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gauzy green dress.
    My smile was a snarl. “I didn’t realize talking was one of your talents. I didn’t think monkeys could speak.”
    She jerked her dress down with a scowl in my direction and tugged the others away from me. I grimaced after them and kept making my way through the crowd. I didn’t know exactly what I was looking for—maybe just someplace where the music would finally pull me into its spell and make me forget the rest of this.
    Someone grabbed my butt as I walked; by the time I spun, however, there was nothing but a row of grinning faces looking at me. It wasn’t that I couldn’t pick out the one who didn’t look innocent. More that I couldn’t find one who didn’t look guilty.
    “Go screw yourselves,” I told them, and they all laughed.
    “We’d like to, slut,” said one of them, and made a rude gesture. “Will you help?”
    No point getting into a fight tonight. I just spit in their general direction and whirled away, putting as much distance between me and the butt-grabbers as I could.
    The drum begged my feet to dance, but I didn’t. The music was gorgeous, and any other night I would’ve given into it. But tonight, all I could think about was what James and his pipes could do with the tune the musicians played now. I wasn’t sure why I’d bothered to come. I was a motionless island in the middle of a swirling sea of dancers. They didn’t bother to hide their stares as they rippled, spun, swayed with the music and with each other. There was laughter all around me.
    “Are you lost, cailín ?”
    I’ll admit I was shocked shitless by both the kindness in the voice and the innocuous title—simply “girl” in Irish. I turned and found a man smiling down at me, dressed in court finery, his tunic buttoned with shell-shaped buttons all the way up his neck.
    A human. He glowed vaguely golden, enough to make me hungry but not enough to really tempt me. Besides, though he was handsome enough, with his laugh-lined eyes and crooked nose, he was neither beautiful enough nor fair enough to be a changeling, stolen away by the faeries as a child. Between that and his court clothing, I would have bet my curls he was the queen’s new human consort. Even I, on the fringe as I was, had heard whispers of him.
    I eyed him, wary, and said loftily, “Do I look lost, human?”
    His eyes took in my jean skirt with the ripped bottom, my low-cut peasant top, and my impossibly tall cork heels. His mouth made a shape as if he had tried a lemon and found it sort of appealing. “It’s hard to imagine you anywhere you didn’t intend to be,” he admitted.
    I curled my mouth into a smile.
    “You have an extremely wicked smile,” he said.
    “That’s because I am extremely wicked. Haven’t you heard?”
    The consort’s eyes returned to my face and his already smile-thin eyes narrowed more. His voice was light, playful. “Should I have, human?”
    I laughed out loud at his mistake. At least I knew now why he’d approached me—he thought I was one of his kind. Did I look that bad? “Far be it from me to disillusion you,” I replied. “You’ll find out soon enough. For now I’m enjoying your ignorance, to tell you the truth.”
    “The truth is all anyone can speak around here,” the consort countered.
    My mouth curled into a smile.
    “I see conversing with you takes me only in circles,” he said, and he held out a hand. “Would you dance, instead? Just one dance?”
    I didn’t like to dance with faeries, but he wasn’t one. My teeth were a thin white line. “There is no such thing as one dance inside this circle.”
    “Indeed. So we dance until you say stop, and then—we stop?”
    I paused. Dancing with Eleanor’s consort without begging for the privilege first seemed like a bad idea. Which added slightly to the appeal. “Where is my dear queen?”
    “She is attending to other matters.” For half a second, I thought I saw something—relief, maybe—flicker across his face, and then it