hard to put into words," Aodh rescued me as I drew breath to try, reappearing over the arm of the couch and perching with his feet on the cushions. "'ll ask Dutch if he'll let me translate one of t'primers for you."
"I still haven't forgiven you for summoning me," she told him, turning away from my door. I let it collapse so I could pay more attention, tilting my head and praying Aodh would see the question.
"T'kid didn't believe I wasn't headblind," he replied cheerfully, knocking one of his knuckles against his temple. "How else'm I s'posed to explain you?"
"Sometimes," she said evenly while I had to re-evaluate all my calculations about what he'd gotten from his parents all over again, "it's very, very obvious just who your father is."
"You're the one married him," Aodh said, grinning around his cigarette, and caught the palmful of water she flicked out of nowhere at him. "Love you too, mamán."
"You give me a headache," I told him in sidhe, scowling.
He grinned wider. "Love you too," he repeated himself, only this time in sidhe.
'Verse/characters: Alternate Earths; Yasha, Screen, Dutch, Aodh, Arianhrod
Prompt: 63A "photographs/snapshots"
Word Count: 2542
Notes: So the poll said 'Yes' to both the Sun Queen bit and this one. So hey. Have a double post.
This is after switching houses, before unexpected connections. Nidavelir, Captaens Screen and Dutch-door, the meadhall (and denizens thereof), and that tall scary gentleman with the dreadlocks hang out at klgaffney's.
---------
Dutch and Harrier had been chasing the Banifaen for Ceannard Shanghai all day, so I was spending my afternoon lessons with Screen. Trap still hadn't freed up the processing time to find me the books she'd promised, but I couldn't exactly fault her for that. Nobody'd expected what'd happened--if I hadn't already been in Nidavelir I sure wouldn't have been allowed in. Loki'd fucked everybody on that one.
But there I was, and I'd even swung being useful.
I still wasn't thinking about the other things that'd happened. The last time I did I'd had nightmares about talking skulls and I really didn't want to find out I could still sleep-open. I hadn't in months, but that didn't mean I couldn't, which was part of why we were still maintaining the lesson pattern around everything else.
That and we'd all kind of fallen back onto patterns because everyone was tired. My calculations put Dutch's supply of coffee running out in another four days. Two if Harrier kept stealing cups, and then where would we be?
So I didn't jump when my area ping told me Aodh had wandered in, and it wasn't until after he'd ruffled my hair, chirruped a greeting I didn't catch the details of, and wandered off again that I remembered why him being around was worth noticing. I blinked a couple times across the top of the lesson-book at the wall, until Screen delicately poked me in the side of the head with her fingernail, repeating her question, and I tried to get back on track.
By the time we got through the last exercise, she was suppressing a scowl, and I had a headache. My control had dropped nearly thirty percent with the distraction, and I hadn't recovered as well from it as either of us had been expecting. I sighed, doored myself a couple of pain pills from the bottle in my pack--I wouldn't touch the Doc's stash at the moment for anything less than a promotion to godhood--and dragged myself to my feet. "Can I talk to Dutch?"
Screen nodded, eyes slipping closed as she ran rapid calculations, then opened her eyes again and said "Hey, Kid," in Dutch's inflections.
"Hey," I replied, saluting my technically-absent teacher. "Aodh's back."
"Headed off?" he asked through Screen, and I nodded. "Think so. I'll have coffee by tomorrow afternoon Nidavelir-local, if you want to swing by?"
Screen grinned down at me, hooked me in for a gentle hug that pressed my head into her belly. She really wasn't that much softer than Dutch was, though she didn't smell like leather and dust so I had a little bit of cognitive dissonance anyway. "Will do, assuming I can get leave from Trap--
"You will be off-duty for a period of two hours," Trap interrupted, hijacking the line briefly and including the precise timeframe I'd need to have coffee available tomorrow.
Dutch was laughing when he got the line back, the tiny dry chuckles that meant he was tired enough to laugh out loud even without the externalised processing the System did for my sake. "See you tomorrow, Kid."
I saluted again, and did one more when Screen was back to being herself, as a thank you. She sorted out a smile for me, and I wondered if Glass had been teaching her expressions again as I took my leave.
Gathering up the detritus in my assigned room and either putting it away in the chest at the foot of the bed or stuffing it into my pack took a while, so by the time I left my pack leaned up against the inside of the door and trekked down towards the meadhall, it was trending on towards evening.
"Salve," I said to the nearest server who wasn't carrying a tray full of mead or using an empty tankard to threaten a guy wearing Viladr pins once I got inside the hall. "I'm chasing Eld'foa?"
