(Copyright 2012 Intisar Khanani, All Rights Reserved - thanks for respecting this!)
One.
“We’ve a visitor,” Niya says as I enter from the kitchen yard. She kneels before the low work table at the center of the room, punching down the morning’s dough, her arms daubed with flour and her hair wisping out of her braid. “I heard Baba answer the door a moment ago.”
“I know. He’s trouble.” I cross the kitchen, debating how to handle the sort of trouble he is. With our mother gone to town, and our father already busy with him, it falls to me as the eldest of my sisters to figure out what to do. “Did you make any of your specials?” I ask, taking a taste from the pot bubbling over the fire.
“Just the bread—who is he?” Niya turns towards me, pushing her hair back from her face and coating the stray locks in white.
“I don’t know.” I join her at the table and lean down to take a pinch of the dough. Underlying the gentle flavor of rosemary I catch a hint of warm blue skies, wheat fields golden in the sunlight, swallows warbling. I have to hold back a sigh as the taste of Niya’s magic fades. “We’ll make flatbread for lunch just in case he stays,” I say. “He may not even be here long enough to eat.”
She refuses to be distracted. “If you don’t know who he is, why’d you say he was trouble?”
I hesitate, uncertain of so many things: what to tell her, how to protect her, exactly what I had seen a handful of minutes earlier. Looking over the low mud brick and adobe wall bounding the kitchen yard, I had been slow to realize that the man walking down our drive, a journey bag slung over his shoulder, was not a man at all. It had been there in the impenetrable obsidian of his eyes, the flawlessly sculpted features, the strange paleness of his skin. The paleness alone would have set him apart from the people of our land, but it was the exquisite grace of his movements, the agelessness of his face, that marked him as something other.
Leaning on the wall, watching him, I had forgotten myself: forgotten that young women should beware of the Fair Folk; forgotten that my sister with her life’s secret was within; forgotten, impossibly, my own unremarkable features, my deformed foot. Only as he neared the corner of the house had he glanced at me, amusement in the tilt of his lips, as if to say, Did you think I didn’t see you?
I had turned my back on him, tossing a final handful of grain to the chickens, and then hurried indoors to my sister.
“Rae? What is it?” Niya watches me now expectantly.
“Well,” I begin when an explosion comes through the hall door in the form of a gangly girl with flying hair, pointy elbows and pounding boots.
“Rae!” cries this ball of energy. “Niya!”
“No need to shout,” I say mildly. “We’re right here.” Our youngest sister skids to a stop, thumping into the table as she drops down beside it and sending the tin cup on the corner flying. It clatters to the floor, spraying an arc of water across the worn stones. At least it wasn’t milk.
“There’s a faerie come to visit Baba!”
I guess I needn’t worry about how to word my news now.
“A faerie?” Niya echoes, gray eyes widening as she turns to me. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I told you he was trouble,” I remind her. “And I was going to tell you what kind when Bean,” I glance at our little sister pointedly, “knocked over the water.”
“Oh well,” Bean says, reaching to scoop up the cup and return it to the table, “some of us do get excited once in a while.”
“But he might guess,” Niya says, ignoring this.
