"No," I said, self-consciously hiding my hand behind my back. I looked down and only then did I realize that my outfit had changed from the Sidhe armor back to the secondhand clothes I'd been wearing before. "I fell."

Other Gothlings appeared. The girl repeated herself, and the others agreed that I was hard-core down there.

I sighed. I gathered my things and clambered out with some reluctantly offered help. I didn't need it, but I thought it might be good for some kid's self-esteem. Then I looked around at all the people staring at me, hunched my shoulders up around my head, and hurried out of the graveyard before anyone else could become helpful.

* * *

When I got back to Molly's place, she asked, "Why do you smell like cloves?"

"Kids today," I said. "I'm just glad they weren't smoking marijuana."

"Ah," Molly said. "Goths. So I guess that's grave dirt on you?"

"Stop Sherlocking me," I said. "And, yes, it is, and I'm showering. Any word?"

"Not yet," Molly said. "Toot's waiting outside for his crew to get back. I had to promise him extra pizza to keep him from going out to look himself. I figured we needed him to coordinate the guard."

"Good thinking," I said. "One sec."

I went into my temporary quarters and got clean. It wasn't just because I had mud from a century-old graveyard on me, along with an open wound on my hand, and because I feared about a million horrible things that could be made from those ingredients. The whole wizard-metabolism thing means that our immune systems are pretty much top-of-the-line. I doubted the Winter Knight's mantle was slouchy in defending against such mundane threats, either.

It was mostly because I'd been up close and personal with some extremely powerful creatures, and such beings radiate magic like body heat. It's the sort of thing that can cling to you if you aren't careful, maybe coloring the way you think a bit, and definitely having the potential to influence anything you do with magic. (It happens with people, too, but with people, even wizards, their aura is so much less powerful that the effect is negligible.) Running water cleanses away the residue of that kind of contact, and I wanted to be sure that whatever happened tonight, I wasn't going to be handicapped by any mystic baggage from today's visits.

I hit the shower, bowing my head under the hot water, and thought about things. The Mothers had been trying to tell me something, something they hadn't said outright. Maybe they hadn't wanted to just give me what I wanted-but, way more likely, maybe they were incapable of it.

I had bullied Maeve and Lily into straight talk, such as it had been, and it had obviously been uncomfortable for them. I would never have tried the same thing on Titania or Mab. For whatever reason, it seemed that the essential nature of the Queens of Faerie was to be as indirect and oblique about things as possible. It was builtinto them, along with things like not being able to tell a direct lie. It was who they were. And the farther up the chain you went, the more steeped in that essential nature the Queens became. Maybe Titania or Mab could be a little bit straightforward at times, but I doubt they could have laid out a simple declarative statement about the issue at hand without a major effort. And if that was true, then maybe the Mothers couldn't have done it even if they wanted to.

There'd been a message in all their talk, especially Mother Summer's. But what the hell had it been?

Or maybe this wasn't a human-faerie translation problem at all. Maybe this was a male-female translation problem. I read an article once that said that when women have a conversation, they're communicating on five levels. They follow the conversation that they're actually having, the conversation that is specifically being avoided, the tone being applied to the overt conversation, the buried conversation that is being covered only in subtext, and finally the other person's body language.

That is, on many levels, astounding to me. I mean, that's like having a freaking superpower. When I, and most other people with a Y chromosome, have a conversation, we're having a conversation. Singular. We're paying attention to what is being said, considering that, and replying to it. All these other conversations that have apparently been going on for the last several thousand years? I didn't even know that they existed until I read that stupid article, and I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one.

I felt somewhat skeptical about the article's grounding. There were probably a lot of women who didn't communicate on multiple wavelengths at once. There were probably men who could handle that many just fine. I just wasn't one of them.

So, ladies, if you ever have some conversation with your boyfriend or husband or brother or male friend, and you are telling him something perfectly obvious, and he comes away from it utterly clueless? I know it's tempting to think to yourself, "The man can't possibly be that stupid!"

But yes. Yes, he can.

Our innate strengths just aren't the same. We are the mighty hunters, who are good at focusing on one thing at a time. For crying out loud, we have to turn down the radio in the car if we suspect we're lost and need to figure out how to get where we're going. That's how impaired we are. I'm telling you, we have only the one conversation. Maybe some kind of relationship veteran like Michael Carpenter can do two, but that's pushing the envelope. Five simultaneous conversations? Five?

Shah. That just isn't going to happen. At least, not for me.

So maybe it was something perfectly obvious and I was just too dumb to get it. Maybe the advice of someone less impaired than me would help. I went back into my head and made sure that I remembered the details of my recent conversations, putting them in order so that I could get a consult.