"A bit. It's possible Mom did something to make me impervious to cold. There's a couple of runes she tattooed on my back that could have done it, but runes are kind of vague, so I don't know for sure. They could also have been to make me grow strong and beautiful. In which case she did an admirable job, in my opinion."

Ari continues grinning and returns to work on his nascent bird.

"What are you making? Is it magic?"

"I don't think I've ever seen a bird, so maybe?"

"Aw, that's sad, though. I'll conjure you a dove when we get to the Snows, it'll last a couple of hours before it dissolves and you can see what a bird looks like when it's not being sculpted by a guy with big stupid hands."

"Are they useful for anything? I mean, I'm happy to have a look at one, but why can you conjure them?"

"You can conjure just about anything out of ectoplasm! It's pretty easy, but it can't do anything much. I mean, you could conjure a sword and stab someone with it, but you couldn't conjure some sage and use it for an exorcism. One time the Summer Lady went nuts and made thousands of frogs rain over Chicago! I could conjure you a frog, but they're not as pretty as doves."

"I do actually know what a frog looks like. My master before Yellow made me turn someone into one."

"Ah, the classics. We don't do much of that back home, it's very difficult and flagrantly illegal."

"Then why is it a classic?"

"Not sure, really. The people who made it illegal haven't been around forever, maybe it was more popular before they showed up. And it's only a bit more difficult than killing someone with thaumaturgy, so if you were already going to do that then I guess it's only a small step up for a lot of extra spite."

"Whereas here, since killing a fairy is impossible, turning them into something is generally the next best thing."

"Reasonable."

"It's really very unfortunate that mortals die. If somewhat tautological."

"Well, our immortals can die, too, the Summer Lady apparently got assassinated by pixies with box cutters a couple of years ago. So it's not quite as tautological as it sounds. But it is kind of bad, I guess. I'm pretty much okay with it."

"Your immortals don't sound very immortal. You're okay? That you're going to die?"

"I wouldn't mind immortality as long as I could quit when the sun burned out, but I'm already going to live for a while. Five hundred years is pretty nice, you know. I mean, maybe I could do some necromantic woo-woo to make myself immortal, but I'm not interested in rending the fabric of reality or going nuts, which are both known side effects of necromantic woo."

"When the sun does what?"

"I doubt very much that our sun is more mortal than fairies are, and anyway I think there's more than one, or it would be very dark everywhere that wasn't more or less directly under it, but I didn't know the mortal world's sun was going to die. What will the mortals do?"

"We're pretty sure we'll have spaceships by then. We can just find another sun. But eventually all of the suns available will burn out. I mean, probably, there's magic, but- probably. If the species hasn't died out by then. And if they haven't, they sure will then. Unless one, such as me, was totally immortal no matter what. Which would suck, because I'd be floating through an empty dead universe. That would be bad."

"Well, you live here now," Promise points out.

"...true. Okay, I might not turn down unconditional immortality. Except somebody could turn me into a frog, or a gritty paste."