"Jeez, that wasn't what I meant. I just… Shit. Forget it. I'm wrong and so what else is new?"
"Quit whinging and start walking, ya thick. And listen a little bit."
"Okay, okay."
"What did you do wrong — isn't that what you asked? You said, 'But I didn't promise her anything!' as if how someone feels about you was some kind of court case or a contract, like you can solve it just by taking out the agreement and waving it around — 'See, I never said it!' But how people feel isn't like that, Theo, especially women. And the thing is, you know it, too."
He groaned again. "I don't know anything."
"Oh, yes, you do. I used to have a gentleman friend just like you. Sweet-tempered most of the time — he could be lovely, he could — but he just took everything that was given him and never wondered what was expected back."
"So what the hell is expected back, will you tell me that? Or are we men just supposed to read your minds?"
"By the Trees," she said, "it's like talking to a faun in the springtime. Look, fella, so you didn't tell her you loved her or that you were going to live with her in a cottage by the sea. Did you hold her hand? Did you listen while she talked about how happy she was? Did you or did you not tell her she was lovely and that you were glad you met her?"
"I thought you were sleeping! You were listening!"
"Fair play to you. This is my life, too, remember. Can you blame me for being curious about what stupid things you might tell the daughter of one of the people who are trying to kill us?"
He was walking again, all but oblivious to the grotesque and beautiful faces watching him through the windows of restaurants and bars, to the shouts and the foreign musical tones of the coach horns, even to the snatches of intriguingly exotic melody wafting out of stores. "Okay," he said at last. "You were listening. What was I supposed to say? She was nice."
"You're just like that other fella I went with. Theo, what do you lads expect? You make us work for every word out of you. Half the time if we let you have what you want, we never hear from you again, or if we do, you've gone all strange on us. We have to try to read you like a book in some language we don't know, then when we make a mistake, you tell us, 'Ha! I never said that! You can't prove it!' Look, you, you can't hold a girl's hand, cuddle up with her, tell her she's beautiful, then pretend that because you didn't ask for her hand in marriage it's all a mystery why she's upset when you piss off at the first opportunity."
Theo shook his head. "But you didn't even like her! You wanted me to stay away from her!"
"I like her better for not sitting around listening to your excuses. But you're right, I didn't want us mixed up with her at all. Which, you may have noticed, is why you didn't see me playing finger-tickle with her, or rubbing me leg on hers when I thought me companion was asleep. Turn right here."
"What?"
"Turn right here. There's a stop down this street for the bus through to the Morning Sky District."
The stop, an ornate bench beneath a small but equally ornate, leaf-shaped roof, stood in front of a boarded-up storefront. The sign over the store's front entrance had been pulled down, but in the silvery streetlights Theo could still see the bolts that had held the letters in place, spelling "Lily Pad Sundries" in that strange gibberish-but-he-could-read-it way that Fairyland writing usually appeared to him. There was only one other person waiting at the stop, a goblin sitting with a very straight back at the end of the bench. He did not look over when Theo sat down, but there was a change in the quality of his attention to the street that suggested he was not entirely oblivious.
"Okay, you win," Theo told Applecore. "You're the zen master of relationships and I'm the whatever, the uncarved block. Teach me."
She laughed sourly. "As if I need to add to my list of impossible jobs. Just use your brains, fella. I think you've got some."
"Is that a compliment?"
"Of a sort." She frowned. "If this is the right bus, we can stop at my place first before we go on to…" She stopped and shot a quick look over to the goblin, who was still solemnly watching the traffic slide past, his long nose pointed at the street like a finger. "To the other place."
Theo couldn't even remember where they were going — to see Foxglove? No, Applecore had vetoed that. "We're not going to go… wherever it is tonight, are we?"
"I don't know," she said. "It's getting a bit late. But I don't know where else you can stay."
"You said we were going to stop at your place. I'm not picky — I'd be happy to sleep on the floor or something."
She cocked her head, looking puzzled, but before she could answer the bus came around the corner, the engines humming with a sound like drowsy wasps, the brakes screeching a little as it pulled up at the stop. It was shaped a bit like a caterpillar, with accordion folds and a humped back, but still recognizably a bus.
I'm getting used to things here already, Theo thought as he went up the steps, then stopped when he got to the top. It wasn't the driver who gave him pause, a squat, donkey-eared woman half Theo's size on a special booster seat, with modified pedals in reach of her dangling feet. "Damn! I don't have any money," he whispered to Applecore.
"Doesn't cost anything," she said. "But that's a good thought. We need to get our hands on a bit of the yellow stuff pretty soon — I've pretty much emptied my tallybank."
The little goblin had got on ahead of them and had already made his way back to the rear of the bus. Since all the seats at the front were full, Theo followed, with Applecore on his shoulder. The passengers hardly looked up as he went past.
They wound up in a seat in the second-to-last row, beside a sleeping fairy woman with a faint lavender tint to her skin, who seemed a bit the worse for drink or something: she had an odd smell to her, almost like camphor. Her cheek was mottled with an old bruise and her wings were bedraggled, one of them even tattered along the edge. The goblin had taken a seat behind them in the last row, and was still staring ahead as though afraid to do anything else.
The bus had gone a few blocks when Theo realized he had been drifting, thinking of the look on Poppy Thornapple's face as she threw him out of the car and wondering why it hurt him so much to remember it. "About money," he said. "Why don't we just have Tan…" He paused: Theo was learning the trick of discretion, too. "Why don't we just ask your boss to wire us some. You can do that here, can't you?"
She frowned. "Not as simple as you think, but for reasons I don't want to talk about now. And I still have to puzzle out where we can put you up for the night."
"But…" He hesitated. "Listen, I don't want to cause trouble. I mean, if there's some religious reason or something that an unmarried sprite can't bring home a member of the opposite sex a hundred times her size…" He suddenly thought of something. "Wait, is this your parents' place? Is that why you don't want to bring me home? But I thought they lived back in…"
She stood up and touched his lip, silencing him before he could say more. "No, you great eejit. It's just that when I'm staying here in the City, I live in a comb."
He didn't get it. "And, so, what, do you have a hairbrush you keep as a weekend place? If you don't want me in your house, just say so."
Applecore rolled her eyes. "A comb! It's a place where people like me live. You don't think I rent something the size of what you'd live in, do you? What a waste! It's a special place just for sprites and us other wee folk, ya thick."
"Oh. Is that… comb like 'honeycomb'?"
"You get the prize, boyo."
"And I take it that it's not big enough for me to sleep on the floor."