“Thank you, Trevor. That was kind of you.” Thank heavens for cider. My mouth is as dry as the Fairsing Desert.

Would you look at that? Ivee no longer wears a pink dress, but Aurelia’s green one. Meanwhile, Aurelia looks utterly miserable as she clutches the front of her skirts to hide the cider stain. Ivee is too busy glaring at me to notice her friend’s discomfort.

Trevor clears his throat, his cheeks growing rosier with each passing second. “Would it be all right if I called on you this Thursday, Kerris? I could bring you by the library. Or, if you’d prefer, we could go for tea. Or both. Or if you’d rather do something else—” His fingers drum an uneven beat against his thighs.

“Both sounds lovely, but the prince and I already have plans on Thursday. What about tomorrow instead?”

His mouth drops open, and his glasses slip down his nose. “No one goes to town on Wednesdays.”

“Why not?”

Ronan throws an arm around Trevor, rattling the poor man so badly, his glasses fall to the ground. “That’s the day my father has graciously allotted for the Unseelie to visit our well.”

Trevor’s blush ignites as he extricates himself and bends down to retrieve his glasses.

Unseelie fae.

The opposite of us Seelie in every way. We prefer spring and summer while they’d rather live in eternal autumn and winter. If we’re light, they’re darkness. We’re the day and they’re the night.

I always assumed that they kept to their side of The Divide, while we remained on ours.

There are countless legends about where The Divide came from. My favorite is the tale of an ancient Unseelie King who fell in love with the first Seelie Queen. He betrayed her with another, and in her rage, she cleaved the world in half, separating the two factions of fae for all of eternity.

“Why don’t the Unseelie use their own well?” Every town has one—even Gravale. Here in the city, not only do they have a well, but also immortal water runs in their taps.

Ivee snorts. “Because the monsters prowling the other side of The Divide have drained their wells dry.”

Trevor settles his glasses back onto his nose with a quiet huff. “That’s a myth, Miss Lynch. No one knows what happened to their wells—or if there were even wells to begin with.”

“Has no one ever thought to ask them?” Seems a simple enough solution.

“No one cares,” Ronan says with a chuckle. “If it were up to me, they wouldn’t have access to our well at all.”

He must be joking. “They would die without immortal water.” If we stopped drinking, our lives would wane after only a handful of seasons. With the water, we could live to see two hundred, even three hundred summers.

“And I’d say good riddance to the lot of them.”