#rivervale_lodge

"She'd be an awesome baroness."

"Maybe. But maybe not. I mean...I don't know if she'd want to stick around and take care of the Lodge and stuff, the way the Chieftain does." A pause. "And...not everybody wants a title, anyway."

"Right. I'd like to stick around, maybe. Like... like Olgar gets to do stuff, and have adventures, and then come home..."

"Yeah." Sylvi nods, watching the water.

"Or, like... I mean, you ever think about being one of the big three?"

"Not that I'd... I mean... but, like... I've got Flyswatter, and as Dagmar, fighting... like, being good at fighting, that's okay..."

"Well...kinda? I mean...I think they're kind of expecting something of me, and I know I'm supposed to do something pretty important someday, but...I don't know. I'm still figuring it out." Then a grin. "You are good at fighting. You'd probably be a good Storm, someday."

"Yeah, maybe." A shy smile.

Another longish pause. "You know...Baron Idris, at StarBear? He...he wanted to make me a Squire." She fidgets with a twig, twisting it.

"Yeah? That seems cool. Colton's a squire, he seems to like it."

"Yeah." She tosses a bit of the twig into the water, and it ripples.

"You don't seem that happy about it, though."

A shrug. "I don't know. I turned him down...politely, you know?...and then he said he'd even suggest me going straight to knight without being a squire. But..." Another shrug. "I don't know. I don't think I'd like playing that game, not the way Colton likes it...but it comes with a lot of advantages, too. Maybe I should have said yes. Just to...like...level the playing field a little when I have to deal with not-so-nice nobles. But...I don't know if I could respect myself if I did."

"Right..." Agreeable, but not entirely following.

A glance at her. "See...if you have a title, it's harder to get cantrips to work on you. And some nobles will just respect you more if you have a title, just because of the title, not because you've actually done anything important."

"Well, I mean, that's how the world is too - you get the right name or the right family, the rules are different. Some people just ain't worth as much as others."

"Right, but then you lose other people's respect. I'd lose some commoner cred."

"But th'Chief and Frank, and Colton..."

A shift, and she tosses the rest of the twig parts into the water. "Doesn't matter now, anyway. I said no. No use second-guessing."

"Doesn't matter." She repeats, and smiles. "Forget about it."

"Well, yeah. But I bet if you wanted, Brekke would make you one."

A thought. "Maybe? I don't think she's ever made anybody a Squire, though. Not like a sidhe baroness would."

"Has anybody asked? I mean, she can be really intimidating..."

"I don't know. And...look, Dagmar, don't say anything about the whole Squire-Knight thing. It was just something Baron Idris said, and I seriously wasn't even thinking about it, and I don't want to think about it anymore. It's not something on my Yule-gift list, y'know?"

Hands up, palms out. "Ok, ok."

"Okay." A nod. "Okay."

"SO, anyways, Siv an' me convinced the troll guy that Tove only liked bland food..."

"So he took her out to a restaurant that didn't have nuthin' she liked..."

A grin. "Nice prank. You sure you're not a pooka?"

She smiles back. "Well, I don't know any tall blue animals..."

"Paul Bunyan had a Big Blue Ox named Babe." Sylvi smiles. "Chimerical, 'course."

"Who's Paul Bunyan?"

"And I mean, if bulls weren't boys... I mean, I got horns and everything... maybe the pooka think we're all very confused cows."

A blink. "You've never heard of Paul Bunyan? American Legend? He was a giant lumberjack...or a lumberjack giant, depending on who you ask. All sorts of tall tales about him. You never heard them in school? I know we've got a book back at the Lodge."

Then a grin. "Confused cows. Nice."

"Dunno, I don't remember him from school. Reading always sucked. Nuthin' worth remembering past a test..."

"Wish books were more like movies, you know? With stuff happening?"

"But sometimes stuff is useful that you never expect, and you don't know what will be until later. Still, yeah, some stuff's boring to read. But tall tales? They're fun. Usually they're pretty silly."

"And they're short."

"I don't think we did those, unless they were on the test."

"You know...I bet Uncle Frank could tell us some of them."

"Yeah? Well, if you say they're fun..."

"Well, I think they're fun. They're goofy. And they come from all different cultures."

"Yeah? Frank tells good stories..."

"He does. And you know, a lot of those tales, they're about us, you know? I mean, about for-real fae."

She perks up. "Really? Now that's cool."

"Like - I mean, there's a troll in Harry Potter... and mermaids, and Frank said selkies are like mermaids but seals...."

"Well, sure! Fairy tales and legends? That's us, a lot of the time. And the ones that aren't about us? Some of those stories _made _ us, cuz Dreamers dreamed about them."

"Really?"

"Sometimes it's hard to say which came first, the fae or the fairytale. That's what my Mom says, anyway."