A Surface of Pressure and Burden

Chapter 4: A Will of Laws and Loopholes

I woke up on the softest surface I'd felt in over a year - a thick, downy mattress underneath the silkiest, warmest, most delicious blankets imaginable. I opened my eyes slowly to see a bizarre sort of man with frog features - or was it a frog with man features? - sitting in an upholstered armchair by a roaring fire, looking at me with a stupid grin on his face.

"I like to watch you sleep," he said.

"What in the actual Night Court?!" I exclaimed, pulling the bedclothes tighter around me. "What is this? Who are you? Where's my sister?"

"If you mean that other girl, she went over the wall with Lord Tamlin," the frog/human replied. "She'll be in Prythian by now."

"Is that where we are?" I asked. "Are you a faerie too?"

"I am one of the Fae, but we're still on your lot's side of the wall," he said with a grimace. "Ten years now since Lord High & Mighty kicked me out of Prythian. This is my humble abode. I call it Oberon House. You live here now. You may call me Lord Todstule."

"Toadstool?"

"It's pronounced tahd - stuhl, you stupid woman. And don't forget the Lord!"

"This is all a mistake," I said. "I need to find my sister. We need to get back home to our own kind."

"This is your home now," the creature said. "Look, I need to go get some work done in my study. Take it easy this morning, get to know the layout of the house, think about what you could do to make yourself useful. I haven't done spring cleaning in forever, maybe you could help with that. I'll see you at lunch and we'll talk about it. Don't even think about trying to escape - I have eyes everywhere!"

With a hop, he was gone. Despite my heart racing a mile a minute, the news that I was now a prisoner, and my worries about Feyre and the others, I'd be lying if I said I didn't take my time enjoying that luxurious bed, the hot, lavender-scented bath (that I didn't have to haul water for!) the black tea and currant cookies (that I didn't have to bake!) and getting dressed in the lovely satin day dress hung near the bed (that I didn't have to mend, wash, or iron!) Cauldrons, but I'd missed this type of life.

Eventually, though, I knew I had to get back to the real world. Step One, I supposed: figure out what kind of place this was. I left my warm, cozy room and padded down the hall in soft slippers. Muttering issued forth from a room on the right of the hall and I went through the partially-open door to see a young man (fully human as far as I could tell) surrounded by books and papers, scratching notes down on a piece of parchment. He was tall and slender (a less charitable word might have been gangly), wore a slightly worn tweed suit and jacket, and had a huge, unruly mop of chesnut hair and almost equally huge wire-rimmed spectacles.

"So if they can lie, but not without repercussions, will there still be repercussions if they didn't know they were lying? And exactly how is a lie defined, anyway? What if a faerie's friend has on a really silly necktie and the faerie just doesn't want to - oh, hello!" The young man's spectacles fell off in his surprise and he frantically shoved them back onto his long nose. "Todstule said he'd caught another one last night, so nice to meet you, so sorry you're a prisoner and all. You do get used to it after a while. I'm William Blackthorne."

I shook his ink-stained hand, trying to process this flood of information.

"How did you get here, William?" I asked.

"Will, please," he replied. "Well I was top of my class at Cowscross in the Magical Writing division - Cowscross is a sort of advanced school, they're calling it a university now because it has such a universal amount of knowledge and -"

"I know what a university is," I put in.

"Yes, of course. Well, anyway, Todstule came to campus one night with a couple of henchfae and stole me right out of the dorm. The fae realm has a lot of complicated rules and treaties, you know. Magic works according to very specific systems, and the faeries are all about trying to find loopholes in the magical law. Todstule brought me here to study the fae law and advise him on the best way to get around it. I think what I'm doing here can become a really respected profession one day. I'm calling myself a lawyer."

"That can't be right," I objected. "Shouldn't it be a lawsmith, like a blacksmith, goldsmith, or locksmith? And it's pronounced law, not loi."

"No, it's lawyer, like sawyer," Will went on. "You know, a sawyer uses a saw to slice up wood."

"So you slice and dice using the law then?" I asked.

"Some might say that's exactly what I'm doing," he laughed. "See all these books and scrolls? For the past two years I've been here, looking through all of them, trying to parse exactly how Lord Todstule can get what he wants. It's maddening work at times, to be sure, but when you start to get into it it's actually quite interesting-"

Chatterboixyer, more like, I thought.

"So faeries and magic have a lot of rules, then?" I asked. "Who makes these rules, I'd like to know? Who decides ultimately if faeries have kept the rules or not?"

"Oh, now you sound like Philo, the Grecian fellow, a classmate of mine who was top of his class in Origins and Meanings at Cowscross, who Todstule also captured and brought here to Oberon House. He was always bringing up things like that, until one day Todstule said 'You're a social construct,' and ate him up, unfortunately."

"Cauldrons," I exclaimed. "Well who is this horrible Todstule then? Or what is he?"

"He's a sort of disgraced lesser faerie," Will explained. "You know how they have the regular faeries, and the High Fae? Well, not hyphae like in a mushroom, but High Fae, well anyway, they have Low Fae too, and that's what Todstule is. They usually have features of the less badass animals: mice, squirrels, frogs and so on. Which by the way, word to the wise, he really doesn't like being called a Low Fae. Or being reminded that he looks exactly like his mother kissed a lot of frogs, if you know what I mean. Anyway, he used to live in Prythian with the others, but he was exiled to our realm about ten years ago. He's obsessed with getting back over the wall, hence me and my work here. I've tried to get the whole story of why he was kicked out, but the best I can tell is it was mainly for being a massive prick."

"What should I expect from him?" I asked, sitting down on a stool by one of the bookshelves. "I'm a little afraid I'm here to be The Bride of Todstule."

"Oh, surely not that," Will replied. "When he told me about you he mostly talked about spring cleaning. I mean, I haven't seen much in the magical law about it, but I would think Todstule would prefer someone a bit more - well - froggy, don't you? What I mean is, he's literally as ugly as a toad, and you're, well - " he blushed furiously and fumbled with the papers on the table. "I mean, you don't exactly have webbed feet or green skin, do you, and I'd have to imagine those are prized marks of beauty among his kind. Are you a good reader? I can teach you about the faerie law, if you like!"

"Well, that does sound better than spring cleaning," I admitted, "But I've got to get out of here. My youngest sister has been captured by another faerie, I think he might have even been one of the High Fae. He was huge. It's honestly hard to say exactly which animal he resembled, but it was definitely a badass one."

"Gosh, that's just awful," said Will, pulling down a family tree chart from the wall. "Here's a list I've been making of all the High Fae that I know of. You didn't catch a name, did you?"