He breathes in and out. "If she... did something. That made them not want to visit. Or... not able to visit. She was always so nice, but- like I said, she never had any reason not to be nice. And it... would have made sense, that if she was just in it for power, she wouldn't just. Let them go. Or let us go, I guess. There's... a lot you can do, to get power out of someone, if you don't need them anymore."

"Oh, they don't get used up when they're - used? They're the sort of thing you'd want to, uh, preserve, if you were a bad faerie?"

"Well, they won't last forever, but if you leave the kid alive then the power all just drains away on their seventeenth birthday. When the child is full-grown, by the- the weird mystical standards of these things, that's it, no more magic of innocence to draw on. That's the cutoff point. She always said she'd paced herself so she'd use up my teeth before I passed it, that- lying, wicked grig."

"You seem awfully sure all of a sudden. Did a bunch of stuff just add up in retrospect?"

"Yeah. It's... there's no way it wasn't this, now I see it. She never lied, that's the thing, faeries can't lie, she just- , she'd never talk about a child from less than a few hundred years ago. She'd say they "died a long time ago," that was how she said it every time. And even with the teeth, she never- she never said something like "I've got a schedule that'll use them up in time," she made it into a little game, like "don't you think I can do enough magic in ten years to eat up one little tooth?" and "oh, I've got it all planned out, you'll see." I just... ugh. It just makes sense. Faeries aren't nice. She said it herself."

"I'm sorry."

"It's not your fault." He thinks for a moment, sniffling slightly, then amends, "Well, it's kind of your fault, but not your fault she was- like that. And I'd... probably rather know than not. So. No need to apologize."

"You're all set up to do without her already, right?"

He gives a slightly watery smile. "Oh, yeah, I'm set up. My friends and I kill evil things, I live with one of them. She's rich and nice, it's all good."

"You kill evil things? What kind of evil things?"

"Oh, you know. Demons. Vampires, the ones that aren't just whiny little pissants. Particularly nasty faeries. The occasional warlock, that's someone who breaks the Laws. That general sort."

"I don't know," she reminds him. "Where I'm from it's humans and magic plants."

"Ah. No evil plants, I suppose. Well, my world has a number of things that are really quite sincerely evil, and don't come in any other flavors, and for the most part we kill those. Sometimes we kill things that are only incidentally evil, but we try to make very sure that they are. Sally'd be awfully upset if we accidentally killed someone we didn't have to."

"Well, yes, you shouldn't go around killing people if they don't really, really need it. What do the evil things do? I guess you explained warlocks, but the others."

"Weeeeell, let's see. Demons are these things that you can summon to ask questions or have them do things for you. All well and good, but they're also very, very mean. So people will have them do things like kill their enemies, which is where we come in; I punch the demon until it dies, Sally tracks it back to the summoner, Peter has his ghosts scare the pants off him and we induce him to change his ways. Vampires actually come in three sorts, but the relevant ones are horrible monsters who drink people's blood and keep a lot of human slaves. Usually fatal, always nasty. We kill them. And, what else... Faeries, we've covered. There's a lot of other things. Most of them eat people. That's usually why we kill them."

"Do they have to eat people?" wonders Rapunzel.

"There are... several ways in which that doesn't make sense. The evil things just- don't have souls. You can check, with magic. No soul means no free will. These things are ruled by their essential nature, they have to do what they do; if I were to ask a troll to stop eating children lost under bridges, it would look at me like you would if I asked if you'd considered moving to the moon."

"Well, now that you've mentioned it I'm wondering how I'd get there if I wanted to and what it's like," says Rapunzel reasonably. "What does it even mean to say they have no free will? I don't know anything about souls, but if they can understand you when you talk the same way I can understand the moon question, they must be somewhat intelligent."

"They are intelligent. But no free will means that- they could think about what it would be like not to eat people, yes, in the same way that you could think about moving to the moon. You could think "well, if I had a rocket" - that's a thing that takes you to the moon - "and some way to breathe and maybe a little garden then I could have a tidy little cottage up there" and it's a fun way to spend half an hour when you're very bored, thinking about your life on the moon. And then you probably continue living in an apartment in Canada, or in your case the royal palace I'm assuming, and think no more of it."

"Generally, they don't want to. Your tower wasn't the worst place you could possibly have been, but "what if I left" was a fantasy, as far as I can tell, rather than "what if there was this wacky alternate universe where I didn't even want to live in this nice tower?" Which is how it would be for a bridge troll to imagine eating a side of beef, plus a healthy dose of disgust at the idea."

"That's really strange, though, why are they like that?"

"Well, the reason why they're like that at all is due to the whole soul thing. Most of the stuff in my world is like that; humans and their soulful cousins are seriously weird by universal standards. And without a soul, logic will always take a backseat to essential nature if there's a conflict between the two. Why are some of them devoted to eating people in particular? Couldn't say. Some people think it's because people think monsters will eat them, so they do. Not sure how much stock I put in that, but I don't have a competing theory."