"Tá!" she said, and I waited. Waited some more, watching her eyebrows squinch together.
After some more waiting, I said "I can't feel you."
"Oh," she replied, looking a little horrified, then, pointing awkwardly and kind of tentatively with her whole arm, she aimed me towards the back of the Hall where the dice games tended to congregate. I nodded thanks and didn't bother saluting her. I hated being headblind.
On my way, I spotted a familiar broad back among the tafl tables, and wove my way that direction.
I stopped on his side of the board, just within line of sight but not offensively so. I waited politely until he was at a good stopping point before saluting him, and did the version that involved touching my fingertips to my chest, not my fist.
He squinted down at me, past the pair of dreadlocks that'd got cut off short and ragged at some point recently. I was still trying to calculate the odds of it having been a serrated blade or someone's teeth, and hadn't got anywhere yet. "Fox?" he asked after a while, and I nodded.
His hand landed on top of my head, more than big enough to palm my skull--and there was something to add to the list of things not to think about--rubbing really gently at my hair for a second before he pushed me to the end of his arm's reach and let go. I automatically saluted, fist over heart this time, and his chuckling followed me as I padded back towards the dicing.
Aodh was indeed in the back, though whatever game he'd been playing had been tabled. He was arguing with a couple of captaenen, walking someone's golden die across his knuckles while he did. As I got closer I saw one of the captaenen was wearing one of Ceannard Lisbon's Rekavengr swallow-pins, and the other was wearing a pin I barely recognised. Helsvorn, maybe, or Daugdaur--one of the units who had a standard issue Doorman, not one of the System.
I didn't catch enough of the conversation to do more than guess that there were gleeful accusations of mutual cheating flying around the place, and Aodh was more than holding up his end. He even used the die on his knuckles to knock over a few of the day-glo carved plastic dice--Gaian-bought dice had been banned after somebody came back with a jokeshop set of loaded dice, but nobody had found a way to properly cheat with a hand-carved set that wasn't immediately obvious yet--to demonstrate his point.
"Salve," I said for politeness' sake, and he laughed, tossed the die to the Rekavengr captaen, and between two pings got close enough to be standing next to me.
"Tha' time?"
"Tá, sir," I replied, and he conveyed a cheerful farewell wave to the captaens without actually using his arm.
I waited on building the door until we were back out of the meadhall--he'd caught up with me at the entrance, after doing some sort of complicated obstacle course that involved swapping someone's mead for someone else's milk without getting splashed or cursed out--and doored my pack before area-pinging and Opening to the apartment's living room.
He went through first, not even hesitating, and was beginning to prowl by the time I got through.
As I let the door collapse after me, I scowled at the back of his head, struggling for words for a good twenty clicks. By that time he'd pulled a cigarette out of the air and lit the end with a thumbnail. I hadn't done so much as kick off my shoes or drop my pack.
"Why the hell don't they treat you like you're headblind?" I demanded, and he turned his head and blinked at me, cigarette dangling loose enough I almost doored a connection to the ashtray on the table at the end of the couch.
" . . 'cause 'm not," he told me, flicking the cigarette to the other side of his mouth with some weird combination of lip and teeth and tongue. It was weirdly like watching one of the fenwraiths lick their chops, and I spent a distracted two clicks running parallel calculations as to whether or not that might be related to the non-human in his ancestry before I reoriented on his answer to my question.
Observed evidence suggested what he'd told me might be true, but "Boghshit" was what came out of my mouth as I shucked off my pack and tossed it through a door onto my bed.
He grinned at me, sharper than usual. "Want to see a neat trick?"
"Astonish me," I replied, aiming for Dutch's sarcastic jibes at Harrier as I climbed up onto the couch and started yanking off my left shoe.
His grin widened, though his voice was solemn when he said "Arianhrod Sabaey. Arianhrod, Arianhrod."
I squinted at him, right shoe still dangling from my hand instead of on the floor with the left one. If that was a spell, I couldn't tell it at all--and I could usually catch at least the edges of his work. I was even getting better at telling what Harrier was up to by how my ears popped. I automatically pinged the room, got back familiar information and confirmed that he hadn't moved on me.
He took a lazy drag off his cigarette--I could smell it was one of his, not one he'd nicked off Strider, now--and I pinged the room again, just in case. Still just him and me, and the shoe I'd now dropped to the floor.
A couple of clicks later, the next time I pinged the room, with no other change, there was another person standing on the rug.
I blinked. Started running initial ping and tags, came up blank on the tags: I'd never seen this woman before in my life. She was short--approximately Aodh's height with both of them in shoes--hair multiple shades redder than Aodh's when his was red and curlier than mine. Clothes within deviations for Olfridulfr cavalry, sturdy old-gold trousers partially covered by a close-cut sleeveless bronze-brown tunic that was bloused a little over a nearly white belt-tie.
