Lizzie turned to see what he was looking at in time to see Mother Crone give Geordie a kiss that was anything but chaste.

Geordie

Galfreya and Christiana are pretty much the last people I expected to run into out here in the middle of otherworld nowhere, but I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised. At least not with Christiana. By all accounts—her accounts, mind you, related over lazy Sunday afternoons at Christy and Saskia’s place, or after-hours at some bar where I’ve been playing—she’s in and out of the otherworld all the time. She’s had more adventures than a character in one of those old movie serials, and some of them were seriously strange.

So it’s not such a stretch to find her here, out in the middle of nowhere. I’ve had her pop up in places almost as unexpected.

But Galfreya . . .

Galfreya rarely strays far from her court in the mall. It’s enough of a way to define her that it was certainly a point of contention in our relationship, even if I never pushed her on it. It’d just sit there in my head. A minor annoyance, most of the time, because I liked the music in the mall. I liked being with her in her own space. But there were times when I’d just want to be with her in some of my old haunts—the places that I felt defined me. The Lee Street Market. Fitzhenry Park. The clubs in Crowsea and Lower Foxville. The sessions at the Harp.

She’d always have some reason not to come with me. It got to the point where I thought maybe she couldn’t leave the mall. Like if she ever did, she’d burst into flame the way stories say a vampire will when it steps into sunlight. Or maybe she’d live up to her speaking name and turn into a hag, or she’d dissolve into water, or something.

It wasn’t something she’d ever talk to me about.

Hazel and Edgan would tell me not to take it personally.

“All seers have inexplicable eccentricities and habits,” Hazel said. “It’s not something they choose, or the price for their gift. It just seems to work out that way.”

“Like pipers.”

She gave me a confused look.

“They’re all a little crazy,” I told her. “It just seems to come with the territory.”

She nodded. “That’s it. It comes with the territory. In Mother Crone’s case, she remains here, in the court.”

Edgan’s explanation was more like a parent dealing with a problem by saying “because I say so.”

“She’s the seer,” he told me. “So she can do what she wants. Who are we to question her?”

“Would it kill her to come out with me once in awhile?”