Silverdun, Ironfoot, and Glienn piled into the cab, thankful for the shelter and warmth, and the cab moved quickly away. Isle Cureid was a pleasant enough place despite the rain: The homes and buildings were all of brightly painted wood, the streets of volcanic rock, silver in the rain. Everything looked new and clean. It was certainly odd to look out onto a busy street and see not a single woman; Silverdun was glad they weren't staying long.
The Seelie Embassy was located on a quiet side street. It was built of imported Faerie marble, and seemed dour and out of place in the gayness of Mag Mell. The rain, however, seemed appropriate to it. As they piled out of the hansom, Silverdun smelled calendula and capelbells, Faerie flowers from the garden fronting the embassy, mixing with the odor of earthworms and horse dung.
The Seelie ambassador was a Fae gentleman named Aranquet, who dressed in the colorful linens of Mag Mell, with his Seelie Army medals pinned directly to the pink blouse. He welcomed them to the embassy, smiling. Glienn passed out powerfully strong drinks that smelled of mint and were served in cups made of tightly woven reeds.
'Welcome to Mag Mell, gentlemen!' Aranquet sang, shaking their hands briskly. 'Come, come!'
He led them to his office, which was airy and spacious, filled with furniture also woven from reeds of some kind, and satin pillows in the color of peaches and limes. A riotously colored bird sat on a perch in a corner, its beak tucked beneath its wing. Glienn left them, shutting the door behind her.
Once the door was closed, Aranquet's demeanor hardened. He drained his drink and set the cup aside, his eyes on the two men in front of him.
'So,' he said. 'You're Paet's replacements, eh?'
'You know him?' said Silverdun. 'Has he always been so charming as he is now?'
Aranquet laughed out loud. 'Ah! I can see we're going to get along famously.' He reached for his drink cup, found it empty, and scowled. 'No, Paet has never been renowned for his wit or charm. Then again, he's done things for the Seelie that ... well, he's accomplished some astonishing things in his time and received no credit for it. Not publicly, anyway. And never asked for any.'
Aranquet tapped the cup on his desk. 'Still and all, though, a bit of a bastard.'
'We were told you'd have some documents for us,' said Ironfoot.
The ambassador looked sideways at Ironfoot. 'You're the diplomatic one, I take it?'
'No,' said Ironfoot. 'I'm just more scared of Paet than he is.'
Aranquet took two sets of papers from a drawer and handed them across the desk to Silverdun and Ironfoot. Passports and travel documents.
Silverdun looked at the passport, which was a perfect forgery as far as he could tell. The glamour imprinted on the page looked exactly like him, but gave his name as Hy Wezel, with an address in Blood of Arawn.
'The two of you could hardly pass as Maggos or Annwni,' said Aranquet, indicating the passport, 'so we wrote you up as Unseelie Fae instead. A bit more dangerous, perhaps, but these are quality documents. They'll hold up to close scrutiny. If you get detained with them, however, they'll probably cut your heads off.'
Silverdun glanced at the travel documents and laughed. 'Eel merchants?' he said.
'Lot of eel going back and forth between-worlds. The Annwni can't get enough of them. The Maggo variety, I mean. Decent Fae eel they turn up their noses at.'
'I was an eel merchant once before,' said Silverdun. He thought of his trip across Faerie with Mauritane, who had tried with a total lack of success to pass them off as eel merchants to a traveling mestine named Nafaeel and his troupe, the Bittersweet Wayward Mestina. And the star of that show had been Nafaeel's daughter. Faella.
Now was no time to be thinking about Faella. She'd been bad for him. She'd ruined his face. There'd been something strange about her, as well: She'd manifested a Gift that Queen Titania had referred to as the Magic of Change, the Thirteenth Gift. Silverdun liked to think of himself as a worldly fellow, but he'd never heard of such a thing, and hadn't really felt like asking his sovereign to elaborate on the subject. But his thoughts kept coming back to Faella at the oddest moments. Seeing her face in his mind, he felt a subtle pang, a queer sense of loss.
Aranquet sniffed. 'I don't suppose it's any good asking you two the nature of your errand in Annwn? If you were to give me some clue, I might be able to ... assist somehow?' He looked significantly at Silverdun.
'Her Majesty's business, I'm afraid,' said Ironfoot. Silverdun only shrugged. Information was as precious a commodity in Mag Mell as it was back home.
'Well, then,' said Aranquet. 'If there's nothing else, I'll need to be getting along. I've a dinner with Baron Glennet tonight, and the wife expects me to help her browbeat the cooks.'
