Frost Burned

full of porcupine quills, I found it harder to stand still and let silver be drawn out a second time. But the pain did focus my attention on the present, as did Adam’s grim face. I gave him a cheery smile, and his frown deepened.
    Zee taught magic the way he taught mechanicking—by making Tad do all the work while he stood behind him and made acerbic corrections. He did it in Old German, and though I can get by in modern German, the old stuff sounds a bit like Welsh spoken by a Swedish man with marbles in his mouth.
    In the end, Tad held a dime-sized bit of silver, I rubbed the cramps out of my thighs, and Adam stalked back and forth like an enraged baboon I’d seen once at a zoo. Asil had retreated to the far corner of the room with a book, to keep his presence from inciting Adam further.
    “If Tad intends to do this to the werewolves,” I said through gritted teeth because every muscle on my body was cramping with equal insistence, “then Adam will have to hold them down.”
    Adam stalked over to me and began kneading my shoulders. I sighed in relief and let him work on them while I turned my attention to my left calf.
    “It won’t be so difficult with the wolves,” said Zee. “Their bodies are already working to get rid of the silver, and all it will require is a little assistance. They also heal faster.”
    “I’ll keep watch,” Adam promised me. “Tad won’t take any harm.”
    “So are the fae planning on taking over the world?” I asked Zee.
    He laughed so hard, he couldn’t speak for a few minutes. “The short answer is yes,” he told me cheerfully.
    Asil set aside his book and quit pretending he was not interested.
    “But?” I said, and he laughed again.
    “Liebchen,”
he said. “
If
they could all point their swords in the same direction for more than ten seconds, they just might manage something scary. The reality is that everyone is tired of merely surviving and is looking for a way to thrive in this new world of iron.” He shrugged. “I don’t know what will happen except that things are changing.”
    “I heard someone”—Coyote—“say that change is neither good nor bad,” I told him.
    Behind me, Adam made a wolfish noise that meant disagreement. “The older you are, the more you fear change, even if you think you are in charge.
Especially
if you think you are in charge. There are a lot of very old fae.”
    Zee inclined his head to Adam in a move that looked a lot more royal in his own shape than it did when he’d done it while wearing his human-seeming. “As you say. I would tell you that there is nothing to worry about except that there is. There are a lot of fae who hate the humans, Mercy. Some fae hate them for the iron encircling the world, some hate them for the loss of the old Underhill even though we have replaced it, and some hate humans for their ease of procreation.” He sighed and looked old. “Hatred is not a useful thing.”
    “To hear you say
that
—that is a thing I never thought to hear no matter how old I became.” Asil laughed and Zee raised an imperial eyebrow and someone who didn’t know him might not have seen the wry humor in his eyes.
    “Not useful,” Zee said, then looked as though he was listening to something, though my ears didn’t pick up anything strange. “But it is powerful. Someone is knocking at my door, I must return.” He put his hand on his son’s shoulder. “Stay safe.”
    “And you,” Tad said.
    And Zee walked through the blackness that filled the mirror’s frame as though it were just another doorway. He said something that I heard with my bones and not my ears, and the frame was filled with a mirror once more.
    “That is one I thought would never change,” said Asil thoughtfully.
    “He loved my mother,” Tad told him. “Love is more powerful than anything, even an old grumpy fae who knows how to hate.”
    Asil gave Tad a thoughtful look. “Indeed?” And then he looked back at the mirror. “Love is both useful and powerful—but seldom convenient.”
    “I don’t know about that,” Adam said. “I’ve found it pretty convenient.”
    “That’s not what you told me,” I corrected him, and he laughed.
    The ghost tried to give me trouble again on the way back down the stairway from Zee’s mirror room. But I wasn’t stoned by fae magic this time.
    “Go away,” I told her.
    “Mercy?” Adam was just behind me, and he put his hand on my back.
    “Not you,” I told him. “It’s the ghost.” He