“Did they want you, too?” I ask. “To keep you.” “Hardly.” Narciso laughs. “I am the bastard son of a mortal father and a fairy from another wood. My mother feared the wrath of her own fairy king, little better than the one you know, and so I was raised by that mortal father and the mortal woman he later married. She loved me as her own when the mother who bore me could not.”