"Son of mine," the stranger said evenly, "Did you have a reason for doing that?"
"Oui," he replied cheerfully, and I lost most of my background calculations, including an estimation of the length of her hair based on how she'd draped it around her neck. Aodh's mother?
"Do enlighten me," she all but growled, and Aodh laughed, ducking in to kiss her left cheekbone and dodging a swat with the ease of a lot of practice.
"Mamán," he said, "may I present Yasha Dveri, Vaneo-Magis Kid of the Olfridulfr."
We blinked at each other, then I offered her a tentative version of the fist-over-heart salute. "Salve?"
"Enchanté," she replied, nodding politely, if visibly as bemused as Jörmungandr getting hugged on the nose for a greeting.
Aodh snickered at us both. "Yasha, my mamán, the Princess Arianhrod Sabaey."
Then he ducked fast as she tried to punch him in the head with the air in the room. I automatically doored his cigarette to a safe location when he dropped it, still brain-hung on that being Aodh's mother.
Then the rest of what he'd said caught up with my brain and I blurted "Princess?"
"I abdicated my title," she growled, glaring at Aodh like she was still thinking about punching him. "Several hundred years ago."
"I don' recall Sean acknowledging tha'," Aodh remarked, half to her and half to the ceiling as he hitched himself up onto the arm of the couch and lit another cigarette.
Tiny lightning curled between two of her earrings. "Sean wasn't even born when I left--why should anything he says on the topic matter?"
Aodh grinned at her around his cigarette. "He is wearin' tha' nice torc as says he's King."
"Whether or not my half-brother is King, he's not going to reinstate my title unless I allow it," she told him, crossing her arms over her chest.
It wasn't until they both looked at me that I noticed my jaw had dropped open. "Hang on," I said slowly, "am I hearing right when you're saying that the uncle who needed help is a King?"
"Sean needed a han'," Aodh said out of the cigarette-less corner of his mouth when his mother raised an eyebrow at him, then nodded. "Tá, m'uncle's a King."
"Which sort of makes you a prince?"
"if you turn your head a bit sideways and squint," his mother--Arianhrod, now there was a name for a mage--allowed, sounding a little amused.
" . . Every fantasy book I've ever read lies," I groused, and only realised that had been out loud when Aodh laughed himself off the arm of the couch and hit the floor with a thud.
"History does tend to be rather more boring," Arianhrod told me dryly over the sound of her son's laughter. "Hadn't he ever mentioned that his grandfather and his uncle were both Kings?"
"Nil hea," I replied on automatic, then reset my language parameters. "Non, he didn't."
"Typical," she muttered. "Can't resist calling me by a title I relinquished, but Winter forbid he mention tiny facts like he's a member of a royal family."
Weak, breathless snickering echoed up from the floor. "N'ver came up."
"I'm sure you could have come up with something," she replied, then looked over at me. "The Olfridulfr?" she considered. "I don't believe I'm familiar with the term. What do you do?"
For answer I held my hands up in front of my chest and doored a half-way-through-the-Berakalfr-game sized hole to my dragonfly's home swamp.
While Arianhrod was staring, my dragonfly--or one that looked enough like my dragonfly to pass seven-point inspection--flew out of the door and buzzed over to investigate Aodh for bugs.
He chirruped a cheerful greeting, and a smoke ring floated past the edge of the couch to ring the dragonfly like some sort of really odd rank pin.
"That's--fascinating," Arianhrod said, staring at the door, and looked like she wanted to stick her hand through it as an experiment. I suddenly saw the family resemblance. "What kind of spell--"
"'s hard to put into words," Aodh rescued me as I drew breath to try, reappearing over the arm of the couch and perching with his feet on the cushions. "'ll ask Dutch if he'll let me translate one of t'primers for you."
"I still haven't forgiven you for summoning me," she told him, turning away from my door. I let it collapse so I could pay more attention, tilting my head and praying Aodh would see the question.
"T'kid didn't believe I wasn't headblind," he replied cheerfully, knocking one of his knuckles against his temple. "How else'm I s'posed to explain you?"
"Sometimes," she said evenly while I had to re-evaluate all my calculations about what he'd gotten from his parents all over again, "it's very, very obvious just who your father is."
"You're the one married him," Aodh said, grinning around his cigarette, and caught the palmful of water she flicked out of nowhere at him. "Love you too, mamán."
"You give me a headache," I told him in sidhe, scowling.
He grinned wider. "Love you too," he repeated himself, only this time in sidhe.