Trisha was the one to make sure Selene got up that morning. Edith and the same workers as the day before were at the dining room table. Edith got Selene to try a fruit that looked like a plum and tasted like a peach. Even though it tasted good she didn’t eat any more. Its difference in appearance and taste didn’t sit right in Selene's mind and she had to wonder what she was basing her assessment on. How could it not be a normal fruit? She must have eaten a million strange tasting fruits before now, so how could some be more familiar.

More things weren’t matching up, but Selene didn’t want to say out loud that something was wrong. She looked over at the metal plated guards. Food vanished into their black mouths and voices came out past jagged teeth. They were just as opposite and confusing as the food. How could they possibly act normal when all they saw was the past? If she had not experienced that flashback for herself she would not have believed it.

The lone guard in chainmail that had caused her trouble was thankfully keeping his head down, but why didn’t he wear one of those safe eyeless helmets? As though the man knew what she was thinking, he looked up and Selene dropped her gaze so she wouldn’t be caught, but for a second she thought she saw a dining room with redwood walls and a gold chandelier. 

The vision was a difficult match against this room of chipped grey stone, which only furnished a scratched wooden long table and a handful of equally neglected chairs, but curious, Selene looked up and saw a bare metal hook in the ceiling where something might have hung.

Selene made a mental note to ask Edith about this, but when Edith started clearing the table after their meal, Selene was left alone to gather the dirty clothes. By the time Selene had gathered the last clothing pile into her arms, she had forgotten the question. Selene sighed to herself and pushed away her own irritation at being stuck with all these jobs before she once more entered the laundry room where Trisha sat in the midst of washing.

Watching the woman work, Selene was sure that her fingers must have been rough from scrubbing and her knees sore from kneeling, but Selene had never seen Trisha stop. Selene would have looked like a fool for abandoning her job when the others worked so hard. 

Selene dumped the clothes between the wash buckets and reluctantly sat down to work. She had to remind herself that every piece of clothing she washed lessened the workload for the older woman. Still, she found the work to be tedious. The sloshing and splashing of the wash water in that silent room and the repetition of it made her feel restless. Selene imagined that this was the time when someone was supposed to magically appear and tell her to run away because her destiny was to be more than a housekeeper and her bright pink eyes more than a fancy gimmick.

"If you want, you can start hanging these clothes on the line."

Selene stopped washing and looked up at Trisha, who had been the one to speak up. She had not expected the old woman to notice her discomfort.

"Are you sure?" Selene asked her.

They still had an awful lot of work.

"Good work deserves a break," Trisha said putting down her washing. "It’s still your first week so I’m sure your hands are feeling raw."

"You’re right," Selene admitted, feeling better now that the silence had broken. "How do you even get used to all this washing?"

Selene could not imagine herself doing this for much longer.

"It becomes a nice routine after a while, especially at my age," Trisha said resuming work as though to emphasize her point. "Think of it as taking care of everyone here while they’re taking care of you. Just as you’re happy to eat for free, the person who cooks is happy to get clean clothes. Of course, you don’t have to hang the laundry if you don’t want to."

"No, I think I’ll go," Selene said hurriedly.

If she had to clean clothes for any longer then she would give herself a headache, so for the first time she picked up the basket of clothes and went outside by herself. She took Edith’s advice and didn’t look at the forest. Instead she kept her eyes focused on the pile of clothes and pinned them up by feeling along the clothesline for the pegs, but the more she ignored the forest the more she thought about it. She could not stop from thinking that once she had known what was in that forest. In fact, she might have considered the place peaceful. She would need to ask Edith for a book about fey.

The nearby bushes rustled and a squirrel bounded out across the lawn. Selene's heart raced at the sight and she joked to herself that perhaps a wildlife manual would be all she needed. She was tugging the laundry down the line to make room when a twig snapped beside her foot and she froze with the hairs on the back of her neck raised.

With a feeling that something was wrong, Selene made herself look up in the direction of the noise. The only thing there was the post of the laundry line. A breeze passed by and Selene heard someone laugh on the other side of the building. Convincing herself that she had stepped there herself, she continued by pinning up a frilly pair of underwear. 

She had put up another two pairs of pants and was holding someone's black work dress when she felt a tickle on the back of her neck. Selene held her breath, waited for the count of three, and turned around. There was still nobody there. Instead, she noticed that the side door to the manor house was open. With her nerves already shaken, she quickly picked up the basket and escaped inside.

***

Naruze shook his head and turned away from the second story window in his office that overlooked the clothesline and forest beyond. He would need to have a talk with that basilisk boy about not frightening the guests, but he had to focus on one thing at a time. He turned to the doorway to meet Tarin who had finally made it up the stairs and stopped with a clenched hand against the doorframe to catch his breath. In politeness Naruze did not ask, but in more than one way his friend's entrance was sloppy.

