Free Songs_of_the_Satyrs by Aaron J. French Page A

help.”
    “Did I? I said they can help with situations where people have a problem with wine. I didn’t say they were going to help you .”
    Marco realized the tingle he had felt when he had entered was not fear, but his passage through a faery portal. The room was in the Unreal, or at least connected to it. He had been set up.
    “Leonides loved the idea when I suggested it to him,” Alphrein said, still hiccupping giggles. “He paid me even more than I’ll inherit from you.”
    Marco suddenly recognized the sound outside the door as thundering hooves. A second later the door burst open, and the clan he had just betrayed rushed in.
     
     

 
Fair Weather from that Crimson Land
     
By S. J. Hirons
     
    My troubles began on paper, as they always seem to do.
    The satyr I had been dealing with emerged from the back office once more. He wore that blank automaton look I have come to know and loathe every time I see it on the faces of the clerking classes as I travel. Among all the peoples and creatures of our many, mighty, miscellaneous, and mixed-up nations, that look is the one trait shared by all alike, from faun to faerie, from minotaur to man. It is the look that signifies one has passed all reasonable point of appeal. It is the look that tells you that you are about to embark upon a tour of those machines of bureaucracy any creature sane enough not to work for government agencies abhors.
    He trotted back to the desk, his half-moon spectacles—hanging from his neck on a dainty chain—sitting at the very tip of his nose, pretending to put great consideration once more into the documents I had handed to him over an hour ago, pretending he wanted to find in those pages of invitation, recommendation, transit, and port-passage the detail that would enable him to enable us.
    With a leathery hand he hiked his woolen kilt up a little higher to his hips and stood, cocking his horned head as though the ink on the paper before him was restless, as if it had wriggled somehow into meaningless scrawls. Behind me I felt the continuing presence of the armed guard who had ushered me forward out of the pens that filtered new arrivals through from the dock.
    The clerk stopped before me and did not sit down, seemingly so absorbed in his task he had lost sense of his surroundings. He continued his perusal of our papers, as if intent on finding some clue or key upon them that would allow him to release my wife and me from this predicament. I know a man with his mind made up, however, and believe I am experienced enough in the ways of other kinds to know that look in other species, too. I knew the communication with his superiors, from which he was returning, could not possibly have brought me good news; or else why make this show of studying our documents again?
    I looked back to those others, waiting in the pens; the erl-lords, and their pet dryads, with whom we had shared passage on the higher decks; the aelfes, far from the collectives their restless ancestors had confederated long ago, who had berthed in the middle decks; and the timid hobgoblin families from steerage who waited now with their heads kept low—who had learnt not to look too hopefully at anything at all in the world lest it be snatched away from them by means as varied as treaty and force; and at my wife.
    Concern had begun to bloom in her eyes.
    Last night I had seen for the first time how our expected child had started to change her breasts, making them bud upward into pleasantly larger handfuls than ever before. I had put dry lips to her little swell of belly and kissed it, whispered nonsense as unformed as the child inside, and she had laughed happily. The tang of her last kiss was still on my lips, despite the cup of ground neptune-seed tea this official had offered me whilst I waited for him to complete the conversation he felt he needed to have with his superiors in his office, over the wires.
    I looked up at him, my chair creaking as I so realigned my