Cora ran down Market Street, not even caring to stop and look behind her to check if Harry was following her.

She spotted a little red tent on the side of the road and darted in, deciding to hide in there for a while and hope that, if Harry truly had come after her, he would get tired of looking around and leave.

She knew that hers was only a temporary solution since he was staying at her hostel and they would inevitably meet again, but she hoped she could at least get some hours away from him to try to make sense of her actions.

It wasn't like her to kiss someone like that. It had to have been the effect he had on her—he'd been around her, clouding her senses, for the whole day. Maybe it'd got too much, and that was why she'd done it. She nodded to herself. It had to be that.

"Do you want a reading?"

Cora let out a squeal and spun around. The same enigmatic woman she'd encountered earlier was standing right behind her, studying her with deep violet eyes.

"Uh, I don't think..." Cora tried to decline the offer, but she didn't get to finish her sentence.

"It's free," the woman insisted, pointing her towards the table in the centre of the room, and Cora understood that her offer wasn't a request at all.

She sat down on a chair unsurely and sent the woman a wary glance as she rounded the table and sat in front of her. She took out a set of cards with a dark red back, that Cora recognised as some kind of tarots, even if they were a type she wasn't familiar with. She passed her hand over them and put them down on the table, face down.

"You don't really need them though, do you?" Cora let out. The woman stilled and sent her a penetrating look.

"Very well." She threw the cards on the table and picked out seven, putting them in a line in the middle. She gathered the others in a pile and put them away. "I see your point, but I like to be visual." The cards didn't tell the story, she chose them to tell the story.

She looked down; the golden leaves of her earrings tingled with the movement of her head. Cora took it as her opportunity to look at her better, without risking being noticed. She seemed to be older than her, but she wasn't old at all. Her hair was as dark as pitch and her eyelashes long, and her long nails tapped on the backs of the cards as she decided how she wanted to start. She swapped two and uncovered the first in the line.

"The Fay," she stated, looking up. Cora jumped back in surprise and tore her gaze away from her. "There's a part of your reality you're yet to uncover."

The card showed a rudimental drawing of a woodland creature, with long pointed ears and dark eyes. Cora couldn't help but feel like she was being glared at by a scrap of paper.

The woman's nails tapped on the second card. "The Mother." She flipped it around at once. "There's someone around you that knows much more than they let on. It's the closest thing you have to a parenting figure." A smile curved her lips when she went to the third one. "Now things are getting interesting," she murmured, flipping it over together with the fourth. "The King and the Kiss. You kissed Harry."

Cora instantly stood up, but a glare from the woman made her sit down again. A fluttering sound came above their heads; it was a bat spreading its wings hanging upside down, ready to fly out into the night.

"I thought you were supposed to read my future?" Cora hissed through her teeth. Yet, in her mind, there was only one question: how did she know? It hadn't even been ten minutes, and they'd been alone in the Pavilion.

The woman shrugged, and her earrings jingled. "It's impossible to predict the future. Every single one of your choices brings to a different outcome, and all the choices of every person in our world put together bring to billions of different ones, and everyone's will can change at any second, which makes it nearly impossible to predict anything about what will come." She went back to the cards and uncovered the next one. "The Cat." She debated commenting on it, but then went on without offering her an explanation. "The Fire." She tapped on a card that represented vivid flames. "You will get deeply intertwined with it."

Cora furrowed her eyebrows. "I thought you weren't able to tell me about my future?"

"I said, nearly impossible. This is something you cannot escape." The obscurity of her reply sent a shiver down Cora's spine. "The Heart." She turned around the last card, showing her the drawing of an anatomical heart, before moving it under the King.

Cora frowned. "What does that mean?"

"You have to go now or you'll be late," the woman said, completely ignoring the question. "I'd tell you my name, but I don't have to. If you ever need me I will find you, Cora."

Cora stood up, sending her a confused look when she realised she'd called her by her name. "How do you know my name?"

"Oh, I know a lot of things." She tilted her head, throwing a dark berry up. The bat caught it effortlessly. "Also, don't trip over Skat on your way out."

Cora left the tent and jumped to the side at the last second to avoid stepping on Skat, that had chosen that moment to stroll past the entrance. She paused, looking at the grey cat as it went away, and then shook her head, telling herself it didn't mean anything.

She went down the street, losing herself among the people that were walking to the Pavilion to avoid being spotted by her friends, that were undoubtedly somewhere in the crowd. If it'd been another day she would've thought about joining them, but now all she could think of was what she'd discovered, the overlap between the two conversations she'd had, her desire to be back in the safety of the hostel, and that cursed kiss.

She couldn't have made it back to the hostel any quicker. She'd shifted through the alleys like a ghost, keeping her gaze down even though she knew the light colour of her hair made her noticeable. When she finally entered her home, she nearly locked and bolted the door. Nearly.

