Karen moved in and out of the frame of the small window on Sarah's computer, as usual having positioned her phone so that Sarah could only see her waist and occasional glimpses of her hands. She could at least hear her stepmother's voice, though.

"…their anniversary and everything, I know they'd really appreciate it, is the twenty-seventh okay?"

"Sure." Sarah randomly browsed social media mentions of Moon Gems while she talked to her stepmother, a bad habit that she hadn't been able to break. "Two tickets?"

"Yes, that'd be lovely, I really think they'd enjoy the show. The Fall might've been a bit too grim for them—"

"Moon Gems isn't exactly cheerful—"

"—no, but it's colorful and it's got magic and lovely costumes, I'm sure they'll enjoy it." The image on the screen jolted suddenly as Karen picked up her phone. "Hang on a second, I'll see if your brother's available."

Sarah watched the image in her computer screen bounce up and down for a bit before it revealed the sight of the back of Toby's head. Her brother was where he usually was these days—on the couch, staring intently at a TV screen, video game controller in his hand.

"Say hi to your sister, Toby."

Toby lifted a hand in a brief wave, his curly blond head not bothering to turn around. "Hey."

"Hey Tobes. I'll beat you at that thing next time I see you."

Toby snorted. "Sure."

The screen image bounced again and Sarah was back in the kitchen, where she could hear the sound of something sizzling. "Sorry, it's like he's losing vocabulary every week."

"Eh, he's a teenage boy. It's normal."

Karen sighed. "I just hope he grows out of it eventually."

"I think most of them do. You know, around thirty."

Karen chuckled. Sarah heard pots and pans moving and then her stepmother sat down at the kitchen, managing to adjust the phone so that her face was finally visible. "How's the new script going, by the way?"

"All right, I suppose. My collaborator doesn't exactly make things easy, but I think he's getting used to the idea that scripts go through revisions."

Karen laughed just a little too heartily and quickly covered her mouth with her hand. Sarah frowned. "What's so funny?"

Karen's face was a mask of careful neutrality. "Don't you think it's time you told me your 'collaborator's' name, Sarah?"

Sarah blinked. "I, uh, haven't mentioned it?"

"No, you haven't. Though I'm aware that it's a he and said HE has come up quite frequently in our conversations in the last few weeks, which leads me to think that this nameless fellow isn't just a script collaborator."

Sarah groaned inwardly. Damn you, Karen.

And of course she'd never mentioned his name, Sarah realized, because it would be quite hard to explain why the person she was collaborating with on multiple levels had the same name as the main character in her play, which Karen and her father had seen, multiple times…

Karen had her chin in her hands, looking remarkably pleased with herself. "So? Do I get to know his name?"

"James," Sarah blurted.

"James." Karen smiled. "Lovely. Any chance of us meeting him?"

Sarah felt her stomach drop. "Meeting him?"

"Yes, Sarah. Not to be old-fashioned, but that is still a thing that happens, isn't it?"

Sarah's mind raced to figure out how she had landed herself in exactly the sort of situation she'd told Miguel that she wanted to avoid. "Yeah, it's, uh, a thing, just…we're not…it's a little…"

"All right, all right, dear, I didn't mean to put you on the spot." Sarah could see the corners of her stepmother's mouth twitching. "All in good time."

"Yeah." Sarah swallowed. "Sure. I'll, uh, keep you posted."

"You do that." The sound of food sizzling in the background grew louder. "I'd better deal with this. Your father says hello, he's working late again, we'll see you for lunch next Sunday?"

"Absolutely."

"Right. Love to Miguel and Nick, and tell James we're looking forward to meeting him."

Sarah forced herself to smile. "Will do."

The call ended and Sarah closed her laptop screen and let her head fall on top of it, visions of the world's most awkward family dinner swimming in front of her eyes.

I could tell them he died, right? Or moved to Iceland? Very suddenly? That's a thing that people do in these situations, right?

Or I could just stop seeing him.

She sighed and fingered a fading bruise on her wrist, the feel of Jareth's sleeping body pressed into hers still vivid in her mind, the faint echo of his breath on her neck.

