"What sinister-or-not-so-much things did your mom do?"

"Sally said it in particular about her taking my blood for magic purposes, giving me enchanted tattoos while I was asleep and not telling me what they did, and turning my baby teeth into a necklace; I call that reasonable compensation for raising me, harmless if not clearly a good thing, and just good sense, respectively."

"...Have you since figured out what your enchanted tattoos do?"

"One of them is probably cold resistance, given the whole "I've been stark naked in five-foot snow for several hours" thing. Which was mostly a test of the principle after you asked about how I could stand the cold so well; I'd never really thought about it, but this is definitely not a human level of cold resistance. So, that. One has something to do with beauty, I think. The rest she claimed were a cultural thing, but it'd be just like her to include extra spells in them anyway."

"It would really bother me to have magic tattoos that I couldn't know what they did. Is there no way to find out?"

"Doesn't much bother me. I mean, if there were somebody else around with the Sight they could look at them with it and get some idea, but it doesn't work in a mirror and it wouldn't be much clearer than me just analyzing the runework myself anyway. I like having ambiguous superpowers, makes me feel like I could suddenly get laser vision at the very moment I need it or something."

"Well, as long as you're sure they're benign or better."

"Pretty sure. I don't think she would've wanted to sabotage me when she spent nine years making sure I was Mama's little war machine."

"You seem to be alluding to a lot of cultural -" Handwave. "Stuff, surrounding the parental relationship. I've never associated very much with breeders to begin with, and in the case of fairies 'parent' just means 'master', so I'm not sure you're communicating as clearly as you might like."

"Ah. Back in Never, parents generally love their children and want the best for them, or they're supposed to. There are exceptions, it's very sad, but in my case my mom raised me as best she could to be someone who could survive the supernatural meat grinder that is our world."

"What causes the exceptions?"

"People aren't always nice."

"But your mom's kind of faerie had a nice - essential nature?"

"Yeah, whatever she was. There's no- nice faeries, per se, but there's kinds that have better things to do than be cruel all the time. Like, cobbs make shoes, that takes precedence. Whatever Belinda was, she cared for me. However much she could."

"You never met any more of her kind?"

"I probably did, but she was a sidhe. Sidhe are like... the nobles, they don't look as much like their own kind as they look like each other. She never told me what she was. The sidhe often don't. They were born to be sidhe, not pixies or sylphs or whatever they would have been."

"What are sidhe exactly?"

"They're very, very good at faerie magic - mostly illusions, conjurations, evocation with their season's element or with raw power. A sidhe could make a bird five times better than the one I made you with a shake of her sleeve, or make a house invisible for a week before she lost the charge, or fight off three mortal wizards at once. Or me, if she was trying." A quick grin. "They're much harder to kill than normal fae; you can do it with iron, all faeries are incredibly vulnerable to iron, but anything else would have a hard time. They're all beautiful, and not just symmetrically like the lesser fae, but drawn from how people think about beauty. Their features will actually shift as humanity's tastes change. And most are utter bastards. But some are alright."

"Does sleeve-shaking help?"

"Nah."

"Are you three times as good at wizardry as a - typical mortal wizard, really?"

"No. Three times as good at killing things? I think so."

"Ah, they orient towards different goals."

"Generally. I am also better than the average mortal wizard at most other things, though. Like making houses, or the art of seduction."