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demanded.
    “The same thing I did the day of the explosion. I passed . It is one of the gifts of the Fae.”
    “Gifts? That’s not a gift. It’s . . . ” She didn’t know what it was. “Horror. Pure horror.”
    Finn shrugged. There was a coldness about him she had not perceived before, an alien quality that marked him as a member of a race apart. “Mankind does not generally find it pleasant, but you have uncommonly high tolerance for the experience. It drives some humans mad.”
    “Being buried alive would drive anyone mad.” Then the real horror of it struck her. “What would have happened if you’d let go of me?”

    T he thought made Finn feel as queasy as Ann looked. It had been a favorite trick of the Queen’s, passing with some mortal who had disappointed her, or amused her, or simply happened to be in the wrong place at the time when the whim was upon her. Finn had always found the idea repugnant, but he’d raised no objections to her casual cruelty, or that of the Court she led. In fact, she’d done it to him once—when he was a boy, before he had fully mastered that art—left him buried alive in a hillside for a terrified instant before retrieving him and depositing him in the center of a circle of snickering sycophants.
    The experience had left him terrified of passing , but he’d conquered his fear with his then-friend Miach’s help and decided in that moment that he was never going to be the object of anyone’s jest again.
    “If I let go of you, you would be buried alive. I would never do such a thing, but there are those of my kind who might, if you give them cause, or even for sport. This is the second time you’ve come to me intent on involving yourself in Fae business, but you don’t have the least notion what you’re meddling with. Before you tell me why you’re here, you need to understand the danger.”
    “You mean there’s more than this passing thing?”
    She looked wary, as well she ought.
    “The Fae are varied in their talents,” he explained. “We have mages who cultivate the sorcerous arts. My son is one. There are others who paint living canvases. And warriors with unparalleled skills with blade and bow.”
    “And what is it you do?” she asked. “Besides extortion?”
    “I am but a humble leader of a fighting band.”
    She snorted. “There is nothing humble about you, Finn MacUmhaill.”
    He laughed. “You’re right. Humility is not one of the gifts given the Fae. Once we were so cruel and arrogant, we brought about our own destruction. Not all of us have learned from the experience, but as a race, we have been humbled. That is what you need to understand. If you meddle in Fae business, you are walking into the middle of a war.”
    “You mean like some kind of gang war.”
    “If it were only that. This is secret, centuried . The Fae fighting the Fae are dangerous enough for the humans caught in the middle, but the Fae fighting their ancient enemy, the Druids, is far, far worse. You see, Druids aren’t the nature worshippers your modern historians paint them. They’re closer to the bloodthirsty practitioners of human sacrifice that the Romans described. They began as our acolytes, vassals, ordinary men and women of extraordinary intelligence. We invested them with magic—just a little, because we were not fools—so they could run our domains. We entrusted to them the tilling of fields and the collecting of rents and all the mundane activities we did not deign to do for ourselves—and we set them to herd the human population like sheep.”
    “That sounds like hell on earth for ordinary people,” said Ann.
    “For the Fae, it was paradise. For the Druids it was . . . unsatisfactory. They began as mortal men, but Fae magic and their own experimentation turned them into something else. They studied our power, learned how to harness it for their own purposes. They discovered our weaknesses, and when the moment was right, they overthrew us. They hurled