Fae Rules: What Not to Eat, Say, or Promise

From Celeste's notebook. Tuesday, after midnight.

The plate arrives before the man does.

A waiter sets it at my elbow without looking at me, which is the first thing wrong. The waiters in this courtyard always look at me. They want to know if I'm reading tonight and whether it's going to be good. This one just sets down the duck, sliced thin and fanned like petals, glazed with something the color of the lamp behind it, and goes.

I did not order the duck.

Then he sits. Across my little folding table, between the candle and my deck, like a man who has never in his life asked whether a chair was taken. He is the kind of beautiful that makes the string lights lean in. He doesn't look at the cards. He looks at my hands.

"Come," he says. Not please. "It's still warm."

The first rule: don't eat what they offer

Every grandmother in this city has a version of the rules, and mine are the three that sit under all the others. Don't eat what they offer. Don't say what you can't afford to mean. Don't owe what you can't repay. The wider map of who's who in Faerie is in my guide to fae folklore. Tonight I only need the three.

The duck smells like a Sunday I haven't had yet. That's the thing nobody tells you. The food isn't poisoned. Persephone ate six pomegranate seeds and nobody ever said they weren't delicious. In Goblin Market the girl pays for the fruit with a lock of her hair and then wastes away for the taste of it. They don't steal from you, the Fair Folk. They find exactly what you're starving for and set it on a plate.

I reach into my bag and take out the bread.

Every reader in the Quarter keeps a heel of bread in her bag and not one of us will admit it. It's an old charm, older than anyone's grandmother: bring your own, and you owe nothing. He sees it. His mouth does something slow.

"You came prepared."

"I came to work." I tear off a piece and eat it, looking right at him. It's the least romantic thing I've done all year and it feels like undressing.

The second rule: don't say what you can't afford to mean

"Tell me what you'd want," he says, "if you could have it."

I know a trap shaped like a question. There's a story, Tom Tit Tot, where a girl lives only because she learns the creature's name, and the whole lesson is that words are not free here. Names are leashes. Promises are contracts. So I say "That's a good question," and nothing else, and let the candle talk.

He lifts a glass I didn't see him pick up. "Thank you for sitting with me."

"You're welcome" is the right answer. It's also the one that closes the account. I don't say it. I don't say thank you either, ever, to anyone I can't afford to be finished with, because a thank-you is a receipt and a receipt means paid in full. The brownies knew it. Hand one a set of clothes, meant kindly, and it walks out of your house forever.

He laughs, low, delighted. "Someone taught you."

The third rule: don't owe what you can't repay

"A gift," he says, and nudges the plate an inch toward me. "Nothing owed."

"Everything's owed." I don't touch it. "It's the only thing every story agrees on."

In Tam Lin, the Queen of Faerie owes hell a tithe and pays it in people. The knight she's holding knows he's the coin. The woman who comes to get him wins by not letting go while he turns into a lion, a snake, a burning coal. That's the whole romance of this lore: somebody refuses to look away from something that is trying very hard to be unbearable.

The iron bangle under my sleeve has gone warm from my own wrist. He hasn't looked at it once. That tells me he's been aware of nothing else since he sat down.

He leans across the table and the July air between us does what it does in this city, goes thick and slow, and I want it. I want it the way you want a stranger's mouth: with my whole stupid body and complete knowledge of the price.

I push the plate back the inch he gave me.

"Not tonight."

When I look up the chair is empty. The waiter is nowhere. The candle has burned down an hour in what felt like a minute, because that's what a night costs you here.

The duck is leaves. Wet oak leaves, fanned like petals, still glossy. Fairy gold turns to leaves by morning, the old tellers say. Nobody ever tells you it can happen at the table, in front of you, while your pulse is still going.

If you want to know what happens to the ones who do eat, the first Jasmine & Rain story is for you. Join the list and it finds you.

What the old stories say

The three rules rise out of every tradition I've read, and the small ones hang off them. Rowan, cold iron, St John's wort, church bells, a coat turned inside out: these are the ways people said no without opening their mouths. Iron is the oldest "no, thank you" there is, and the only item on the list that is a refusal rather than a courtesy. The household fae, the brownies, are fed by people, never the reverse. You feed them. They do not feed you.

In our New Orleans

We do all three and call it manners. We watch the drink get poured. We don't say "I promise" to anyone we haven't already decided to marry. We tip the people who feed us, because a debt left on a table follows you home. Not everything in this city is a fairy story, and I've kept the rest on its own page: New Orleans Folklore and Legends.

The hardest page in this notebook is the one about what the rules are really protecting: Changeling Folklore. And for the ones these rules are really aimed at, there's Dark Fae Folklore.

The door

This notebook goes to the list first, along with the first Jasmine & Rain story: join here. If you'd rather read ahead, Patreon members get each installment a week before it goes public: Jasmine & Rain Stories on Patreon.

Sources: the protections, brownies, fairy gold, names and the Tam Lin tithe are collected in Fairy on Wikipedia, which cites Briggs and the ballad collections.

If you want to go deeper

• Katharine Briggs, An Encyclopedia of Fairies (1976). Start with the brownies. She's the reason most of us know any of this.
• Christina Rossetti, Goblin Market (1862). Public domain, and the most sensual thing on this list. Overview on Wikipedia.
• Joseph Jacobs, English Fairy Tales (1890). Where "Tom Tit Tot" lives. Public domain.
• W. B. Yeats, Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (1888). Public domain, and full of people who broke the rules.