"Yes. You obey your parents and grandparents whether you like them or not but I don't know that I'd attribute that to an emotion."

Cam nods.

And they can head back upstairs. "I have six brothers but that is unusually many for my age. My mother likes being slow because she can do magic research."

"That requires being slow?"

"Yes. Magic things can only be made while slow. There's some research you can do while fast but you can't check your assumptions."

"Huh. Humans can't do it?"

"Never seen them at it. It's conceivable they just don't know how."

"How'd faeries discover it?"

"I know it's been independently discovered a few times, mostly by pregnant women. There's something in the air which you can draw out of the air and crystallize into various forms, the simplest one just requiring concentration but all the more sophisticated ones requiring a lot of technique, and then you can use the forms to do things."

"- about how many faeries are there, in the world?"

"My father estimated once that there were twenty billion of us but I don't remember all his assumptions. This court covers about ten acres and has about eighty people; to the west of us there's very little fertile wilderness that isn't claimed by some court or another; we're denser on the Misty Isles where we started; we're sparser to the east and very rare to the north."

"South?"

"Lots of us down to the sea. I don't know about the other side of it."

"If it's really on the order twenty billion I suppose I can buy that humans might never have stumbled on it and several faeries have."

"There aren't that many mortals, yeah."

"Not twenty billion, certainly."

"It's because they need food. Can't support a very dense population if they all need to eat."

"I mean, you can, but you need demons or at least more advanced technology."

"I guess demons would solve that entirely. Fair enough."

Wag wag.

He glances at the tail. Smiles. Sighs. "I should get you back before we worry your companion."

"Sounds good."

So he takes him back to his room. "Let me know if you need anything."

"I'll turn on the light on the door to alert people that I may want something."

"All right."

He leaves.