Robots vs. Fairies(59)

“What? Yes. I mean, no. Sort of.” Mr. Jonsson laughed ruefully. “It’s outside. The ride. It drove me here. I wasn’t sure, with the roads, so I thought I should take something more specialized, but actually—”

“Good,” Sigrid said. “Drink your tea.”

She did not tell him about the damiana in it. And since it wasn’t a scheduled substance, the assistant wasn’t legally compelled to either. They shared a rare glance at each other. Sigrid looked away first. His eyes could hold a focus indefinitely. Hers were organic, and very old.

“The elfstone,” Sigrid said.

Mr. Jonsson coughed. “Yes. Well. You seem to have heard about the trouble we’ve been having, building the road for the new resort.”

“I heard you lost someone on the road crew,” she said. “I heard your bulldozer flattened him like p?nnuk?kur.”

Mr. Jonsson blanched. “Well, there was an accident, yes. The bulldozer was meant to be autonomous, and it acted up. You know how these things can be.” He cast a quick glance at the assistant. “No offense.”

“But that wasn’t the first incident, was it?” Sigrid asked.

Mr. Jonsson drank more of his tea. His pupils began to dilate. Color returned to his face. “No. Not as such. Although none have been so serious, until now. Just, you know, rainstorms. Windstorms. Hail. People falling ill, permits getting lost, money not coming through. The same little problems as with any project, just . . .”

“Just more of them.” Sigrid made no effort to disguise the smug tone of her voice. “I warned your office, you know. I did.”

“We—I—understand that. That is why we—I—have come to you. We know about your talent. And the fact that you’ve done this before. Spoken with the elves, I mean, ahead of major development projects. We thought perhaps you might go to the site and parlay on our behalf—”

“I will do no such thing,” Sigrid said. “That stone is home to many generations of elves. I cannot ask them to leave.”

Mr. Jonsson’s eyes made a movement that Sigrid’s eyes didn’t catch: a barely restrained eye roll. Suddenly the assistant had to reevaluate the man’s affect. He was not nervous about offending Sigrid or incurring her spiritual wrath, but rather nervous about his behavior being reported to his superiors. He resented this part of his job. His aversion to the animal hides and skulls and spheres of obsidian and labradorite was not fear, it was contempt.

“Your tea is getting cold, Mr. Jonsson,” the assistant said. Mr. Jonsson drank more of it. The assistant wondered if Sigrid had added mushrooms to this particular blend. It would be inconvenient if the man from the Road and Coastal Administration had a bad hallucination in their living room; the assistant might need to call an ambulance, and that would really disrupt their plans for the afternoon. It was Bingo Day at the community center, after all. And Sigrid had such a streak of good luck going.

“If you could just, I don’t know, ask them what they want,” Mr. Jonsson said. “We have to move the stone either way. So if you could just, you know. Ask them if they want an ocean view, or access to public transit, or something like that.”

And then Jonsson made a terrible mistake: he winked.

“You are not taking your work very seriously, are you?” Sigrid asked. “You are here so that you can say you came here. You don’t believe. You have no faith, so you cannot bargain in good faith. You are hoping to influence the local people that way. But not the hidden folk.”

“Do the hidden folk vote?” Jonsson asked. With Sigrid’s tea in his system, he could no longer hide his scorn. Her tea was useful, that way. It helped people to tell the truth. “Do they pay tax? Because until they do, they don’t really get a say in this.”

“You don’t even think they might exist, do you?” Sigrid asked. “Do you know the story?”

“I know all the stories—”

“The story of how the hidden folk went into hiding,” Sigrid said. “Do you know it?”

The assistant knew it. She had told it to him enough times. But Mr. Jonsson appeared to be at a loss.

“Soon after he had created the heavens and the earth, and all the animals and the beasts of the sea, and breathed life into Adam and fashioned Eve from Adam’s rib, God visited the couple at home in the Garden.”

The expression on Jonsson’s face closely matched the industry standard for embarrassment. He had come for witchcraft, not Sunday school. And while a passing superstition regarding the elves was common, belief in God was considered gauche at best.

“This was before they ate of the fruit of the tree of knowledge, you see. So they had been rutting like animals, and they had already borne a litter of children. It was painless, because Eve had not yet been punished with the pangs of childbirth. So they already had a boy and a girl.”

Jonsson tried to stand. Sigrid’s arm shot out. Her gnarled hand gripped his forearm. Jonsson’s pale eyebrows climbed toward his thinning hairline. Few knew the strength that remained in Sigrid’s arms. Under the fat and the liver spots was muscle as tough as that of any shepherd’s horse. It was part of the reason why Sigrid’s daughter had purchased the assistant. Sigrid was too big for most home-care workers to wrestle.

“Although they did not understand nakedness, they did understand filth,” she intoned. “And their children were filthy. They were too filthy—from play, from exploring the Garden, from tending the animals—to meet the Lord their God. So Adam and Eve hid them in a field of stones.”