The entire room was empty if not for Cora's aunt sitting behind the counter with a tattered old book and a cup of tea. She raised her eyebrows when she saw Cora, and acknowledged her presence with a little hum before going back to her page, expecting her to walk past her and go to sleep.

But Cora couldn't do that. Not tonight. She hated arguments, but she had to know. She had to know, because both Harry and that woman had said the same thing, and while she'd thought Harry had lied to her, she wasn't that certain about the other. She'd known she'd kissed Harry, she'd known about Skat—what were the chances she knew something more? There was only one way to find out, even though she felt ridiculous by following her doubts through.

"Aunt?" Cora asked, approaching her as she sat behind the counter, and she turned to look at her.

"What is it, Cora?"

Cora gave her a light shrug and crossed her arms over her chest in nervousness. "You've never told me about my parents before. Who were they?" Her voice was more high-pitched than usual.

Her aunt put down the cup of tea. "Why are you asking?"

"I'm just curious."

The older woman sighed. "I knew this moment would come. Close up and let's go."

Cora locked the front door and followed her aunt to their private quarters. Harry was yet to come back, but she wasn't worried. He'd surely find a way inside if he wanted to, and if he couldn't—better for her.

Her aunt sat on her armchair and waved in the direction of the table, where a kettle was still steaming. "There's tea if you want," she offered, but Cora's throat was so closed that if she tried to drink anything she'd throw it back up.

She sat on the second armchair, shaking her head when the mysterious woman's words came back to her. She didn't know how to ask—she didn't know what to ask. Cora was terrified of conflict—she hated every source of instability in the mundanity of her life. Ever since she was a small child, she'd done all she could to avoid arguing with her aunt, her friends, even the children that teased her when she was little and the rude clients of the hostel. She'd never been the kind to willingly bring up conflicting topics, and her origins certainly were one.

Growing up, wanting to learn more about her past like many other children her age, she'd asked her aunt about her parents. Where they were—why it was just her and her aunt, in a small city such as Beilyn, in the much bigger reality of Andar. The answers had always been unsatisfactory, and with time, she learned not to bring up the topic. Her aunt always seemed to tense up when she talked about it, and so little Cora had decided that, if it brought her so much pain, then she didn't really need to know. It wouldn't have changed any part of her reality anyway. And so, her origins had been forgotten with the passing of time, hidden in a dusty corner of her mind she hardly visited. Bringing them up now felt like crossing an invisible border, one she wasn't sure she should've ever wandered near.

She opened her mouth, but she hesitated before finally letting out a feeble, "Tell me."

Her aunt sighed again. She adjusted the glasses on her nose, changed position on the seat a few times. Then, she started. "I was still in my first years of running the hostel. My husband had died in an ambush a few months before, and it wasn't easy. We hardly had any visitors, money was lacking. I had no help, and the time came when I started thinking about closing this place down and selling it." The ticking of the clock in the other room was so loud Cora could feel it inside her chest. "That's when that woman arrived," her aunt said. "I didn't know it at the time, but she was pregnant. She was looking for refuge. You see, she was part fay and was running away from very dangerous people." She frowned. "To this day, I don't know what they... I mean, they were..." She shook her head. "As I told you, people fear what they don't know, and when they're scared, they're bound to do many terrible things."

"Like what?"

"You see, back then Andar wasn't a good place for everyone that is different. Fays never went extinct, they simply learnt to hide and run and mix with the human population. With time they erased their traces, and when humans started thinking they no longer existed, they finally knew peace. But there were some people that never forgot. They believed fays should never mix with humans, and that their kind should be exterminated. Thankfully things got a lot better since then," she explained, adding the last sentence quickly. "Now, going back to that woman. She told me her grandmother had been a fay, from a village up in the north. She had no powers, but there she was, being chased out of her home."

She paused, lost in the memory, and Cora too found herself thinking about that woman, coming to the door of the place she felt safest in in search of the same safety. Being chased, hunted through the same streets she walked down with Naomi in the twinkling lights of the Fair, without a care in the world.

"Of course, I took her in and protected her, and we lived together for a few years," her aunt continued. "I told people she was a cousin of mine, as to avoid any suspicions. Unfortunately though, it wasn't enough. After a while, we started settling down and believing she was safe, and I let her go to the market for me in the mornings, because she wanted to help." She scoffed, a sour, pained sound. "It was a mistake. They found her and killed her, and I was left with her three-year-old daughter."

Ice fell over Cora. Her aunt wasn't her aunt—she was only a stranger that had happened to offer shelter to a woman she hadn't even known. A woman of which she hadn't known the story, the truth. The only reason why Cora was sitting in front of her now was that she'd opened her door one night, and, a year later, decided to raise a child she wasn't related to instead of giving her up to a orphanage. We follow the course of our own choices, Harry had told her once. Now, understanding how true it was gave her chills.

