Holger takes his leave as Melina and others continue unpacking.

  Kenric steps inside, laughing, “If Rosaniya, Arthion, or Halaema had seen it like this, they’d still be here.”

  I look sad for a moment, “I do miss them. I hope they get home safely.” “I’ve got some letters to write in the spring, when the winds and tides turn again. Have you looked at some of the new murals? They’re lovely. I want to see if Ellisar will be interested in an artist’s exchange and possibly some bards as well. I know that our music is largely underappreciated, yet everyone here who’s heard me sing is entranced by it.”

  Kenric nods, “That seems reasonable. I’ll ask Duke Jellema when the next delegation is going so they can take the letters with them.” “I’ll write them so they can be handed off,”

  I say, then call for my writing desk. I sit for a moment, deciding how to phrase this so that Ellisar knows the type of artists and bards to send. Those who can do triple duty, artist, spy, and be capable of combat. If this place burns, I don’t want to see them harmed. Not all artists are as comfortable with a sword as they are with a paintbrush or a sculptor’s chisel.

  I suggest that he look among the veterans of the border war for those who aren’t feral but who have an artistic bent. That will tell him what I’m trying to say to him without making it obvious to anyone else. That’s part of the power of knowing someone for seven centuries. I can speak three sentences, and that’s enough for him to catch my thoughts as surely as if he could catch them out of my skull. I choose my words with care as I write essentially the same letter to my parents, to Amer, to Ruvaen, and to Ellisar himself. I add a second letter for my parents and a third for Amer.

  These letters are in code and wrapped in magic. Anyone reading them will find nothing out of the ordinary unless it's my intended recipient. The third letter to Amer outlines what’s going on here and my concerns, and requests that we be called back to Ellisar’s court as soon as possible. If I know Amer, he’ll get involved in the next round of negotiations specifically so he can get Ellisar to call us back. I include all of this in a letter to my parents, but I also write to my mother about this second wedding. I write about Duke Jellema and Duchess Ina, Doustan and Rekke, Grethe and Bastian, about my honor guard from Nintoku, and what bastards so many of the men here are.

  If they can, I’d love to see these people who have been kind called away from this mess while even more fire and brimstone rain down on the arrogant males of this place. I share my thoughts on everyone I’ve met so far, including my 'fake' relatives. My mother will point anyone asking about them to a different Fey court, one where I have cousins, some of whom are Lawless.. They’ll chase their tails but never find anything. My Lawless cousins will swear that those ladies exist and give them some story about why they’re not available. Since they supposedly purchased a ship, they’ve gone galivanting aboard it.

  I’ll owe my cousins a favor or two, and that will be the end of it. I suggest that, as part of the art exchange, exchanging theater troupes would also be beneficial. Let them take those actresses away from this place, too. I also mention that the orphanages here are full of children that no one seems to want, and ask my mother to arrange for people to come and take them all back to Imelenora. As the ships arrive, we can have adoption parties. Many couples would be happy to have a child to raise, even if it’s a human one. Conception, among us, is difficult. Children are rare. To have so many that no one wants is mind-boggling.

  The Fey don’t have orphanages because we don’t need them. If both parents of a child are lost, someone always steps in to claim the child. In cases where no one the child knows will or can claim them, the temple places the child with a couple willing to take them. The idea of needing a charity to handle scores of unwanted children is challenging to grasp, even though I’ve seen the orphanages here. My Fey sensibilities are offended that such a thing exists, that it’s even necessary. We might be brutal, apex predators, but no youngling ever goes unwanted.

  We have always dipped into the human population for mates. When we do, our birth rates increase, which we need, while those of us born with strong magic become fewer. Over time, the magic returns, but the birth rate remains higher. The border wars drained us, and we lost far too many people, especially females. This influx of humans will help us boost our birth rates as they grow up and take mates. We need to make up for our losses. For seven hundred and eighty-three years, we lost most of each year’s children. There are only a few hundred children each year. We can’t afford to lose them if our population is going to continue growing.

  Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

  Our border villages are depopulated because of those Lawless cretins that I was dueling. I blame Ellisar for all of that. I blame him for protecting the Lawless scum who fed our own people to those things. I blame him for the shite equipment they issued us.

  The “standard kits" issued to us for equipment were nearly useless. Our survival rates tripled when we started making our own gear. I blame him for the lackluster training we got for the first three years. The so-called training centers did little to help. I was more of a swordsman when I got there. The only good thing they offered was some physical conditioning.

