Zirus laughed. "You're doing okay, though, country boy. A bit more than you seem, eh? Right, I think there's a quiet room just up the stairs. I'll catch up with you — I've just seen some friends."
The room was open to the dance floor, and the noise boiling up from below didn't make it a whole lot easier to talk, but at least they couldn't see the crucifix from the table in the dark room. Theo got Cumber sitting upright and Applecore fanned his face with her wings until he seemed a bit more himself.
"Sorry," he mumbled. "Just… not my sort of thing."
"That's okay," Theo said. "Do you want some water?"
"No, another drink."
"Are you sure?"
The ferisher nodded his head grimly. "It'll make it easier. We'll be here a while."
"Well, why don't we just go home by ourselves? Catch a cab or something?"
"And how are we going to pay for it, boyo?" asked Applecore. "Do you have any tallies? No, I didn't think so. Cumber?"
The ferisher shook his head. "I paid for the meal in the restaurant. I left it on the table. It's one thing for Zirus to walk out on a bill, but I'm not the Jonquil heir." He sighed. "But that was all I had, so we'll have to wait for him to take us home. Could I have that drink? I'll be perfectly happy to put it on Zirus' tab."
"I'll go find a waitress," said Applecore, and hummed straight over the railing into the seething mass of creatures below.
Another group of fairies, apparently upper crust and dressed in a weird mixture of what looked to Theo like High Victorian and slashed and smeared punky Goth fashions, piled into the quiet room and settled around a table in the opposite corner, making it much less quiet. Theo frowned and moved a bit closer to Cumber Sedge. "I don't know how much you know about me," Theo said, "but I really don't want anyone to… well, notice me. There were people trying to kill us on our way to Daffodil House. I shouldn't even be here."
"Nor should I," said Cumber mournfully. "Don't belong."
"I'm just saying that I don't know enough to pass myself off as anything, really. So please, help me out. We can't afford to draw any attention. We just need to stay sort of quiet and unnoticed until your Jonquil friend takes us home again."
"Understood." Cumber tried to lay his finger alongside his nose in a gesture of secret solidarity and managed to poke himself in the eye. Applecore buzzed back in, followed a few moments later by a waitress, who took one look at Theo and Cumber Sedge and went to take orders at the other table first.
"How are you boys?" Applecore asked. "Enjoying this charming place?"
"I was just telling Cumber that we need to be… inconspicuous."
"No worries about that," the ferisher said. "Nobody here wants to see you. These Flower folk, they could care less. One of the lesser classes — even worse, one of the other races… !" He shook his head. "Wouldn't help you if you were lying dead in the street."
The waitress appeared, an attractive fairy woman with surprisingly prominent wings. She was wearing an odd costume that Theo only figured out after she had left — bearing their drinks order and instructed to charge it to the young laird of Jonquil House — was a nun's habit shortened and slit into a minidress.
"But Zirus seems like an okay guy," Theo said.
"Oh, as far as they go, he's a good one." Cumber had recovered from his initial shock, but had become morose and distant. "But most of them wouldn't piss on you if you were on fire."
"Unless you were lying on an expensive carpet," said Applecore.
"So are you telling me that no matter what language I spoke back in my world, I'd be speaking Fairy here?"
"You'd be speaking the Common Breath," Cumber said, working very hard to enunciate his consonants above the musical din. He'd had three drinks on Zirus' tab, and what he had gained in cheerfulness he had lost in articulation. "That's the language all the races of Shaerie fare. Bugger. Faerie share."
Applecore, who had downed a few thimblefuls herself, giggled. She had left Theo's shoulder and was sitting in the middle of the table.
"Okay, I guess I get that. But what if my normal language was, I don't know, Arabic? No, Chinese. Isn't it kind of weird that I'd arrive here and I'd see all you fairy folk from, like, old Irish stories and whatnot?"
"That is an interesting question," said Cumber, downing the last of his drink. "You see, Seeo, we don't thee… we don't see… ourselves the way you do. And we don't see you the way you see you. Right?"
"You've lost me."
"See, there have always been people of Faerie visiting the mortal world. Well, until recently — the Clover Effect has cut back on that." He frowned. "And until just lately, there have always been mortals who have crossed over into Faerie. So most of the difference between what some mortals call us and what some others call us is just the difference in mortal languages. You call us fairies, other mortals call us peris or whatever the Chinese word or the Balinese word is. See? But there is another difference, too. It was a ferisher who did the important work on it, actually." He nodded slowly. "Holdfast Buckram. A few centuries back. Wrote a marvelous book called The Mortal Lens. About how mortals tend to see what they want to see. No 'fense." He belched. " 'Scuse me."
Theo was trying to pay attention — this was something he hadn't read about in his great-uncle's story — but a fairy lordling at one of the other tables in the quiet room was smoking what looked very much like a cigarette in a long cigarette holder, and Theo found himself wishing he had the courage to go bum one. But that would be asking for trouble, wouldn't it? He tried to refocus on Cumber Sedge. "So I see most of these fairies as looking like… like the kind of fairies I expect to see?"
"More or less." Sedge got the attention of their waitress and ordered another round of drinks. Theo shook his head. He had been drinking only a sweet wine, and was only on his second glass since reaching the club, but he was already feeling more fuzzy than he wanted to. "So if you had grown up in some quite different datrition… bugger… tradition, you'd be seeing and hearing things a bit differently."
Theo had now stopped listening entirely. The young, pale-haired fairy with the cigarette holder had leaned back to laugh at something. Sitting on his far side was Poppy Thornapple. "Oh, my sweet Jesus," said Theo.
"That only hurt a little!" Cumber announced cheerfully.
"Vilmos, I told you, don't do that," said Applecore.
"There… over at that table, it's the girl we were on the train with." Poppy was dressed quite differently now, no longer wearing what he realized had been her meeting-her-family clothes. In a sort of elaborate mourning-outfit with a surprisingly low bodice, and makeup that looked like it belonged in a Japanese play, she blended in well with her companions, but he knew without doubt it was her. He was surprised by the flipflop in his stomach. Remorse? Or just jealousy? She was leaning her head against the young lord with the cigarette.
"Well, I'm not surprised," Applecore said. "This is just her sort of place, isn't it?"
Before Theo could reply, Poppy looked up and saw him. She had been speaking, and for a moment she simply froze, mouth open, eyes suddenly wide and startled. Then she looked away and finished what she had been saying, forcing a laugh. When her companions responded and the conversation eddied away, she looked at him again. This time it was as though a gate had been slammed down behind her eyes: she stared as though she had never seen him before and never wished to see him again. After a moment, she whispered something to the pale-haired fairy and got up and left the room, her stiff, wide skirt swinging.
"Just a minute," Theo told Applecore. "I'll be right back."
"Don't you dare, Vilmos… !" the sprite began, but he was already up from the table and heading for the door.