Ten minutes into the first course, roast quail in almond sauce, and Sarah had a pretty good idea of why Jareth was not fat. The answer was simple; he didn't eat—or at least, he didn't eat anything that was prepared by, or passed to him from a stranger's hand. He contented himself with thick slices of coarse bread spread with a liberal amount of butter, a few tart little crabapples, an orange, and a handful of sugared pecans.

"Are you afraid it's poisoned or something?" Sarah asked. She leaned her head close to his ear to whisper it and hoped that any onlookers would think they were flirting.

"Jareth shrugged and crunched another pecan. "Probably not," he said. "I doubt Raspiel would risk poisoning the entire Court just to get me."

"Then why aren't you eating anything?"

"Because it's a risk I'm not willing to take, and because I wouldn't put it past the bastard to have one of his faithful servants slip it into something under my eyes."

"I thought Fae were immortal," Sarah said. "Would poison actually kill you?"

Jareth smiled. "No, poison would not kill me. However, the right mixture of magic and malice might."

Sarah gave him a confused look. "Magic and malice?"

"A potion," he clarified and popped another pecan in his mouth. He brought his wine goblet to his nose and inhaled the scent. He must have decided it was potion-free, because he took a long drink before putting it down.

Sarah pushed bits of quail around in the creamy yellow sauce, but she suddenly wasn't very hungry.

"You're not eating, my dear," commented a fat Fae man with a curled handlebar mustache who was sitting across the table from her.

As she watched, he picked up his own whole quail with his bejeweled hands, tore a piece off with his teeth, and swallowed it almost without chewing. Sarah shifted her eyes to either side of the fat little man to see if anyone else was as disgusted by this display as she was. Apparently not. They all seemed to not even notice, and farther along the table, she saw another man doing very much the same thing with his food.

"No," Sarah said faintly. "I'm not . . . I'm not very hungry."

She put her knife and fork down on her plate and the chubby little man, finished with his own quail, reached across the table, snatched hers, and began eating with gusto.

Sarah put her shaking hands in her lap and looked away from the revolting spectacle to meet Jareth's laughing eyes. "You don't approve of their table manners?"

"What table manners?" she whispered back.

Jareth laughed and passed her the pecans. Sarah took a handful and did her best to eat them without looking at any of the other guests. She was already praying for the eighth course—not so she could eat it, mind, but so they could get the fuck out of there without insulting anyone.

Though at the moment, she would have been willing to insult all kinds of people.

Sarah's left hand unconsciously strayed up to her throat to finger the wand pendant.

The second course was soup, which Sarah tasted, and one taste was more than enough. It was cloyingly sweet and creamy.

"Do they put sugar and cream in everything?" She asked Jareth.

"Almost," he said with an amused grin. "You'll notice that many of the elders do not have all their teeth."

"And that's such a surprise," she said sarcastically.

Following the soup, there was pasta, salad, meats, and several courses of deserts, none of which Sarah or Jareth partook of.

She shared an orange with him and a twist of marbled rye bread, and together they finished off two bottles of very good red wine.

"You better not get drunk on that," Jareth warned her after her fifth glass. "I completely understand if you wish to drink yourself into an inebriated stupor, I only ask that you not do it here."

Sarah laughed and drained her sixth glass. "Don't worry about it. I took Binge Drinking 101 in college. There's no way I'm going to get drunk off of a little merlot—or even a lot of merlot."

Jareth lifted a skeptical brow at that, but didn't mention it again.

"Is your young lady getting a tid bit tipsy, Jareth?" a smooth female voice said from across the table.

They both glanced up to see Raspiel's wife, Elipsabet standing in front of them. The fat little Fae man across from Sarah gave the queen an alarmed look and tried to say, 'My lady' with his mouth full of crème brulèe and ended up drooling it down his shirtfront.

"Oh dear," Elipsabet said with a merry little laugh. "Poor Wendel. I'll have a servant attend to you presently."

Wendel gave the queen an apologetic look and went back to his coffee.

"I trust you are both enjoying your meals," the queen went on, eyeing Sarah with a maternal look in her eyes that Sarah found entirely unconvincing. "Now Jareth, have you seen my lord's latest acquisition?"

