With her breath catching in her throat, Laurel rose to her feet, applauding the fire dancers with as much enthusiasm as she had the ballet dancers. Tamani rose silently beside her and didn’t say a word this time about her standing.

The fire dancers took their final bows and the applause began to die away. The Fall faeries in the balcony rose and started making their way to the exit; Laurel could see the Spring faeries below her doing the same thing.

Laurel turned to Tamani with a smile. “Oh, Tam, that was incredible! Thank you so much for making sure I got to come.” She looked back at the empty stage, concealed now behind its heavy silk curtains. “This has been the most amazing day.”

Tamani took Laurel’s hand and laid it on his arm. “The celebration has scarcely begun!”

Laurel looked up at Tamani in surprise. She dug in her small purse for a few seconds, glancing at the watch she’d brought with her. She could spare another hour or so. A smile spread across her face as she looked at the exits again, with eagerness this time. “I’m ready,” she said.

TWENTY-THREE

“THAT WAS AMAZING,” LAUREL SAID AGAIN AS she and Tamani lounged on pillows beside low tables heaped with fruits, vegetables, juices, and dishes of honey in a dizzying array of colors. Music filled the air from a dozen directions as faeries across the green lounged, and danced, and socialized. “I had no idea theatre could be like that. And those fireworks at the end! Those guys were incredible.”

Tamani laughed, much more relaxed now that they were spread out in a meadow where the faerie classes mingled a little more freely. “I’m glad you liked it. I haven’t been to a Samhain celebration in several years.”

“Why not?”

Tamani shrugged, his mood turning somber. “I wanted to be with you,” he said, not meeting her eyes. “Coming to festivals didn’t seem as important when it meant leaving you behind the gates. Especially considering the revelries at sundown.”

“What revelries?” Laurel asked, half distracted as she dipped a large strawberry in a dish of bright blue honey.

“Um…well, you’d probably find it rather distasteful.”

Laurel waited, her attention piqued now, then laughed when he didn’t continue. “Keep going,” she prodded.

Tamani shrugged and sighed. “I think I told you last year: Pollination is for reproduction, and sex is for fun.”

“I remember,” Laurel said, unsure how that related.

“So at big festivals like this, most people…have…fun.”

Laurel’s eyes widened and then she laughed. “Really?”

“Come on, don’t people ever do anything like that in the human world?”

Laurel was about to tell him no when she remembered the tradition of kissing at midnight on New Year’s Eve. Though, granted, it wasn’t really the same thing. “I suppose.” She looked at the crowds around her. “So nobody cares? Aren’t most of these people married?”

“For starters, you don’t get married in Avalon. You get handfasted. And no, most of them aren’t. In Avalon, the main reason to get handfasted is to raise seedlings. Typically faeries aren’t ready to do that until they are”—he paused, considering—“eighty, maybe a hundred years old.”

“But—” Laurel cut off her own question and turned her face away.

“But what?” Tamani prodded gently.

After a moment of hesitation she turned to him. “Do faeries ever get handfasted young? Like…like at our age?”

“Almost never.” He seemed to know what she was asking, though she couldn’t bring herself to be completely forthright; his eyes bored into her until she had to turn away. “But that doesn’t mean they aren’t entwined. A lot of people have committed lovers. Not a majority, but it’s common enough. My parents had been entwined for over seventy years before their handfasting. Handfasting is a little different from human marriage. It is not just a sign of a committed romance but an intention to form a family—to create a seedling and become a societal unit.”

Laurel giggled, trying to dissipate the tension that enveloped them. “It’s so weird to think of faeries having kids when they’re a hundred years old.”

“That’s barely middle-aged, here. After we reach adulthood, most of us don’t change much until we’re a hundred and forty, a hundred and fifty. But then you age fairly quickly—at least by faerie standards. You can go from looking like a thirty-year-old human to looking like a sixty-or seventy-year-old human in less than twenty years.”

“Does everyone live to two hundred?” Laurel asked. The thought of living for two centuries was boggling.

“More or less. Some faeries live longer, some shorter, but not usually by much.”

“Don’t they get sick and die?”

“Almost never.” Tamani leaned over and touched the tip of her nose. “That’s what you’re for.”

“What do you mean?”

“Not you specifically—Fall faeries. It’s like having the world’s most perfect…shoot, what do you call them. Hostels?” He sighed. “Help me out; where people go when they’re sick.”

“Hospitals?” Laurel suggested.

“Yeah.” Tamani shook his head. “Wow, it’s been a long time since I lost a human word like that. I mean, we all speak English, but human-only lingo really is like another language sometimes.”