“Fairies don’t much care for cousins,” Jack tells her. “Cousins don’t much care for fairy. It’s been like that since you first showed up on these shores. Sometimes we get along, sure, but that’s only been the easygoing among us. Back in the hills there have always been individuals, waiting and brooding and planning. It’s just your bad luck that one of them got elected war chief at the same time that some of your people decided it would be entertaining to kill a few cousins.”

“You know it’s something we don’t condone,” she says, falling back into royal speech and repetition.

Jack sighs. “But you didn’t control it, either.”

“So because of that, Joe’s going to make us suffer.”

Jack shakes his head. “No. Joe’s so focused on his family that he probably doesn’t care one way or the other what goes down. None of this’ll mean anything to him until his sister’s safe.”

“But we don’t know where the humans are.”

“Then you know Joe’s not going to be helping you.”

“In the time it would take for us to track them down, we could lose everything to that army. Tell him we’ll do whatever he wants if he first helps us stop this.”

Listening to the two of them talk, I feel for her. Once those buffalo start to move they’re going to wipe out pretty much every fairy they find in the city. And once they have the taste of fairy blood, I doubt it’ll stop there. After all, so far as a lot of cousins are concerned, there’s a whole continent to take back.

Yeah, I feel sorry for her, but I empathize with the cousins, too.

“And in the time he takes to help you,” Jack is saying, “Jilly and her friend could be killed.”

“You don’t know that.”

“We don’t know anything,” Jack says. “That’s a big part of the problem.”

“But—”

“And I doubt it’d make that much difference to him anyway. You know Joe. He looks at the little picture first. Until he knows his family’s safe, you’d have better luck whistling up the wind to help you.”

It’s pretty obvious from Tatiana’s face that she already knows this, but I guess she had to try.

“How about you?” she asks Jack. “Can you talk to them?”

“The buffalo wouldn’t listen to me. You need someone way up on the respect ladder, or at least someone who’s got the gift of calm, the way Joe does. I wouldn’t know where to start with that trick of his that has people putting down their weapons to listen to him pretty much as soon as he opens his mouth.” He shoots a glance at Mother Crone. “Barring one or two exceptions, that is.”