Dragon Justice. Laura Anne Gilman
suddenly-appearing gazebos, restaurants and castles, and god knows what else tucked into the utterly artificial and incredibly lovely grounds. Something like thirty thousand trees, according to the stats, and rumors of coyotes to go with the birds and rabbits and squirrels and occasional seriously confused deer.
And there are fatae. Exactly how many Cosa-cousins live in the Park is unknown—even if we tried to run a census, they’d either refuse to answer or lie. Piskies, flocks of them nestling in the trees and building, their nests tangled in the roots. Dryads, not as many as we might wish, but enough to help keep the rooted trees healthy and well. Some of Danny’s full-blooded faun cousins, and at least one centaur. I didn’t think the lakes were deep enough to support any of the aquatic fatae, but I’ve been wrong a lot before, enough that I’d be very careful leaning too far over a watery surface. City fatae tended to abide by the Treaty…but water-sprites were changeable and moody and saw most humans as annoyances at best. Venec and Stosser would be peeved if they had to ransom me from the bottom of a lake.
The moment I entered the Park at West 77th Street, I knew that I was being watched. Fatae don’t use magic the way we do, but they’re part of it, and they know it when it walks by. I could pretend I wasn’t aware of the surveillance, make like I was just out for a nice afternoon stroll, or I could stop and deal with it now.
I stopped.
The closest person to me was a woman pushing a stroller a few yards ahead of me. Other than that, the walkway I was on appeared deserted. I waited until she was out of earshot, then cocked my hip and addressed the air around me.
“If you’ve got something to say, say it. I’m listening.”
Silence. Not even a rustle or a giggle, which meant that it probably wasn’t piskies. When no pinecones or other shot hit the back of my neck, I decided it definitely wasn’t piskies.
“Come on, this is boring. You have a question? Ask. Got a warning? Go ahead. But don’t just skulk silently. It’s creepy as hell.”
The sense of being watched didn’t go away, and I was starting to get annoyed. “You know who I am.” It wasn’t a question this time; last I’d gone hunting in the Park I’d almost managed to set off an interspecies incident, riling a Schiera to the point that it spat poison at me. That was the kind of thing that got retold. And I wasn’t exactly subdued in my appearance—I didn’t dye my hair the extreme colors I used to, after being told in no uncertain terms it wasn’t a good look for an investigator, but the naturally white-blond puff of curls, matched to my normal urban goth-gear, was easily identifiable. Lot of Talent in the city, but the combo of Talent, appearance, and showing up to poke my nose directly into things that other folk looked away from? Savvy fatae knew who I was, and unsavvy or ignorant fatae wouldn’t have lingered once I called them out.
“Come on. Seriously?”
“Seriously.”
My heart went into my throat and my eyes probably bugged out, and I resisted—barely—the urge to drop to my knees and apologize for every thoughtless, stupid, or mean thing I’d ever done. The woman standing in front of me tilted her long, solemn face to one side and lifted one long, gnarled hand to my hair, touching it as gently as sun touches a leaf.
“I startled you. That was not my intent.”
“M’lady—” And unlike with the Lady this morning, the title came easily to my mouth, without resentment. “You do not startle but amaze.”
Rorani. Not merely a dryad but The Dryad. It was rumored that her tree predated the Park itself, making her well over three hundred years old. Nobody had ever seen her tree, at least not and spoken about it, but Rorani was always there, moving through the Park the closest thing to a guardian spirit it had. If the fatae in New York had any leader at all, or one soul they would listen to without hesitation, it was Rorani. Her willowy green-and-brown presence could stop a bar fight in progress, halt a bellow midsound, and make edged weapons disappear as though they’d been magicked into fog.
“You are here about the children.”
“What, everyone knows about this except us?” I sighed and dragged a hand across my face as though to erase the words. “I am sorry. I just…”
“I have been watching them,” she said, accepting my apology without acknowledging either it or my rudeness. “I worry. But I did not know who to speak to, or even if I should. Humans…are difficult sometimes.”
“As opposed to the logical, tractable, and obedient fatae?”
At that, she smiled, a small, almost-shy grin that could break your heart. “Even so.”
That grin didn’t mask her concern, or soothe my unease, but it put paid to my thinking this job wasn’t worth my skills. Even if this had nothing to do with my case, I was glad I’d come. Anything that worried the Lady of The Greening, Stosser would want to know about.
“These children. Show me?”
I was surprised when the dryad hailed a pedicab. I don’t know why—even dryads must get tired of walking, eventually. I always felt guilty using a pedicab—I was in better shape than a lot of the drivers—but Rorani stepped as gracefully into the carriage as a queen into her coach, me the awkward lackey trailing at her heels.
“To the Meer, please,” Rorani said, and the pedicab headed northeast.
My first thought was to be thankful that I had encountered Rorani the moment I entered the Park, saving me probably hours of searching… and that thought led me to the suspicion that it hadn’t entirely been coincidental. Accusing a dryad of collusion with a da-esh, though, took cojones I did not have. And it changed nothing, save that the fatae of the city were helping in an investigation without being prodded, coerced, or paid, and that was…new.
I had no expectation that we were all going to join hands and sing “Kumbaya” anytime soon; we might have stepped back from the edge regarding human-fatae relations, but there were still generations of tension built into every encounter. If Rorani had given word that we were to be helped… that was a very good sign.
We skirted the Reservoir and got off a little while after 102nd street, vaguely on the east side of the Park. Rorani waited, and I belatedly dug into my bag for cash to pay the cabbie. He sneered at my request for a receipt.
“This way,” she said, as he pedaled away. We walked past the Lasker Pool and off the roadway, down a worn path, and into surprisingly deep woods.
This part of the Park had been designed to mimic a natural forest, and once within it, you could not see—or hear—any hint of the city around us, not even the tallest skyscrapers. I was pretty sure that a slender beech winked at me as we passed, but I didn’t have time to stop and say hello—and I might have imagined it, anyway.
We walked down the deer path, single file, until Rorani stopped, waiting for me to see whatever it was she wanted me to see.
There was a decline, sloping gradually into a little flat-bottomed valley, with another higher, rocky rise on the other side. The floor was covered in grass and ground cover, the trees midheight and leafy, and—then the scene shifted, the way some paintings do when you stare at them too long.
I saw the bedrolls first. They were tucked under a clump of thick-trunked trees, concealed under tarps painted to mimic the ground, but the shapes were wrong, jumping out at me like they were splashed with bright orange paint. The storage container was harder to find; they’d found one the same gray as the rocks and cluttered it up so that the lines resembled a small boulder. I was impressed.
Once I saw that, the bodies came into focus. Three skinny forms in dark hoodies and jeans, curled up against each other like kittens, and another higher up on a rock, his or her legs hanging over the side, reading a book. It was a quiet, peaceful scene, and I couldn’t see a thing about it that would have worried Rorani, other than the fact that all four were young enough to be living at home, not out here on their own. But that was a human concern, not a fatae one.
The campsite, now that I was aware of it,