How It All Goes Down
- By the next morning, all of the petals have fallen out, and there's a small scar on Laurel's back where the blossom was.
- She decides that she needs more answers from Tamani, so Laurel goes down the yellow brick road… No, wait, she takes a bus and rides her bike the rest of the way to get to her family's land in Orick. She asks David to cover for her and say they're hanging out in case her parents look for her.
- When Laurel gets there, Tamani meets her in the forest, but this time he's wearing armor made of leaves and bark. Why? Because he's on sentry duty, of course.
- Laurel tries to grill Tamani about what it's like to be a faerie, but he's so hot that she ends up tongue-tied. Looks like someone likes a man in a uniform.
- She mentions that she's tried to do some research, which makes him laugh. Humans always get it wrong, apparently. For instance, no faerie has wings, though the blossoms that female faeries get could maybe be mistaken for wings.
- Faeries do, however, have magic, and Tamani fills Laurel in on how there are four kinds of faeries (Spring, Summer, Fall, and Winter) based on what time of year they're born in. Laurel's a Fall faerie (kind of powerful, good at potions and stuff), and Tamani's a Spring faerie (not very powerful, which is why he ended up as a sentry, a.k.a. manual labor).
- Laurel asks what magic he can do, and Tamani makes her promise not to get mad at him—because he's used it on her without her permission. Gasp.