Theo, meanwhile, could not help his slow progress. For the first time he was getting a chance to see faces up close — fairy faces of all types. There were the little people, of course, brownies and gnomes (he guessed they were gnomes; they certainly had the boot-tickling beards for it) and many other types who did not even reach his waist, most of them with faces as wrinkly and knobby as dried-apple dolls. Even smaller were the sprites like Applecore, little more than swift shimmers in the air until they stopped to hover. There were plenty of goblins as well, some working menial jobs in the station, some waiting for trains, others apparently just hanging around, doing a bit of panhandling. The goblins seemed of all ages and many economic stations, but all of them seemed actively to avoid eye contact with Theo and Rufinus.
Are they supposed to do that or something? he wondered. Do they get in trouble for looking at the upper-class fairies? Or do they just hate our guts?
Our? He was amused despite himself. And what makes you think that if you lived here in Fairyland, you wouldn't be a goblin or something even farther down the totem pole? It's like reincarnation, those people who believe in previous lives always think they were dukes or queens or something, ignoring the fact that most people back then spent their whole lives up to their knees in shit before dying of toothless old age at thirty.
But it was the faces of the upper-class fairy men and fairy women that were most intriguing — the women in particular, of course. Not just because the "nobles" were by far the most human, or because by human standards they were all good-looking (although they certainly were) but because of how they were good-looking.
They weren't perfect. In fact, although by and large they had a greater regularity of feature than the average set of human train station visitors, they weren't more attractive in aggregate than your average Hollywood party full of wanna-be actors and actresses. But what kept them from being perfect — and thus perfectly dull — were features Theo couldn't quite define, features which pulled them away from the human norm and which were fascinating precisely because he didn't recognize where they came from.
When he had first met Count Tansy he had thought him something like a Celtic-Asian or Scandinavian-Asian mixture, but with skin tones lighter than either. Now, seeing all this fairy nobility at once, he began to see a fuller example of the types that he had only been able to classify with human approximates before. The "Asian" eyes were by and large set wider in the face than in most humans. What he had thought an extreme Northern European lightness of skin in Tansy actually seemed to be near the middle of the fairy scale, and there were subtle colors in that skin type, green and purple overtones so faint as to be almost invisible, that made even the most linen-pale of Irish maidens look like a ruddy Sicilian dock roustabout by comparison.
That was what made them so interesting, and the women so alluring: these average fairies were not much more beautiful than humans, but they were compounded of so many different — and to Theo unfamiliar — types that each face seemed almost a new world in itself.
Not that it was always easy to get a good look at the faces, especially those of the women. At least one aspect of the fashions which Eamonn Dowd had described appeared to have survived into this more modern era — all-enveloping clothing for women: gloves and long soft skirts and calf-length coats of crisp, pale fabrics. Dozens of upper-class fairy women waited on benches or took tea with friends in the small station restaurants, but there was scarcely an ankle to be seen among them. Big hats and head scarves seemed to be in fashion, too. The whole scene was bizarrely Edwardian: if it hadn't been for things like swooping sprites and little men with heads like pug dogs working the shoeshine booths, Theo could have been watching a costume drama on public television. He wondered for a moment if the rainy weather was making them cover up, but if so, the working fairies, big and small, seemed to pay it little mind, dressing for comfort and blithely displaying bare arms, bare legs, bare wings…
"Hey, why don't any of you have wings?" Theo asked suddenly.
Rufinus turned in obvious irritation. "What are you talking about?"
"Wings. You don't have 'em. Your… cousin, whatever, Tansy — he didn't have 'em either. I thought maybe it was only the little ones that grew them, but there goes somebody your size," he pointed to a young fairy woman in a funny white hat that looked like a flattened seagull, "and she's got 'em."
"She's a nurse," said Rufinus, as if this explained something.
"But why don't you and your cousin have wings?"
Rufinus shook his head slowly. "The better people… don't. Now, here is the tea shop. I hope they haven't changed proprietors — I've not been here in months."
Theo shrugged and followed him in.
As Rufinus ordered three teas, two large and one extra-small, from a red-faced woman with stubby wings who had to stand on a stool to see over the countertop, Theo found himself staring at the various delicacies behind the glass. The pastries were lovely, each one a piece of staggeringly careful craftsmanship. He was just about to ask Rufinus to order one for him when he noticed that the dainty little torte whose shimmering colors had caught his eye appeared to be made from real butterflies. Real, living butterflies, since the wings were still gently moving. Another had a pile of what seemed to be sugar-dusted fish eyes mounded on its center.
His appetite in retreat, he followed Rufinus and the tray toward a table in front of the tea shop which afforded them a grand view of the concourse — and the concourse a grand view of them. "Ummm, I hate to be a nag," Theo said, "but shouldn't we sit farther back? Just to keep a low profile?"
This time Rufinus could not hide his annoyance at Theo's suggestion, but he shrugged with what was probably a fairy lord's equivalent of good grace and let Theo lead him back to a more shadowy spot along the shop's inside back wall. As Rufinus poured the tea, Theo watched Applecore appear in the shop's open frontage, a small shadow zigzagging in place as she hunted for them. "Over here!" he called.
She saw them and buzzed across the room so quickly that one of the patrons was just beginning to swat absently at a spot above his head as Applecore landed on the table next to Theo's saucer.
"Nice of you to join us," said Rufinus.
"Yeah, cheers." She turned to Theo. "Don't turn around too suddenlike, but there's some fellas I don't much like the look of across the station. In front of that Wingworks shop. They're watching you."
He looked. "I don't see anybody there."
She rose up off the table for a quick survey. "They've gone, now." She turned to Rufinus. "Three fellas, your size but a bit strange. No, a lot strange. Cool and collected, though — not street hooligans. Wearing dark coats."
Now Rufinus was squinting too, but with the absent air of someone examining a cloud that a child has claimed looks like a duckie or a horsie. "Maybe you were mistaken, Kettledrum. Of course, there are lots of people in long coats. On account of the rain, you know."
"It's Applecore," she said, but without the heat Theo felt sure he'd have received in Rufinus' place.
It's a class thing, he realized. She treats me like an equal and expects the same back. But she doesn't think she's going to get it from him — and she won't either, from what I've seen.
"Still, it's good of you to be concerned," allowed weft-Daisy. "And I am not altogether unprepared. Fear not, Master Vilmos, should something happen, I will protect you. Cousin Quillius gave me some quite fine little counter-charms against attack, for one thing. And I also have more than a bit of experience with other forms of defense. Did you know I captained the fencing team at Evermore my last year up at school?"