  The training centers had the most lackluster instructors. Their ideas of sword techniques were rudimentary at best. This was before we figured out that you had to take the heads off those things to kill them. Fighting to decapitate something isn’t a typical fighting style. Most normal things can be sliced or stabbed to end the threat they represent. Not those things. It almost always involved taking off the head. They didn’t teach us any of that. I ended up teaching the others in my training center what I knew of swordplay. Since my father was one of Ellisar’s ministers, we’d been trained to defend him if he were attacked.

  It wasn’t the best since we weren’t royal guards, but it was better than the so-called training centers. Those centers were no help at all. Once we learned that we had to take the heads, things improved. The longer we survived, the more effective we became at figuring out how to kill those things. We started keeping notes and sharing them with other war bands. That boosted survival rates even further. It was no longer just what your own war band knew about the things that kept swarming over the border. It was all of us collectively, and that was quite a lot. If someone encountered something new, it was recorded and shared with others.

  We’d light off some colored smoke and meet the neighboring war band to pass on what we’d learned. In most cases, we built shelters large enough to house both war bands in places where our borders met. We’d talk, eat, and rest a bit. We’d trade techniques, training, and expertise in other areas, such as cooking, shelter building, potion-making, antidote-making, armor-making, and even weapon-making. There aren’t many of us from the early year-groups left. Most of the early year-groups have between ten and twenty survivors. That said, there are tens of thousands of us who survived.

  Those of us who managed to survive are things to be reckoned with. While an army might need all sorts of things, we’re highly self-reliant. Part of what frightens Ellisar is that he needs us far more than we ever needed him. Unlike his army, we don’t need a supply line. We know how to hunt. We know what plants to pick. We can make potions, poisons, and antidotes. They might be a bit crude, but they’re highly effective. We don’t need you to arm us. We know how to cure and prepare leather. If we can find ore, we can build a kiln and smelt it. We can make our weapons and armor.

  We know how to conceal ourselves and remain stealthy. If we hadn’t, we wouldn’t have lasted long. We learned to hide from things whose favorite prey was Fey. We can walk through your army undetected. If we choose to, we can step out of the shadows, rip your head off, and step back into the shadows. We can do it so quickly that our target is dead before most know we’ve come and gone. We’re in much better physical condition than most of that army. We can run for days without food or rest. One of the first veterans to come home lost his mind and started hunting some of Ellisar’s court officials.

  They still haven’t caught him, despite sending the army out again and again. I doubt that they ever will, unless he decides he wants to be caught for some reason. I think this is why Ellisar is so concerned about all of us coming home from the war. That’s just one, and his army has been ineffective at dealing with just one of us. With all of us coming home, there are thousands of us. There is strength in those numbers, and we’re nearly as large as his standing army. That hasn’t recovered from the border war, either. If we were to band together, we could easily take the king off his throne.

  If he threatens Kenric, I may put out the call to my battle siblings and do precisely that. I think they would support me in this. We all hate Ellisar. He was supposed to give us the best equipment that the Fey could create. What we got was a joke.

  The “standard issue kits” were a disaster. Armor that was no better than tissue paper. Weapons that broke in combat. The much-vaunted field guide that never materialized. The shelters were so tight that we didn’t always quite fit. There’s not a veteran still breathing who doesn’t hate Ellisar from the depths of their soul.

  Every last one of us watched too many of our war band fall because Ellisar is cheap, short-sighted, and seemed to be actively working against us. If Ellisar is smart, he will not give me cause to issue the call to take his armies. Ellisar isn’t always smart, especially when it comes to dealing with me. He likes to torment me, and I always end up wondering if I’m going to have to challenge him. I know, in my bones, that one day he will do something or I’ll find out that he’s already done something that I can’t overlook, and I’ll have to challenge Ellisar.

  I’ll end up having to do it for no other reason than to maintain my self-respect. Part of me wonders if I shouldn’t just do it now and get it over with. If I do it now, it will be done before Ellisar can manage to turn them against me somehow. I don’t really want to be Queen of the Fey, any more than I want to kill Oskar and become King of Centis. Being in charge, being a ruler, comes with a lot of headaches. Headaches that I don’t really want. Being King of Centis for a bit might not be so bad, except it means that I’d have to devour Oskar to dispose of his body.

  Does anyone still send actual paper letters through the mail anymore? Let me know the comments... I'd love to hear your ideas. I might even use some of them.