Yeah. Not likely.

—

Hoggle always scoffed when Sarah called the winged creatures in the garden fairies, even though he'd called them that on the day they first met. Technically, he said, they were stej-vrash, which translated to something like "worm-wings."

She could remember a time not so long ago when she'd thought fairies were beautiful. Or at least cute. She remembered filling up the pages of childhood notebooks with pictures of them, begging for a pair of "real wings" for her birthday, devouring any fairy-themed TV show or book she could find.

Now she wanted them all dead.

To be fair, the fairy population had gotten quite out of control in the sprawling garden outside of Hoggle's small but well-kept house near the edge of the Firey forest. Hoggle said it had something to do with a batch of squash he'd planted the year before, which, much to everyone's surprise, seemed to have driven the fairies who'd eaten it into a breeding frenzy.

Sarah cursed as yet another one of them escaped the spray coming from the metal tube in her thick-gloved hands. "I swear they're getting smarter."

Hoggle grunted and easily downed a fairy from five feet away, kicking it casually into a basket of twisted limbs and wings. Sarah didn't like to think about what would happen to the fairies afterward—they were pests, but they still looked vaguely human.

"Ye gotta move silently," he said, his small body crouching even lower to the ground. "Take smaller steps. And breathe less."

"Breathe less? Are you serious?"

Hoggle rolled his eyes. "Nobody asked you to come here, missy. Why doncha go back to makin' mushy-mushy with His Royal Highness?"

"Can't do that." Sarah planted her feet and took careful aim. "I've been banished for being a distraction. Apparently Jareth needs complete solitude to awaken the literary genius within."

"A lack of sarcasm is also helpful."

Sarah jumped and Hoggle let out a tiny squeal as he dropped his spray-gun. Sarah put her hands on her hips.

"No eavesdropping on conversations through magic, Jareth, we've been over this."

The disembodied voice seemed to rumble along the ground. "You said my name. I'm hardly at fault."

"Fine, fine. Get back to work."

"I was working, until I was interrupted."

Sarah opened her mouth to retort again and then thought better of it, knowing from experience that this sort of argument could go on for quite a while. Instead, she picked up Hoggle's fallen spray-gun and handed it to him, just as Jareth's voice rumbled across the ground again.

"Hoggle."

Hoggle dropped the spray-gun on the ground again and croaked, "Yes?"

"Public disdain for your monarch is a boggable offense, I'm sure you know."

Hoggle sighed. "Yes."

Sarah watched as Hoggle went back to spraying fairies, not looking very perturbed by Jareth's threat. "He's never actually tossed you in the bog, has he?"

Hoggle downed two fairies at once and tossed them in the basket. "Nah."

"Has he ever bogged anyone?"

Hoggle paused for a moment. "Come t' think of it…not for a while, no."

"So why does everyone freak out when he mentions it?"

Hoggle raised an eyebrow at her. "You ain't stupid, Sarah. I'm guessin' you know that he likes to remind everyone who's in charge."

Sarah blinked. The fairies, emboldened by the lack of spraying, buzzed around her. "So you mostly…pretend to be scared? To make him feel better?"

Hoggle shrugged. "Whatever works."

Sarah leaned against the open doorway of Hoggle's house. The faint smell of drying herbs drifted out. "That's really kind of you."

Hoggle didn't have to turn around for Sarah to know he was blushing. "You live in this world long enough, you learn how to keep the peace."

Sarah glanced up at the castle that loomed over everything, imagining that she could see Jareth in the window. Is that why there are certain questions I don't ask him? she wondered. To keep the peace?

She pushed the thought from her mind and returned to spraying fairies, downing two with a single shot before she felt a strange vibration under her feet. At first she thought she was imagining it, but then she glanced at Hoggle's home and saw that the window curtains were shaking slightly.

"Uh, Hoggle?"

"Mmm?"

"Why is the ground moving?"

Hoggle paused and followed her gaze to his curtains. "Oh. Yeah, that's been happenin' lately."

The ground continued to shake, not enough to make movement difficult but just enough to be noticeable. Having never experienced an actual earthquake, Sarah was unnerved.

