"Thanks, but I think I'd rather have one of the ogres. They may not be the best company, but I bet nobody would f…" He paused to rephrase. "I bet nobody would mess with me if I had an ogre along."
Tansy shook his head. "Oh, no, most unsuitable. For one thing, they are needed here. They are personal bodyguards on loan to me from my brother — not to mention that they are of great help moving equipment here in the lab. For another, you betray your ignorance of our society. To travel with ogres in attendance is to signal yourself part of the highest Flower nobility and thus to attract attention. Someone would very quickly wonder why an unknown like you could afford two such large and dangerous servants."
"Oh, and they won't notice me without them?"
"Not if you wear the proper clothes and we make some other adjustments to disguise your appearance as well. Mostly it is your color, that brash, brownish tone to your skin. It makes you look like a laborer."
"Well, that describes my general position in society pretty well. If you add 'boneheaded' and 'ungrateful' to it."
Tansy gave him a sour look. "I will have all the details seen to, so there is no need for worry. I will send someone to help you with disguising yourself."
"Okay, we hide my tan so people think I'm an ordinary middle-class fairy." Theo shook his head. "This all makes me feel like this trip is going to be a little more dangerous than you've been letting on. Who's this relative you're going to send with me?"
"Do not worry, Master Vilmos — it will be easier than you fear. Come to me in the morning when you are up and dressed and we will finish the preparations." Tansy turned his back on Theo and then seemed to remember himself. "Can you find your way back to your room by yourself, Master Vilmos? Hob can take you straight there or give you directions."
"That would help. Otherwise you might never see me again."
"Yes, that's true." He said it quite seriously. "By the way, would you take this inebriated sprite with you? I have work to do."
Theo picked Applecore out of the drawer and cradled her in his hand. Her little eyes opened blearily for a moment, then she let out a minuscule belch, smiled, and went back to sleep.
"They are like starlings," said Tansy, frowning. "Never silent, and rude as can be."
Theo felt an urge to defend his only friend in this otherworldly place, but from his own experience he had to admit the fairy lord was speaking the truth.
"Ow!"
"Hold still — you wouldn't want me to pull your face off by accident, would you?"
When an ogre said something like that to you, even a comparatively friendly one like Dolly, you paid attention. Theo held still. "So you're the expert Tansy said he'd send to make me up, huh? Ow! Careful, you're smashing my nose!"
"By the Oldest Trees!" groaned Applecore, slumped on the bedside table. "Can you two not talk without shouting at the top of your bleeding lungs!"
"Someone's hungover," said Dolly, grinning. "It's funny when the wee ones drink."
"Ha ha," agreed Applecore. "You great gray shower of shite."
Theo didn't say anything at all because Dolly was rubbing white cream onto his face — and right through his skin onto the bones, it felt like — with a gray thumb the size and texture of an unpeeled avocado. For a moment he thought she'd pushed his lips all the way around to the side of his head, then he realized they'd just gone numb from the pressure. "What the hell is that stuff?" he asked when she let up for a moment.
"White lead," Dolly told him. "It's what I always use when I want to look like I don't have to work for a living."
"Lead! That's poisonous, isn't it? Do you want to kill me?" Theo tried to struggle away.
"No, not after all the work I've done on you," Dolly told him. "But I'd be happy to pinch your face up until everyone thinks you're a Stroke Boy, then it won't matter what color you are."
"It's too high up here," Applecore announced and flew unsteadily down from the bedside table to the floor, where she began walking in eccentric circles like a smoke-stunned yellow jacket. "I feel like death, don't I," she moaned. "How could you let me do that?"
"Let you? I didn't even know it was happening." Theo turned his head to peer at the clock, then remembered he couldn't read it. "What time is it?"
"What are you looking at that for?" the ogre asked.
"Isn't it a clock?" They both looked blank. "You know, a thing to tell time?"
"A thing to tell time what?" Dolly looked at Applecore, who shrugged, uninterested in anything but the pain in her head. "My, you pink folk do have strange ideas. No, it's a charm-casket."
Theo tried to rub some blood back into his temples, where he felt certain he now had ogre-prints the size of beer coasters. "What the hell is a charm-casket?"
"Just something that will give you any little charms or cantrips you might need — direction-finders or hair-straighteners or love-stiffeners." She poked his side until he squeaked. "That what you were looking for, Pinkie?"
"Jeez. No wonder I almost burned the place down trying to get the radio to play. So how do you tell what time it is?"
"Those big round things in the sky." Dolly smirked. "Sun? Moon? You may have seen them."
"Okay, so I'm ignorant. We do it differently back home. Just tell me what time it is, will you?"
"Sunwise it's midmorning," Applecore declared. "You can tell because the light is pure poison and it stabs into your eyes like knives." She found a spot back against the wall. "Also because it's the time of day when ogres and mortals talk the most shite. Oog. Even my hair hurts."
"There," said Dolly. "I think he's done. Not top quality, but what can you expect?"
"I'm sure you did the best you could," Theo said generously, looking for a mirror.
"I'm talking about you, not the paint-up." Dolly smacked him with a powder puff until he was choking, then brushed off the excess with astonishing gentleness. "All done. Here." She reached into a pocket of the voluminous something-or-other she wore and produced a surprisingly small hand mirror; it seemed no bigger than a poker chip in her huge gray paw. For a moment Theo wondered why she would carry such a small thing, then realized that mirrors for ogres must not be very commonly made — for obvious reasons. She'd taken a fairy-sized mirror and made it her own. As he took it from her he was suddenly and uncomfortably full of what felt like pity.
He definitely looked… different. Dolly had curled his longish brown hair and put something in it that made it look more golden. The white grease had been applied with more care than it had felt like from his end, rubbed in until it made his skin seem palely translucent. That and a subtle brushing of rouge brought out his cheekbones and narrow nose — his "Vulcan features" as Cat used to call them.
"I look… okay," he said. "Not perfect, but… surprisingly realistic."
"You're very welcome," said Dolly.
"Sorry. Thanks, yeah."
"Oog," said Applecore. "Does that mean I have to drag myself up now? Or can I take another few minutes and get on with dying?"
As Theo pulled on the clothes that Tansy had sent for him, a pair of boots and some loose and serviceable earth-toned garments that he doubted came from the lord's own closets, but more likely had been commandeered from one of the more human-shaped servants, Dolly continued to admire her handiwork. "You do look rather sweet, if I say so myself." She grinned hugely, revealing teeth like crooked shower tiles. "How about a kiss for good luck then, Theo-lad?"
Theo was seized with panic, but it was a strangely familiar panic, the fear of someone who wanted things to be easy when they never, never were. "You know," he said after a long moment, "I'm really grateful that you did this and all, but… but you're not really my type, Dolly. Sorry."