"I changed that infant's name to Cora and had her—you—registered as part of my family, and hoped that was enough to keep you safe. You grew up and I realised you were very lucky—you didn't have your mother's characteristic violet eyes, nor pointed ears. You look like everyone else, and that's what kept you safe."

Cora sat there in silence, biting the inside of her cheek. Her mother was part fay, which meant she too was part fay. That same morning she'd believed magic didn't exist anymore and fays were extinct, and now she'd discovered that same blood was running through her veins and had been for the past twenty-one years of her life. Rage bubbled up inside her, but it faded quickly. For so many years her aunt had kept it a secret—it was a secret too big, too heavy to be uncovered so late in her life. Had she even been planning on telling her at all?

And then, and then—Harry was right. Harry had looked at her twice and seen what she hadn't been able to see for the entirety of her life. Earlier that night, he'd talked to her knowing they were more similar than she let on. He'd let her be terrified of him, knowing that fearing him also meant fearing part of herself.

A new realisation struck her. A stranger coming to the hostel late at night, a golden rose, her aunt's lack of reaction.

"You knew he was a fay when he arrived." Cora didn't need to say the name for her aunt to understand whom she was talking about. "Is it why you accepted him? Is it why you weren't scared of him, why you were so enigmatic when I asked you about him? Because you knew someone like him once and she wasn't dangerous?"

Her aunt had offered him shelter just like she'd done many years before, she'd kept his secrets by watching over his room personally; she'd kept him safe. She'd told her enough to make sure she wouldn't go around talking about him, but not enough to reveal who he was.

"So many questions all at once," her aunt commented, sitting back against the armchair now that the tension had lifted. "I'd never met someone quite like him before. A fay, though, is just as dangerous as a human can be. Nobody is good or bad depending on their blood."

Cora bit down on her lower lip. Certainly both humans and fay were capable of doing terrible things just as much as they were of doing wonderful ones, but she was sure a fay could be more destructive than a man with less effort. When Nature bends down to your will, who can stop you? Who knew what actions an angered fay would be able to do.

Like burning down a tent. Almost.

The more she thought about it, the more she wondered how she hadn't put all the pieces together way sooner. Harry hadn't been hiding anything from her, and yet it'd taken her so long to realise who he truly was.

"Does everyone know that Harry is a fay?" Cora asked. Had that been why Naomi had warned her? Did everyone but her know magic still existed in Andar?

Her aunt shook her head. "They don't. Most people in this land believe fays went extinct after the War. He is very smart and uses it to his advantage."

"How?"

"I don't know if you noticed, but the Fair and the people that work there don't do anything that would be physically impossible for humans to do. It'd be hard to pull off, yes, but it's still possible. They're keeping it basic, in a way," her aunt explained. "That's because he knows that, as long as he doesn't do anything that would be impossible for humans to do, people are likely to believe no real magic is involved."

"That's smart." She too had been a victim of his brilliant strategy. Enough magic to guarantee an experience, but not enough to be discovered.

"It is." Her aunt paused for a moment. "But I think he's part fay too, just like you. That's why he blends among humans so easily—that's why his miracle stands."

Cora's breath hitched. "Part fay?" I'm much more like you than you think, he'd told her that same night. She'd dismissed it then, but now...

"It's only a supposition, of course. But he's too comfortable around humans. He knows how to act around us, how to go unnoticed, how to manipulate us, even. That means he likely grew up around us, and it wouldn't have been possible if both his parents were fays—I told you how dangerous things were some decades ago. Besides, there's the matter of his eyes."

Cora frowned. "His eyes?"

"Fays traditionally have purple-toned eyes. His eyes are green, though, which is traditionally a human eye colour. That makes it very likely that at least one of his parents is a human—and his magic points to the other parent coming from a fay bloodline." She thought about it for a moment. "Not that it matters much. I just thought you'd find it interesting, considering... you know, everything."

Cora nodded slowly. He'd told her himself that they were alike. Knowing that, to some degree, it was true made her feel closer to him. She blinked a few times. Her head was starting to hurt. The more she thought of all the things she'd uncovered, the least she could grasp them.

"You should go to sleep, now," her aunt told her, standing up, and Cora skittered up the menial staircase.

It was too cold outside to bathe with freezing cold water and the fireplace in the bathroom hadn't been turned on since Cora's eighteenth birthday, so she made a beeline for her bedroom and changed into her sleeping clothes, draping a cream-white robe over her shivering limbs. She went into the bathroom and combed the knots out of her hair before putting it in a braid for the night and walked back into her room.

She let out a gasp when she discovered that Skat was sitting on the floor in front of her bed. The window was wide open, and she couldn't remember having opened it herself.