"Has this place always been prone to, er, earth-shaking?"

Hoggle took Sarah's spray-gun and tossed it along with his inside a small wooden box under his window. "Nah, more of a recent thing. Maybe cos the labyrinth and His Highness are testy at each other."

"Testy? What do you—"

"Well met, fair comrades, well met!"

Sarah turned to see Didymus emerging from the firey forest astride Ambrosius, a bundle of firewood attached to the back of his steed's saddle. Ludo lumbered silently next to him, carrying a load of firewood twice as large in his arms. He gave a small wave when he saw Sarah.

Didymus hopped nimbly to the ground, seemingly oblivious to the ground shaking, and tied Ambrosius to a fencepost. "Verily, the fireys did as always attempt to distract me with their wildness, but they were no match for me and my brother."

Sarah gaped. "Are you two seriously telling me that you don't notice the ground shaking right now?"

Didymus cocked his head and sniffed the air. "Ah yes, the battle of wills continues…"

Ludo suddenly tilted his head back and gave a low howl that gradually increased in volume. Amazingly, the shaking slowly subsided.

Sarah shook her head. "All right, earthquakes, the king and the labyrinth fighting each other, and Ludo can stop it all with his voice—why hasn't anyone told me about this?"

Hoggle shrugged. "You didn't ask."

Sarah followed him into the cottage, leaving Ludo and Didymus outside to sort firewood. He automatically handed her a primitive-looking peeler and a knife and pulled a bunch of root vegetables from a basket.

"So the labyrinth, like…has a mind? A will of its own?"

Hoggle shrugged. "Sorta. Ain't like I can have a conversation with it, but I can sense when it's grumpy. We all can, anything what lives here."

Sarah set about peeling a large carrot. "Have things always been tense between it and…him?"

"They got their ups and downs. Sometimes he don't like following orders, you must've noticed that."

She thought of the dark look on Jareth's face the night that she'd first read his play, the way he'd cursed at having to deal with another wisher. "Yeah, I guess."

"Anyways, it don't ever get too out of hand. Little shakin' every now and then, sometimes he disappears for a while, sometimes the hedge walls turn into stone walls. We're used to it."

Sarah chopped the carrot into small pieces. Like clockwork, Hoggle carried them over and dumped them into a copper pot that was hovering over the fireplace. "I guess I just always thought he was, you know, all-powerful here."

Hoggle looked at her, surprised. "He is powerful." He continued to stare at her, his expression serious, until Sarah felt slightly unnerved. "Don't you go forgettin' that. Just cause the labyinth likes to put him in his place occasionally don't mean he couldn't turn me into a pig if he felt like it."

Sarah crossed her arms. "But you don't think he would."

Hoggle shrugged. "Depends on my mood. And his."

Didymus brought the firewood inside and immediately began telling a story of fighting wild boars in a distant kingdom. After the soup was finished cooking they pulled the small table outside (since Ludo wasn't able to fit through the door) and loaded it with cheese, bread, the soup, and mugs of fresh juice and mild mead, all thoughts of earthquakes forgotten, though Sarah jumped slightly every time the table rattled under the weight of pots and dishes.

She couldn't sleep that night, and she was fairly sure it had little to do with the extra helpings of vegetable soup and barley bread that she'd eaten.

She lay in Jareth's large bed, as usual enjoying the slightly unearthly sensations of incredibly soft linens and pillows around her, a softness that no earthbound bed had ever been able to imitate. The oversized shirt she was sleeping in—one of his, she still hadn't gotten into the habit of packing an "overnight bag," given that night and day didn't really exist here in the same way—was equally soft.

Hoggle says he's powerful. But how powerful can he really be when he's basically a prisoner in this place?

She glanced over at Jareth's peacefully sleeping form, his bare chest rising and falling slowly, hair spread out across his pillow. She still wasn't sure if he actually SLEPT in the way that mortals did, but if he didn't he seemed adept at mimicking mortal sleep patterns.

