A Surface of Pressure and Burden

Chapter 5: A House of Fae and Flirting

Strange as it is to say, life in Oberon House fell into a sort of pattern. Wake up, luxuriate in the soft bed and warm slippers and hot tea until the guilt and dread overtook me. Try every window and door in the house, to see if somehow Todstule had left it unlocked. Try smashing a window or door with the poker from the fireside, until I grew tired of the painful, lightning-like shocks that would shoot through my entire body. They were never bad enough to erase all the guilt and dread, though.

Breakfast with Will and Todstule, spending the morning helping Todstule with whatever inane tasks he thought of that day. It wasn't the desperate, backbreaking work of the cottage - Will had found several lesser-known spells in his research that could enchant various objects in the house to do most all the cleaning, cooking, and so forth that was required, and Todstule seemed to have plenty of money to order baskets of fresh food to the house every day and experts to deal with things like a broken chimney flue - but he seemed obsessed with the idea that his perfectly fine mansion needed "a woman's touch."

"Everything has to be perfect when the Fae Council come for the evaluation," he would say. "I've written them so many letters, I'm sure they'll come any day now. When they see how fine my house is and hear William's legal defense, I'll be on the other side of the wall in no time. Now which shade of neon green do you like best for these curtains?"

Lunch together again, then afternoons spent in Will's study, flinging the curtains wide to get whatever sunlight we could. He said I was helping him, but really I had so much to learn - faery law, the history of their people, the endless knots of personal and political alliances that guided their decision-making. The impact that this high, cruel people had had on our human world. How to pull words and phrases from the huge collection of books and scrolls and form them into my own thoughts and arguments. Trying to understand this Treaty that Lord Tamlin had mentioned back at the cottage, and how we might find a way to get around it if we ever got out of here. Todstule would sometimes go into town in the afternoons, but just as often he'd stay home, popping into the study at random. We perfected the art of switching rapidly back from Feyre and the Treaty to Todstule's reinstatement so he never suspected a thing.

Evenings, a mixed bag. Todstule often had company, mostly other exiled Lesser Fae like himself, who liked nothing so much as gathering to bemoan the glories of life Over the Wall and how unjust their exiles all were. He always insisted that Will and I be present for these dismal dinner parties, offering snacks on golden-edged platters, pouring wine for the guests, and entertaining them with human folktales (what they called our "primitive tribal lore" or occasionally, music. (I had learned something of the pianoforte when we were rich, and it came back more easily than I would have thought. Will himself was not bad at all on the oboe.) We tried to think of these interminable evenings as information-gathering sessions, but it is impossible to convey just how one-track their conversations always were.

"Remember when we didn't have to face these chaotic seasons?" the Lesser Fae would moan. "Spring Court, Summer Court, Autumn Court, Winter Court – over there you could just pick one, and design your wardrobe aesthetic to match. Here, the weather doesn't know what the cauldron it's doing, and you have to have four of everything in your closet!"

Fae alive, I would think listening to this endless whining, is this how we sounded to the Widow Maykre?

Infinitely better were the evenings when Todstule chose not to entertain, or better still to leave the house entirely, likely to have these same sorts of conversations at a friends' house. Will and I would pile every available log on the fire, sneak scones and jam out of the larder, and enjoy deliciously lazy evenings reading from the non-legal portions of Todstule's library, playing chess and card games, drawing our own family trees and maps of our hometowns so we wouldn't forget them. Sometimes we would try the magic spells Will had found in the old books, even though they never seemed to work for us non-fae-born. Will loved word puzzles as much as legal ones - even now, despite everything that worried me then, some of the happiest memories of my life are sitting in those squishy fuschia & mahogany armchairs, idly tossing twigs into the roaring flames as he amused/irritated me with his endless acronyms and anagrams.

"You would have been magnificent at Cowscross, Nesta," he said one evening after I'd finished reading a poem aloud. "You could have studied anything you wanted."

"Don't be silly," I said, blushing. "Girls don't go to Cowscross."

"No, they do now, though," he protested, sitting up straight. "All seven of my older sisters visited the Dean's office every day of their adolescence with baskets of cranberry muffins until he finally let them register for classes." Will laughed. "He had such a sweet tooth, but was terribly allergic to cranberries!"

"OK then," I said, "When I get out of this fancy prison, AND somehow rescue my sister, AND somehow become not dirt-poor, AND have time to bake an infinite supply of cranberry muffins, what should I study at Cowscross?"

Cue endless rambling conversations about the different courses of study and (on Will's part) how brilliant I would be at all of them. One night he even pretended to be the Dean himself and made a list of classes I should take. "Welcome to Cowscross, Miss Nesta!" he exclaimed, shaking my hand heartily as the Dean apparently would. We let our hands stay like that for just a little longer than the Dean ever did (at least I hope so). What can I say, you do silly things when you're held prisoner.

I really have to say that my time in Oberon House was not all bad.