"What are you doing here?" Cora whispered, shaking her head when she realised she was speaking to a cat. Was she losing her mind? She pointed to the window. "Just go."

Skat hopped on the window ledge. She stared at Cora one last time with her deep amber eyes and then jumped into the night.

Cora gasped and ran to the window, sticking her head out just in time to see her land on the wooden beam that separated her floor from the one below on the back of the building. She jumped into another window on her same floor, disappearing from view.

Cora shook her head and left her to her adventure, giving a quick glance around and immediately halting when she spotted someone in the garden.

She squinted, trying to see through the shadows of the night, and sudden dread filled her when she recognised none other than Harry.

She shut the window. It slammed against its wooden frame, making the glass tremble and catching Harry's attention. He looked up. Cora could feel his gaze on her despite the surface separating them, and she damned her choice of not turning off the light before approaching the window, since she was sure she was now giving him a near-perfect view of her. In her night clothes, too.

Then, after some interminable seconds, his lips curved up in a smile and he offered her a little wave, making her squeal and jump away from the window.

She only moved away from the wall beside the glass when her back started hurting. She closed the curtain to shield the inside of her bedroom and went to sleep—she tried to, at least.

She tossed and turned on the mattress, but sleep never came. She focused her mind on what her aunt had revealed, but Harry kept entering her thoughts. Ten minutes passed, and she was more awake than when she'd first got on the bed. Deep inside, she knew she wouldn't be able to fall asleep without inquiring after Harry's presence in the garden.

She sighed and kicked away her blankets. It would just be a moment—she would just ignore the previous events of that night. It didn't have to mean anything, and he certainly knew it too. Besides, she still remembered what she'd been told: Harry didn't form personal connections. He wouldn't bring it up if she didn't.

She threw on her robe and closed it well to hide her nightdress, put on a pair of shoes and went downstairs. The lights in their quarters were dark but it wasn't yet midnight, so Cora knew her aunt was still in the main room of the hostel. Careful not to be caught, she went out into the garden.

Harry was standing beneath the arch that sheltered the door that brought to the guest wing of the hostel. He wasn't wearing a hat, and his blue coat was open to reveal the white of the shirt underneath. There was a light frown on his face as he looked down at a stick between his fingers that emitted smoke up into the night sky. He brought it to his mouth and breathed in before parting his lips and releasing a string of off white smoke into the air. Cora was close enough to smell the sweet scent of honey. That was no regular cigar.

"What are you doing?" she asked, but he didn't flinch. He'd heard her come closer.

He glanced at her and raised an eyebrow when he took in her attire. "Following up on a promise I made," he replied. "Aster enjoys these, but I truly can't see the appeal in having smoke in my lungs, no matter how sweet the taste. I might be biased, though. Do you want to try it?"

With some hesitation, Cora stepped closer and took the cigar from him. She'd never smoked before, but she'd seen the men huddled in the corners of the Lilac Sun have a smoke while playing cards more than once. This couldn't be too different. She repeated the action and let out a cough, the smoke leaving her mouth in sugary splutters. "What is this?" she choked out.

Harry chuckled. "A honey-tasting cigar, I believe. It comes from overseas."

"How can anyone even like this?" Her throat was burning, and the heaviness in her head was turning into a headache.

"I suppose they have a taste for punishment. And fire." He tutted. "These people don't know how lucky they are, and yet here they go..."

Cora looked up at him curiously. Away from the Fair, it was easier to make conversation with him. He was less intense, and it made him look more genuine. Maybe, her aunt's words were playing a part in her perception of him as well, now.

"Why are you here on the last night of the Fair? Aren't you supposed to pack everything up and go?" she asked, schooling her expression to look unaffected. The Fair would leave soon, taking its magic away with her, and she would be left with an empty reality she could no longer trust.

He gave her a little shrug.  "You aren't getting rid of me so soon, Cora. It'll take weeks to get ready to leave."

"Oh." The Fair has always been so quick to leave, nearly disappearing overnight. Cora wasn't ready to see it go. Part of her wanted to uncover every secret behind its tents and colourful stalls. "You still haven't told me what you want from me, you know."

He observed her, the shadows of his eyelashes projected onto his cheekbones by the moonlight. "I have."

Cora closed her eyes against the autumnal breeze. "You haven't, really. You've been really confusing about it, it kind of looks like you're doing it on purpose now."

He let out a silvery laugh, soft and gentle, that thrummed into his chest for the few seconds it lasted. "I have to admit you're perceptive, Cora."

She pursed her lips not to smile at the praise. "So?"

Harry put out the offending cigar on the ground and stared ahead into the darkness of the garden, that was illuminated by a silvery glow. Nature had grown eerily silent, and only their breaths could be heard. That was why it was impossible to miss his answer even when it came in a low murmur. "I have a job proposal for you."

I hope you enjoyed this chapter x
Miki