She rose quietly and went to sit at his desk. His play revisions, still not quite finished, were in one corner of the desk, under an inkwell, and she'd promised not to look at them yet. She glanced at the piles of books and papers scattered over the rest of the desk, noting absently that The Riverside Shakespeare was open to Act 3 of Richard II.

…for within the hollow crown
That rounds the mortal temples of a king
Keeps Death his court and there the antic sits,
Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp…

Sarah sighed. It might be a coincidence. Or it might be that his wish for an ending was never far from his mind.

She took a blank piece of parchment and a pen and started writing (she'd left ballpoint pens lying around his desk, but he still insisted on using a quill and ink). She had no idea what she was going to write, but within a few minutes she had several pages that began as prose and gradually morphed into dialogue and stage directions, as her writing usually did.

She heard the bed creak slightly and jumped, turning her head to see Jareth leaning against a bedpost, wearing a pair of loose-fitting trousers. "Sorry, didn't mean to wake you," she said.

His eyes traveled over her and lingered on the hand that clutched the pen. "I enjoy watching you write," he said.

She smiled and put the pen down. "I suppose that's not as creepy as watching me sleep."

"I do that occasionally as well."

"Yeah, well, so do I, so I guess we're both slightly creepy."

He glanced at the pages on the desk and she quickly turned them over. "No peeking till this thing's been through lots of revisions."

"What's it about?"

She smiled. It was only in the past year or so that he'd begun to show a genuine interest in her writing, or other aspects of her Aboveground life. Which might explain why she was a half-inch closer to things like a family dinner, insane as it still sounded in her head.

And why you blurted out "I love you" like a damned idiot, but let's not think about that right now.

She ran her fingers over the parchment. "At the moment it's about power and what it does to different people who have it and don't have it, something that's been on my mind a bit lately." She regarded him carefully, wondering how much he'd be willing to reveal. "That was quite an earthquake this afternoon."

His expression darkened. "Yes."

She stood, pulling his oversized shirt around herself. "Hoggle says you and the labyrinth are a bit testy at each other."

He seemed about to speak but then didn't, instead turning back toward the bed. She followed him, sitting on the edge.

"Do you, like…have conversations with it?"

He shook his head. "It has…invited me into its inner realm a few times, always in different forms. Sometimes a lake of fire, sometimes a room full of knives. It seems to take forms that it thinks I will find intimidating. Perhaps not so different from the forms I take when I encounter wishers for the first time."

"Why does it do that?"

He laughed mirthlessly. "To remind me of my place."

She reached out to touch his hand. "Are you…afraid of it?"

He flinched. She thought he would pull his hand away, but eventually he squeezed hers, gently.

"Might we speak of something else, Sarah?"

She had a sudden vision of sitting with him in a strangely reconstructed version of her childhood bedroom, recalling the time when she'd been cruel to Hoggle, Didymus and Ludo in an attempt to be "grown up."

It must have felt good, for a moment, he'd said. To feel powerful.

She stood up and moved in front of him. He cocked his head at her, confused.

"Tell me what to do," she said.

When he still looked confused she unlaced the front of her shirt slowly. Understanding, he smiled.

"Take off that shirt," he said, his voice betraying none of the uneasiness from before.

She quickly pulled off the shirt and let it drop to the floor, standing naked in front of him. His smile widened, and he stood up.

"Kneel."

She did, grateful when he grabbed a pillow from the bed and placed it under her knees. She could feel heat pooling in the lower half of her body, the familiar giddiness that came from giving herself over to a role that she almost never played in her Aboveground life.

He swiftly undid the drawstring of his trousers.

"Open your mouth."

She obeyed.

—

Later, lying in bed contented and with the taste of him still lingering on her tongue, she realized that they hadn't tried this version of things before—it had always begun with threats, or demands, or the faintest hint of impending violence. This had simply been…surrender.

She'd liked it. She could tell that he had, too.

Drifting off to sleep, she felt his arm close around her waist and pull her against him. "Thank you," he whispered.

She threaded her fingers through his, conscious enough to realize that in a single night he'd asked about something she was writing AND thanked her, two things he definitely hadn't been in the habit of doing not so long ago.

She sighed. Girl. You are in so, so far over your head.