“Some, yes, but not all. We are wanderers. We go where we feel called. We practice magic together in peace. We care for each other like a family,” Pascal explains.

Pascal waves his hand cheerfully and summons the group to stand in a semicircle around us. He says something in French, and the group nods and smiles at us. “Hello!” they shout in accented English. “Welcome!” They greet us with just as much enthusiasm as Pascal.

Voices bright, eyes sparkling with sun just like the lakeside they’ve made a home, they wave us farther into the camp.

I don’t speak French, but follow Maxine to where she’s been directed to sit at the head of the candle-covered table.

I sit down next to her, and shoot her a look. “They’ve made lunch,” she explains, but her face is as skeptical as Lena’s on the other side of her.

“Are you all right?” I whisper to Lena.

She nods, tight-lipped. “I just find them all a little… odd.”

She’s hardly wrong. Pascal’s friends have the same baffling joie de vivre he does. But I don’t want to be someone who can’t trust other people, so I brush away my uneasiness and smile. “So are we.”

Lena nods, but she doesn’t touch her food.

Pascal looks thrilled. Oliver looks on edge. The last time he was in a group of magical men he brought home a black eye and a ruined suit. I apologize for what happened in the basement of the Commodore Club the night of the Cath Draíochta at least once every two months, even though Oliver still insists none of it was my fault.

I nudge him. “Can you ask him which one of them is the leader?” I don’t want to be impolite and turn my nose up at their hospitality, but I took the train today with one goal in mind. I’m here for answers, not a party.

Oliver whispers to Pascal. Pascal nods, then leans around Oliver to answer me directly. “The leader is not here at this table. We will go to him once we are finished.”

“Can we go now?” I prod.

Pascal pulls a melting petit four from a robin’s egg–blue plate and eats it in one bite. “Why would we want to do that? The party is just beginning.”

A girl with blond hair in tangled waves nearly to her waist appears beside me with a platter of cucumber sandwiches cut into neat little circles, like from a tea party.

Another girl with black hair cut a little unevenly at the back floats over to Oliver a whole baguette and a crock of sunny yellow butter.

The seats of the table are soon filled, the surface bursting with food.