I noticed a letter on my kitchen table that hadn’t been in the mailbox, and picked it up as I went to listen to the voicemail. I checked the time stamp: it had been left while I was in the shower, so hopefully Sylvie had gotten some rest.

“Hi, E,” it started. “Um.” That wasn’t a good sign. That meant either she was thinking, or trying not to say something, right? There was a long pause that, if I hadn’t been so relaxed, I might have started to mentally cramp over, if you know what I mean.

“About last night,” she finally said, “I didn’t mean to blow you off. I… look, this isn’t working. Just call me, OK?” She rattled off her digits and I deleted the message.

I opened up the letter and read.

It took me a while, and all thoughts of Sylvia had kind of blown away in the thinking. This was, if you excuse me, Bigger than that.

I hadn’t given much brain time to the events of the Small Court or however I’d end up naming it. They weren’t related to the Gillikins, they didn’t fight Dragons, and, well, a troll, however scary, just wasn’t on the same level. I had to see if the city was going to fix the pavement outside, but besides that kind of mundane clean-up of the night, and the rock Peredur knew was in my pocket, it was something I was pushing off until I had to deal with it.

This letter pushed the time table up, because Thomas called me “friend.”

I was probably feeling weird about the subject given the events of last night. I realized sometime on the drive home, feeling a little maudlin about my empty bed, and recovering from all the emotions of the night, that Ed was a real friend. I mean, minus his being nosy about my personal life (I really didn’t have any designs towards Maggie anymore. Those feelings have been shot and buried in the backyard. I hadn’t quite sown the metaphorical remains with salt, but I was ready to do so if needed.) I guess that’s part of being a friend, too. Ed hadn’t been steady with anyone, well, ever, really, so I couldn’t return the favor (although a dark part of my brain that remembers that kind of thing chuckled disturbingly about it) but… huh. I wonder if Ed’s really gay. I mean, he says he likes the girls, but I do, too, and all of mine have turned out witches, apparently. Which isn’t different than “lady” but it still seems like a strange coincidence.

I got up and got some soda from the refrigerator, added some ice and then came back to look at the letter. First things first. Clever Capitalization seemed linked to words about size, specifically a lack thereof. There wasn’t any, “HELP ME” or other word of power in the choice of letters along either the left or right hand sides. I held it up to the light, but couldn’t detect any invisible writing to be made visible. I mean, it could have been waiting for the full moon near an equinox and then it would tell me about the three dwarves that can walk abreast, but I kind of doubted it.

With all of this analysis, you almost end up disappointed when nothing comes up, but so far it seemed, except for having unnaturally regular letters in his handwriting, perfectly normal.

So it was a matter of content. There were definitely rules to what he could tell me. He spent a lot of paper to tell me that there were Big Things Happening. That sort of thing always reminds me of the movie, “Men In Black,” where Agent Kay says, “There’s always an Arquillian Battle Cruiser, or a Corillian Death Ray, or an intergalactic plague that is about to wipe out all life on this miserable little planet, and the only way these people can get on with their happy lives is that they Do Not Know about it!” Practitioners are not immune from their own myopic viewpoints. There’s always an incursion of Beyonders, or a rogue mage, or a changeling plot, or a rampaging Dragon… well, fine, that last one was a new thing to me, but the rest of them? It’s happening all the time, and it’s just not important to people who aren’t in the worlds it happens to, pretty much. Replace a movie star with a changeling? I’m not going to know. Wreck my car and steal my fairy? I’m going to know.

Doloise. “They are fascinated by love.” I think Doloise loved me. It’s been hard to put my brain around it, the being-that-was-Doloise different from the Realm, as I wasn’t sure there was one. She wanted me to free her, and instead I got her et by Dragon. If they can die. If I understand death and immortals.

So, a quick read gets that Thomas got in over his head. Something I don’t understand about twins that’s probably some kind of esoterica of which I’m not inducted into the sacred mysteries. He’s responsible for me getting to talk to the King, because he thinks there’s a Portal Problem. He drops some Star Wars references to verify that it’s him (not that Star Wars isn’t a huge things in the Aetherverse. I mean, there are disembodied voices that complain that Han shot first in the farthest reaches of known conceptual space. Really.) He insinuates that Adelinda knows about Wyrm Queens, which, unless he means Dragons, I am not worried about, he talks a little poetry (not the Red Poets, at least) and then he muses about the importance of love to the fey. He finishes with a, “Don’t come find me, but I was working on this case so it’s important you draw some of the same conclusions,” and tells me to go directly to the King, do not collect two-hundred dollars. The King will be a bit of a jerk, but I can see past that to see he has his people to consider.

OK, gotcha. Now, what do you really mean, Thomas? Guess there’s only one way to find out.

But first things first, I need to call a girl.