She wore the flower crown Twila had made her; she’d spell casted to preserve it. She brought honey and apple butter and bread sweetened with currants as gifts for her hosts. Because during her months with Mallick she’d gained a full inch of height, she sought out the sly young elf Jojo, who had a reputation for her skill in finding anything, and requested new pants. In trade, she offered a bracelet she’d made of braided leather.

As the smoke curled, the fire crackled, and drums beat, she sat with an elf nursing her baby. She’d been an exchange student before the Doom. Testing herself, Fallon held the conversation with Orelana in French.

“The family I stayed with was very kind. I had gone home for Christmas, and came back to America on the second of January. No one knew, not then, what had already happened. No one knew, so I left my family and came back to America. I went back to school, and you began to see, began to hear. But still, no one seemed to know. The father of the American family took ill first. While he was in the hospital, the mother became ill, and then Maggie—this is the girl of my age, the daughter. So fast, all so fast and horrible. At the hospital, so many ill, so many dying. I called my family, and my papa was already ill. I tried to get home, but I couldn’t get a ticket. I went to the airport to try to get one there, and it was madness.”

Smoothly, she shifted the baby to her other breast. “People sick, people desperate, people angry. Shoving, striking, shouting. Police. Soldiers with guns. I ran from there. It took hours to get back to the house, empty now, where I stayed. So many cars, coming and going, so many people in them sick. I tried to call my family again, but I could not get through. I never spoke with my mother again, or my papa, or my brother.”

Fallon stared into the fire, watched the crackle of red and gold into the hot blue heart. “It was a terrible time, but it had to be more terrible for people like you, people who couldn’t get to their family.”

“I know my papa is gone. He was already ill. But I have hope my mother, my brother survived. Afraid, so afraid, I stayed in the empty house. Afraid, too, because I felt the change in me.”

“Your elfin blood.”

“Yes, it frightened me. What was I? Why was I? The family lived in what is the suburbs. Do you know this?”

“Yes. On the way here, Mallick showed me. Communities outside the towns.”

Orelana nodded. “This was such. Quiet, wealthy, a lovely big house, but inside it, I was alone and afraid. Outside it, I would hear gunfire and screams, horrible laughter. And I would also see beautiful lights.”

“Faeries.”

“Yes.” She lifted the baby to her shoulder, rubbed his back. “What was in me knew the lights were good. I took what I thought I would need. I was only nineteen, you see. A child of privilege. A young girl on her first trip to America, away from home. A good student with dreams of becoming a designer of fashion. A designer of fashion,” Orelana repeated with a laugh. “I took what I could carry in the backpack, and I followed the lights.”

“How did you get here?”

“Inside me was a need, not only to follow the lights, but to take this road instead of that, make this turn instead of another. For days I let the need guide me, just as it guided me to become one with a tree or the slope of a hill when something bad came near.”

She looked toward Fallon with a smile as the dozing baby burped. “I learned not to fear what was in me, but to use it. Whenever I saw crows circling, I would hide. When I heard fighting, I would hide. Or run, fast as elves can, so I wouldn’t be caught. But men did catch me. Soldiers.”

“You were swept? I didn’t know.”

“They said they’d help me, take me somewhere safe.” Remembering, Orelana cuddled her baby, swayed a little to keep him lulled. “They gave me food and water. I was so tired, so afraid, so hungry. But elves hear very well, as you know, and can hear thoughts as well if they’re loud enough. So I heard them talk and think about the containment centers and about laboratories and tests. Isolation camps, all these frightening words and thoughts. I was with three others in the back of a truck with heavy material on the sides so we couldn’t see where we were, where we were going.”

“I didn’t know you’d been in a containment center.”

“I never got there. One of the soldiers thought very loud, very loud to speak to me. Minh.”

Fallon glanced over at the elf talking to some of the men and bouncing a sleepy toddler on his knee. She knew he was Orelana’s man, and his parents had come to America from Vietnam. She hadn’t known he’d been a soldier.

To lead, she thought, would take more than understanding words in any language. It would take knowing the stories of those who said the words.

“What did he say to you?”

“He thought: This isn’t help. It’s prison. Be ready.”

“What did he do?”

“First, I should tell you he was a good soldier, wanted to serve his country. But he’d hidden his true nature from the others he served with. He knew, because he’d seen the camps and centers, what would happen to him. What was happening to others. There were others who served who did the same, and they had found each other. Some of them.”

She paused to shift the baby, free a hand so she could pick up a cup and drink.

“Be ready, he thought to me, and not long after, the truck stopped. It stopped because one of the resistance, a witch, made it stop. They made an explosion, not on the truck, but close. And another.

“In the confusion, Minh came around, elf quick, he took the little boy—a shifter, no more than three—and told the woman who cared for him, who had become his mother to go, go. I took the hand of a girl, an immune, pulled her out. We ran into the trees where more were waiting to help us. And we escaped.

“Minh led strikes against one of the camps, one of the centers. With Thomas and others. They freed some, and some were lost on all sides. We came here to make our lives. You know the boy there, Gregory?”

Fallon looked toward a group of teenage boys pretending to be bored. “Sure. Wolf shifter.”

“He was the little boy with me in the truck. Darla, though she is not Uncanny, lives with the pack. She is his mother, after all. The little girl, the immune? She’s a soldier with the resistance. She sends word to me, to Minh, now and then.”

“It’s a good story. A strong story.”

“It’s important never to forget who and why we are.” She set aside her cup, let out a contented sigh. “I haven’t spoken in the language of my birth for so long a time in years. You’ve given me a gift.”

“It’s my first conversation in French, so a gift for me, too. I’m glad Minh was there for you. Glad he was a soldier and wanted to serve. And glad he understood how to serve, was brave enough to do what’s right.”

“I felt grateful to him that day. I admired his courage over the weeks and weeks that followed, his ability to help lead, to provide. But I fell in love with him on a spring night just here, just here where we sit now when I came upon him singing to a little girl who’d had a bad dream.”

Fallon knew the light in Orelana’s eyes when she looked at Minh. She’d seen it in her own mother’s toward her father.

“Here is a man who would fight, I thought, who would choose what’s right and risk himself for it. A man who would provide. And one who would soothe a child with a song.

“I thought too loud,” she said with a laugh. “I hadn’t learned how to quiet my thoughts, to protect them. So he heard me. So he heard me, and he looked at me, and because he was brave, let me hear his.” She sighed. “Litha is a time for love and lovers. One day you’ll look, and you’ll know.”

She gave Fallon a pat on the knee. “But now, I need to put the baby to bed.”

Fallon sat studying the fire. She wasn’t sure there would ever be a time for her for love or lovers. Wasn’t sure she had inside her what would put that light in her eyes.

She’d made a vow. Balance, she mused, yes. A dance around the balefire on the solstice, good food, and friendships. Her first conversation in French. But to balance that, she’d learned Minh was a soldier, part of the resistance. Someone who knew, if she needed to know, where camps and centers had been.