Jareth regarded her coolly, but under the table, he took Sarah's hand and laced his fingers with hers. "No, lady Elipsabet, I don't believe I have."

Elipsabet clapped her hands together excitedly. "Oh, good. I wanted to show him to you myself," she said. She was positively gushing. "Jonas," she called, and gestured to a young man that Sarah hadn't noticed before. "Jonas, come here so Jareth can have a look at you."

Jareth squeezed Sarah's hand as the young man approached their table.

Sarah didn't see what all the fuss was about. He was pale and blond, and not at all attractive looking. He walked with his head down in a slow deliberate shuffle, as though he'd had one or both of his legs broken at one time and they had not mended properly. His hair was lank and his skin was oily and covered in pock marks.

Wait—pock marks? Could the Fae get chickenpox? Somehow Sarah didn't think so. Chickenpox was a human disease.

Jareth knew the instant that Sarah realized that the young boy named Jonas was human, and he tightened his hand on hers in warning.

He need not have bothered. Sarah made her face carefully blank as the boy came to stand before them.

Sarah noted with surprise that he wore a thick leather collar around his neck.

"Well, what do you think?" Elipsabet asked.

"Very nice," Jareth said dully.

The Fae woman seemed not to notice his lack of enthusiasm. "I knew you would think so," she said. "After all, you deal with the creatures all the time, don't you?"

Sarah almost said something at Elipsabet's mention of 'the creatures', but Jareth bore down savagely on her hand, grinding her fingers together, and she wisely changed her mind.

"Jonas, where are your manners?" Elipsabet asked. "You bow before royalty, you know that."

Jonas obediently bent into a courtly bow.

"Isn't that clever?" Elipsabet said. "Raspiel taught him that."

Sarah didn't know which horrified her more, the way the Unseelie queen talked about Jonas like he was a well-trained dog, or the blank, dead look in the man's grey eyes.

"My dear, you have such an unusual name," Elipsabet said to Sarah. "Sarah. Pretty enough, but not one I've heard before."

Sarah sent Jareth a questioning look. Just what was this woman up to? She didn't have to wait long to find out.

"But Jonas tells us that it's a quite common name among women in the Aboveground," she said, her bright blue eyes boring into Sarah's. "Among human's. Is that not so, Jonas?"

"It is so, mistress," the human replied tonelessly.

Sarah felt Jareth tense beside her and squeezed his hand reassuringly. The six years of acting classes she'd taken in high school and college were now going to pay off.

"Really?" Sarah said, sounding only mildly interested. "My parents often visited the Aboveground. I suppose it's possible that they heard the name while on one of their sojourns there."

Elipsabet did not seem to have heard her. "And we all know that the Goblin King has a rather strong affinity for mortals, don't you Jareth?"

Jareth regarded her the way he might a vile, poisonous slug on the toe of his boot. "They amuse me."

She gave a little light and tossed some of her gold hair over one shoulder. "Oh, yes, they're quite good at that, aren't they?"

"Just what exactly is it you want, Queen Elipsabet?" Jareth demanded.

Elipsabet was speechless for a moment, a little taken aback by his bluntness. "Well, I suppose I would like proof that your lady is who she says she is."

Sarah stared at her for a long moment, then gently, but firmly pulled her hand from Jareth's so that she could steeple them on the table before her. "How exactly do you propose I do that, lady Elipsabet?" she asked.

Elipsabet had regained her earlier composure. "I do so love your Goblin Kings eyes," she said. "So lovely. So disturbing. If you could give Jareth's eyes to Jonas, well then, I would have to concede that you are in fact Sidhe, to possess such power."

Sarah looked at Jareth, his left eye as dark as shadows in the night, his right eye the clear blue of a cloudless sky at morning. When he nodded, she gestured for the boy Jonas to lean forward. When he did, she pressed her thumb over the closed eyelid of Jonas' right eye, thought of it as a different color, and then willed it to be so.

When she withdrew her hand and Jonas opened his eye, it was no longer grey-blue, but vibrantly green. He now had one blue eye and one green eye.

"That's very nice," Elipsabet said approvingly. "Though not precisely what I had in mind. But if you don't have magic enough to change them both, well that's certainly understandable these days. What with belief in the Above ground what it is, it's surprising that any of us have any magic anymore."

