“I answered one for you, now you get to answer one for me. Do you have a boyfriend?”

“Not right now,” I said, cheeks starting to burn. I coughed to clear my throat and said, “Elliot. He does what around here, exactly?”

“He’s the County seneschal. He does administrative stuff, like the bills and talking Riordan’s people out of challenging us to single combat in the middle of the local computer store. He’s been with Jan for like thirty years. What’s the deal with your sidekick?”

“Quentin’s a foster from Shadowed Hills. Duke Torquill asked me to bring him along, since this is a pretty straightforward diplomatic job.”

A shadow crossed his face, there and gone before I could identify it. “Straightforward,” he said. “Right.”

“Is it going to do me any good to ask what that look was for?”

His grin was only a little bit forced. “Nope. Your question.”

“All right: April.”

Alex blinked. “April?”

“Sylvester didn’t say anything about Jan having a daughter. What’s the situation there?”

“April is . . . a special case. She’s adopted. Sort of.” Seeing my blank expression, he shrugged, and said, “She’s a Dryad.”

This time, there was no “nearly”; I literally choked on my coffee, coughing for several minutes before I managed to croak out a startled, “What?”

“She’s a Dryad.”

“How does that even work?” Most Dryads are sweet, reclusive bimbos who avoid people whenever possible, preferring the company of woodland fauna and other Dryads. They’re not the sharpest crayons in the box. Most of them probably don’t even realize the box exists.

“It’s a long story, and it happened before I got here, so it’s sort of secondhand . . .” Alex looked at my expression and continued without missing a beat, “But I guess I can try. April was an oak Dryad. She lived in a proper Grove and everything, with about a dozen others. Then some developers bulldozed the place—including her tree—to put up condos.”

“That’s horrible.”

“The Dryads thought so, too. Most of them sealed themselves away and waited to die, but not April.” Alex shook his head. “She grabbed the biggest branch she could carry and ran like hell.”

“So what happened?”

“She got lucky. She found Jan.” Alex picked up his own coffee, turning the cup in his hands. “Jan loaded her into the car and drove home. From what I understand, she paged Elliot while she was en route—they’ve been friends forever—and sent him to look for survivors. All he found was kindling. He cursed the land and came back to see what was going on.”

“And?”

“Jan was up with her all night. No one knows exactly what she did, but April lives in an information ‘tree’ inside one of the Sun servers now, and she’s doing fine.”

I paused. “You’re telling me you have a Dryad living in your computers.”

“She’s happy there. She doesn’t get sluggish in winter like most Dryads do, she doesn’t need clean water or fresh air, she’s pretty much indestructible—she’s happy.”