Page 39 of The Robin on the Oak Throne

Graves moved to the nearest bookshelf, looking a bit like a kid in a candy store. He removed a book and thumbed through it before grabbing another one. His stack almost instantly became ten high. He brought them over to the counter by Gen and went back to the shelves. Kierse focused her magic on him and could actually see the wisps of gold magic sliding around his body as he recharged.

Kierse had pickpocketed a few unsuspecting tourists on their way here. Nothing of note—a pack of gum, a gel pen, and a handful of euros that she’d passed off to a local busker. Stealing from Oisín was too easy, since the old man was always distracted and never quite cared what she carried off. It didn’t energize her the way other tricks did.

Gravestsked. “Someone should really categorize some of this. This entire stack is almost unreadable from the mold. And the dust.” He wrinkled his nose. “Whose job is it to tidy this?”

“Who cleansyourlibrary?” Gen asked him.

“Magic,” Graves said with a smirk.

“Of course,” Kierse muttered. “Well, use some magic to clean this place up.”

“There’s a difference between keeping something clean and cleaning it to begin with.” He shook his head in dismay as pages fell out of a large leatherbound book. “Tragedy.”

A throat cleared hoarsely. “Sometimes the pages like to find new homes in other volumes.”

Graves looked aghast.

Oisín smiled toothily up at him. “Hello, Brannon. It has been many years.”

A grimace was all that revealed that Graves detested the use of his first name. He held his hand out to the stooped bookstore owner. “Long enough that I no longer go by that name. It’s simply Graves now.”

He took Graves’s hand in his wrinkled and age-spotted one. “Ah, yes, I believe someone mentioned that.” He tapped his forehead. “Some things stick forever and some things…” He waved his hand as if indicating a dark abyss from which it might never return.

“You still remember who I am, though, right?” Niamh asked.

Oisín smiled and reached up to pat her cheek. His long, robe-like clothing puddled on the floor, but when he lifted his arm, you could see he was wearing worn brown leather loafers that looked like they’d been plucked straight out of a medieval tale.

“I’d never forget my Niamh. You or my faerie love that you’ve named yourself for.”

“I love that you chose the name based on the story,”Gen told her with a small blush on her pale, freckled cheeks.

“It was always my favorite tale,” Niamh said, winking at Oisín. “And when I transitioned, it felt more me than anything ever had.”

“You are so like her,” Oisín said with that same sad smile.

The first time Kierse had entered Oisín’s bookshop, she’d never heard the story of Niamh and Oisín. Kierse had thought Graves and Lorcan had suggested she try the Goblin Market bookstore to get more information, not that the owner himself actually had involvement with the Fae. Oisín had given her a copy of the faerie tale, and it had been the first story she’d read when she began to dig through the spotty history of her people. Graves always said that there was a kernel of truth to every tale that persisted, but until then, she hadn’t really believed him.

In the popular Irish faerie tale, a beautiful fae woman, Niamh, came into this world and fell for a human man. Oisín left with Niamh to return to her world of faerie, where they were very happy for many years. But he wanted to say goodbye to his family back in the human world. Niamh agreed under the condition that he never left the horse she gave him, which he readily agreed to. When he returned to his Dublin, he found that instead of a handful of years, hundreds of years had passed and no one he once knew remained. On his return voyage, he fell from his horse and thus lost both his true home in faerie with his love and the human world that had left him far behind.

She’d returned to Oisín the next day, wondering if the story of Niamh and Oisín was one of the ones that held a kernel of truth.

“You are that Oisín?” Kierse had asked.

“I am,” he’d agreed.

“But…how? Wasn’t that hundreds of years ago?”

“My time in faerie marked me. While I aged to this almost instantly,” he’d said, gesturing to himself, “I remain the man I was when I left faerie in here.” He’d touched his heart. “I have not aged a single day since. With hopes to return and find my Niamh still waiting.”

Since then, Oisín had been helping her and Gen learn more about Fae. She’d trudged through massive tomes, reading everything she could get her hands on. The scant knowledge of wisps was particularly disturbing. In most of the tales, will-o’-the-wisps were nothing more than faerie lights, especially around swamps, which led travelers off of their path. In other iterations, they were jack-o’-lanterns, or a will-of-the-torch that helped luckier travelers through the night. Sometimes wisps judged whether to help a stranger or not based on their actions. So much of it was a mix of urban legend and faerie mischief. For a few centuries, mortal scientists had claimed they were just bioluminescence in the marsh due to decay. Boy, did she have a story for that hypothesis.

It was only with Oisín’s help that she had reconstructed an index of all powers the wisps had historically wielded to compare them to her own. Absorption, time manipulation, glamour, and finding treasure—check. Pixie light, persuasion, magic intuition, and possibly portaling—negative. No matter how she worked at the latter powers, they stayed squarely out of her grasp. She was happy enough with what she’d had, but Oisín feared that the spell had horribly altered her magic.

“I feel something has changed,” Oisín said, looking between them.

“She’s going into Nying, Oisín,” Niamh said. “We were hoping you’d talk her out of it.”

Oisín sighed. “You’ve been seduced by Nying as well? There won’t be answers about the Fae in there.”

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