The most notable sign of distress being that Tarin had thrown a knitted orange scarf around the neck of his purple velvet jacket, obscuring the silver details of the lapels, while the scarf ends hung loosely down to the grey of his tiger stripped pants. Orange was a colour that Tarin avoided because of the way it clashed with his messy blond head of hair and the pink of his irises, which now looked tiredly ahead. Tarin smiled faintly to his old friend.

A small shiny object slipped from the hand Tarin held to the doorframe and bounced across the carpet to land by Naruze's foot. Tarin didn't even seem to notice as his eyes were focused elsewhere, and then flicked down to the fallen object on the carpet when his senses caught up to his head.

Naruze lifted his arm, snapped his fingers, and was holding the object on the raised palm of his hand. It was a silver ring marked with the familiar signet of a five-pointed star known as the pentacle, an object that belonged to the college of wizards. The sight of the ring reminded Naruze of times long past, for he had been a sort of student there himself, but he knew that Tarin had not obtained it for such reasons of sentiment.

"You found one of your warlock friends," Naruze noted.

Tarin saw a chair against the nearby wall of the room that had been stacked with books and inconsiderately pushed them onto the floor to sit down.

"Evil fiend is more like it," he said.

Now able to rest, Tarin puled back his sleeve to examine the sparse growth of reddish feathers on his forearm. He scratched at his neck and Naruze noticed more feathers under the scarf. It wasn't the first time that he had seen Tarin sprout feathers, but it was the first time he had come back not fully returned to his proper state. The bird was a form Tarin's familiar preferred to take.

"And those wizards don't even notice them," Tarin continued idly.

Naruze placed the silver ring on the nearby windowsill where the dim light glinted off its surface. Despite its corrupt origins, the ring's addition to the scene almost made the world seem bright.

The effect was ruined by Baltane's reflection in the windowpane. The mirrored reflection could have been mistaken for Tarin's own had a natural reflection been possible, and had the familiar that stole Tarin's appearance not been glaring at him, or perhaps back at Tarin himself.

"I don't appreciate that look," Naruze told Baltane in warning.

"I wanted to do it myself," the familiar told Naruze.

"Baltane is upset because he…didn't get enough killing time."

"She was my friend."

"She was our friend, assuming we knew her before. You cannot seriously think that every warlock's familiar was a person we knew," Tarin corrected, as he spoke to the familiar.

"You know most people would be concerned over having to kill their friend, not over which one would do it," Naruze told them. "Only you two would argue over such a morbid topic."

"This was one that I once loved. I thought of marriage once," Baltane said.

"Oh, yes. And the spirit of the warlock before this was his second best friend," Tarin said, unimpressed.

He took advantage of Baltane's averted attention to smooth the feathers on his forearm into his skin.

"Listen to that," Baltane said. "He doesn't even care about his friends. Killing them cold. Not letting me hurt them until they understand how hurt I am for being dragged into THEIR grave!"

"Enough!" Naruze punctuated. "Neither of you are going out hunting for the next week."

That shut them up. Both of them knew from experience how frightening Naruze's anger could be.

"Why not?" Tarin asked.

"I need you here to help look after some guests from the wizard academy."

"I thought you were going to go talk to them," Tarin said. "Privately."

Tarin saw no need for a meeting when all they had to do was secure a little compassion from the wizards for when they moved into the human realm together. He felt Baltane's silent agreement and then withdrawal into the unconscious parts of the mind to avoid having to listen to politics.

"I realize what you're thinking, but the recent generation of wizards no longer cares for the fey's natural abilities or nature loving ideas. So I've invited them here."

"To do what? Invade our privacy," Tarin said.

"Well…they might not care about my people, but they do seem rather interested in the lost unseelie prince who was so tragically banished to the human realm all those years ago, and the same it is rumoured we have contact with. The wizards see him as a threat and they will want to leave us untouched for observation."

Normally, Tarin would have agreed, but he remembered a certain girl recently and illegally obtained.

"What about interest in girls kidnapped from the human realm?"

Considering that the humans were going to be their new best friends it should not have been a problem, but politics could be a tricky thing, especially when they were managed by an insane seelie king. Tarin was not about to lose Selene over some made up custody battle, but to this Naruze merely smiled, turned to his oak desk, and picked up an ivory hand mirror that had been carved with flowering vines.

"Ris will give her something to do like all the others," Naruze said inspecting the reflection before disappointedly setting it face down. He spoke again to Tarin.

"More importantly, I want you to be ready to get the door in case these wizards arrive early. I’ll have Ris deal with them from there."

"Isn’t that a little harsh on Ris."

Tarin knew that Ris was already responsible for supervising many of the tasks around the house.

"It is," Naruze admitted. "But I have little choice if guests want to abuse my hospitality. I’ll just have to owe Ris a favour."

"And Selene…

"Will be watched by me, unless you changed your mind and want her as your apprentice."

No, Naruze was right Tarin thought. He was in no position to worry about the girl.

"I hope this is worth it," Tarin said simply.

"We will soon find out."