Elipsabet was baiting her, she knew that. Still, Sarah was playing a part now, and while Sarah the human would have just agreed with her and let it drop, Sarah the Seelie Sidhe had more vanity than that and saw it as below her dignity to let such a slight pass.

"Power, or lack there of, has very little to do with it," Sarah said calmly. "It's just that I happen to like Jareth's eyes too—in Jareth's head."

Beside her, Jareth chuckled approvingly. Had he actually been worried that Sarah wouldn't be able to handle herself in the midst of courtly intrigue? She seemed to be doing a fine job of it so far.

"Why don't I turn your Jonas into a toad and have him tap-dance around the table for you?" Sarah suggested, voice thick with sarcasm.

Her cynicism was completely wasted on the Fae Queen. "You could do that?"

Sarah laughed softly. She was enjoying herself immensely. Two more courses had been served and cleared away during their conversation, and as soon as the next one came, they were leaving, even if she had to drag Jareth out the door by his hair.

"If I can turn a goblin into a silver candlestick holder," Sarah said, "transforming your filthy little human into something that he already highly resembles should be a piece of cake."

Jonas himself didn't seem to even notice that he was the topic under discussion. He kept fidgeting and, though he kept his head down in subservience, his eyes never paused on one thing for very long.

He reminded Sarah a little bit of a junkie she'd known in college. Her first love actually, Henry Cain. Henry had had a thousand dollar a day heroine addiction all through school. He'd tried to go cold turkey a couple of times their senior year, at Sarah's insistence, and he had fidgeted and twitched just like Jonas.

A month after they graduated—her to go on to teach Poe and Hemmingway to bored children, Henry to a promising career in the movies—he'd been found dead in a hotel suite in Miami. The housekeeper had found him with the needle still in his arm.

"Sarah," Jareth said beside her, bringing her back to the matter at hand.

"What?"

"Where were you just now?"

Sarah waved it away like it didn't matter. "Memory Lane," she told him, then turned her attention back to Elipsabet, who was looking at her like she expected her to say something. "Excuse me. Did you say something?"

Elipsabet's eyes narrowed a little at being so easily overlooked. "I don't believe I'll take you up on your offer. As entertaining as it would undoubtedly be, we're quite fond of Jonas."

"I could turn him back," Sarah said, then she shrugged. "But I might not."

"Why not?" Elipsabet asked warily.

"I am of the opinion that he might be better suited to life as a toad."

With that, The Seelie queen turned her attention away from Sarah to Jareth. "Your uncle is here," she informed him, her voice sharp with insult on behalf of her pet human. "I just thought you should know. In case you wished to see him."

"I don't," Jareth said flatly.

"Well then," she huffed, then without anything else to say, she turned on her heal in a swirl of gold lamè and blonde curls and marched back to her seat at the high table with Jonas following obediently in her wake.

Not for the first time, Sarah was fervently grateful that she belonged to the Goblin King. Jareth might regard her with one part tolerance and two parts frustration, but at least he didn't make her wear a collar or call him 'master'.

"That went well," she said. Sarah looked down at her plate. There were small little cooked things resembling the whole carcasses of mice floating in a broth.

"You did very well," Jareth agreed.

"Who is this uncle of yours?" she asked. "And why don't you want to see him?"

Jareth leaned back in his chair. "Uncle Iglaemus," he said after a minute. "He is—he was—my mother's eldest brother. He is High King of the Seelie Court, and he disapproves of my very existence. Takes it personally, you understand, because the way he sees it—the way the whole family sees it—my mother disgraced them all by breeding with a goblin, and I am the physical reminder of that shame. Sort of a slap in the face."

"Oh," Sarah said. "I'm sorry I asked."

"It doesn't matter," Jareth said, though Sarah could see from the tense set of his shoulders that it did, a little.

She looked back down at her plate and pushed one of the little meat things around with her spoon long enough to be almost certain that they were, in fact, mice. "What course is this?" she asked.

Jareth looked down at his own plate with a grimace. "I have no idea," he said and stood. "Let's go home."

Sarah took his hand as he helped her to her feet. She was in total agreement.