Sunny warned them not to move. She didn’t say it loudly, but she’d mastered the voice of authority that made volume optional. She’d also mastered a darned good accent in their language. I suspected that was Linn’s doing. She said some other things, too quickly and too well for me to translate exactly, but I think they were the rest of the warning that goes with “Freeze,” the stuff about keeping your hands in sight, and why you should pay attention to the person ordering you to do all this, besides the fact that she’s the one with the gun.

The kids really were straight out of the Elflands. They hadn’t had the time, or maybe the inspiration, to do funny things with their hair and clothes yet, though the girl on the bunk had cut hers off untidily to about chin length. It shone like mother-of-pearl, white with a hint of rainbow shadows, in the trembling light. She wore an embroidered knee-length gown with scalloped hanging sleeves lined in red, and red hose. Her bare arms were white as a marble statue’s, but still child-skinny. Her companion on the floor wore a boy’s long jacket, indigo blue, with deep cuffs and lapels of pale gray that showed the grubbiness of constant wear. The shirt underneath still had fragments of lace so fine they looked like scraps of mist. The one on the cot, now that I could see him better and at full length, I decided had run away from home during the elven equivalent of his senior prom. His doublet hadn’t been made to stand up to daily use, but in its heyday it had been green and silver tissue, and his narrow black pants were velvet, trimmed with silver knotwork, now torn in places. His feet were bare, as white and childlike and vulnerable as the girl’s arms.

I’d stopped paying attention to the flow of Sunny’s words, but the silence brought me back. The youngest boy, after a startled, wild-colt look at Sunny when she came in, had kept his eyes on the floor, but the girl had watched Sunny throughout the speech. Now she said something quickly, apparently to the room at large. The other two looked at her. Then the girl on the bunk gave a cool little shrug and stood up. She moved with breathtaking grace, like water flowing, as if she and the air had some kind of agreement. The little boy beside her scrambled up, too. The boy—the young man, or whatever they call them in Faerie when they’ve stopped being children but haven’t quite made it to adulthood—in green and silver sat for a moment longer, trying to keep his emotions off his face. But he, too, rose at last, slowly, and stood at parade rest with his chin high.