Maybe because it was a moist towelette.
“Where did you get that?” I asked blearily.
“Out of the pack. Lie still,” he added when I started struggling to sit up.
“Why? They’re gone.” Even the sound of footsteps had vanished while I was busy graying out.
“Humor me.”
I humored him. I didn’t feel so good.
“We need to get going,” I pointed out, after a moment.
“In a while. Let them get well away first.”
That . . . sounded like a plan, actually. I lay in the mud, staring up at the swirl of stars visible through the dark, wet canopy above. And waited while my hideous companion cleaned me up. Or made me as clean as anyone ever got in Wales, which wasn’t very. Even the fey’s hair had been dripping. . . .
“Is there a reason Pritkin’s element is water?” I asked, after the wind tossed some in my face.
“Is it physically impossible for you to lie quiet?” Rosier asked.
“Humor me.”
He opened his mouth to say something but then closed it again abruptly. “Well, obviously.”
“And that would be?”
“I already told you, he’s part fey—”
“What part?”
“An eighth, if you must know.”
“An eighth?”
“Yes. His mother was a quarter, his grandmother half, and his great-grandmother—”
“Does he know?” Pritkin had always acted like his fey blood was minimal.
“I’ve no idea.”
“You didn’t talk about her? His mother, I mean?”
“No. She was dead. What was the point?”
“That she was his mother?”
Rosier scowled at me, like I was the one acting weird. “She was also part fey, and he was infatuated enough with the creatures as it was. Just like her, always talking about them—”
“His mother was always talking about them?” I tried to get up on one elbow, but Rosier pushed me back down with an irritated tchaa sound. “Then she didn’t live there. In Faerie.”
“Well, of course she
didn’t live there! How would I have met her in that case?”
“Then where did she live? Who was she?”
He scowled some more, but to my surprise he answered. “You already know that.”