I’d been wrong.

“You’re fey.”

“Partly,” she agreed. “My grandparents fled Faerie, almost two centuries ago. They had a farm once, on the border of the Alorestri lands. It wasn’t particularly good soil, but my grandfather had a gift, and it bloomed for him as it would for no other. They made it work…

“Until the invaders came. The Svarestri needed new farms to support their armies, and took them from the Green Fey, who then took replacements from my family. It didn’t matter that the soil was rocky and hard, and would return them little. They took it because they could, and drove my grandparents out, along with a host of others.”

“So, your family came to Earth.”

She nodded. “And built a life—of a sort. My grandfather died, some would say of a broken heart, a few years later. He tried farming here, but he didn’t like Earth’s soil; it didn’t sing to him, he said. They cremated him afterwards, and the family still has the ashes. They were afraid to bury him, as his body might break down and join this world, and be lost, as so many have.”

She turned on me suddenly, her eyes wet and furious. “Do you understand? Lost—utterly and irretrievably. Everything they knew, everything they were, gone as if they had never lived at all!”

I had a sudden flash of Billy Joe, but pushed it away. Because that hadn’t been his fate. He had come back, and had visited me on Samhain, when the veil between worlds was thinnest. He’d successfully transitioned to… wherever we go after death. I might be missing him, a constant ache, but he had been happy.

I doubted the same was true for the fey.

“You’re saying that your grandfather’s knowledge won’t go into the Common, if he is buried outside of your world?” I asked.

“How could it? From a universe away? We fled here to save our bodies, but in doing so, we lost our souls. That is what the wars have cost, not just death and pain, although there’s been plenty of that. But a loss so great that we do not speak of it.”

No, I didn’t guess they would. I felt honored that she was speaking to me now. And then I wondered what it would be like, to have history at your fingertips, a long, unbroken chain of knowledge about your forebears, stretching back… basically forever. To taste food a seven times great grandmother had made, and maybe even watch her make it. To smell a flower that didn’t exist anymore, from a species that didn’t exist anymore. To walk through cities long crumbled to dust as if you belonged there, because part of you did.