"I am given to understand," the queen informed me, "that spirits may hold more than one contract at a time."

"Not usually," I said. I was half-focused, playing with the little puppy in her room. Since I had entered, it had not stopped barking. I showed it a part of my realm through my eyes--at once it whimpered, and fell silent. I pet it after, my claws idle at its head. Obediently, it deferred to me, and so I was pleased. "It is a lot of work to maintain a tie to this plane for just one person alone, never mind two."

"But you can do it."

"Do you ask me a question, or do you make a request?" I demanded of her, bored now. I flitted from her pet to gaze around us.

I'd been in many rooms with my King--his travels, his entourage--there was never anything that did not express his wealth. So I had seen the rooms of Kings, and I had known everything from the wealth of a Sultan to the poorest village in the land. But the queen's room, well.

What I remembered of it was that it had been very simple. My King adored her since the days they had been but prince and princess; he had me devote power to celebrations made in her beauty, and bestow the blessing of my magicks onto her gifts that we brought from lands far away. But her room had been plain once upon a time, with only the rich bed sheets and the ornate bed poles to signify that its owner might have been someone at least noble.

Now, it was more like a queen's room. Still as sparse as it had been back then--as if her stay here was only temporary, as if she refused to leave any part of herself behind--but there was a few things here that were hers.

I traced my fingers over the unmelting ice sculpture. The material was something from my realm, ringing in tones earthly and spiritual as it reacted to my magic. I'd played with this form of spiritual art decades ago when I had been mastering myself and powers, but I had never made something quite like this. Whoever had been tasked was certainly a well-informed master. This was carved...into a youngling form of mine. It was a form nobody on this earth had seen, except...

"Ah," I said. What she would tell me more of would be up to her. "This was not here the last time."

"I commissioned it," the queen said. She had been watching me passively, but quite puposefully. She was so cautious, so quiet and sound compared to my King, whose heart he bore raw on his sleeve as if he could not handle it in his throat like those who had sung songs about it all ages before. I thought I liked this.

When a spirit contracts a human, we mimic them--we mirror them. After him, I had never contracted anyone else. But if I had her then instead of him, should I have contracted the princess rather than the prince, I wondered how fate would have played out.

"You were very accurate."

"There was a village where you first appeared in this world. It would be impossible for mere peasants to forget the splendor of your original form." She lowered her gaze to her puppy and beckoned it. It did not move, its eyes locked onto mine. The little pet remained between the two of us. What a good child--even until it died it knew I was the most dangerous to its master. "Do you remember it? There was a girl..."

It is forbidden for unsummoned spirits to appear in the human realm, but it is an unspoken rule that so long as we do not influence the natural order, we are exempt from any consequences. So it has been that many of my kind and I have wandered this earth to know and to learn.

"I remember." And I did and always will. Spirits hold great memories because we have so few; the more memories a spirit has--of humanity and with humanity--the weaker they become. I have not come to the human realm since my King had ended our contract, but before him--before his inauguration, before anything else--I made use of the fact I was still fledgling.

I saw a world.

"I saw you," I said.

"You saved me," the queen murmured, and oh, maybe I saw then why the King loved her. For when she looked at you with some emotion in her eyes, you felt as though even mortality would be worthless before her favour. And yet, how cunning; she could not have known I liked the vulnerable side of humanity so much. "You saved my life. Do you remember?"

"I do." I remember I reached out to her and brushed her cheek with my finger. She was soft, and yet her skin was dying just as much as her husband's. Perhaps at that time she had been unwell in health, but she still had some years left.

The puppy was barking again, and it was growling deep into its throat.

"Sleep," I told it, with the words of my magic, and its eyes rolled over into a faint. Then it slumped onto the bed, unmoving, outside of its little body breathing.

The queen watched me. "You never said anything, back then. About our history--"

"What does it matter? The King loves a woman, and you are that woman." I circled around her, and she held herself with grace as she did tension. "He did not need me or want to know what or where you had come from."

She was ambitious and she wanted something. And yet before me, she spoke of past times, dredging memories of a little child who would have drowned in the river behind the little hut in the woods. Her hair had been lighter then--wet blonde that clung to her shoulders as she heaved for air on the riverbank, gasping and coughing but never making a sound otherwise...a child that had been taught to stay quiet and only be seen.

"Do you wish for a contract with me after all these years?" I asked her. I offered once, because she seemed like her life would've been interesting. Because though she had been at death's door, the little girl had seemed no stranger to it, and yet her fingers had held mine so tightly it would've been cruel to just let her go.

"I am different from what I was then."

"Yes," I hummed. "You rejected me then."

"I am...older now. Different."

"Not so. The human soul does not transform too much from when we are children. It is only time and the learnings of other humans that transform your thoughts."

"The things that I've done--"

"Yes," I murmured. I traced the forelock. She shivered, but she did not chase me away. "You've been so evil, haven't you? How much blood have you spilt, how many lives have you ruined? But that doesn't matter to me. I am glad that you have welcomed me. My answer is 'yes'. Is yours 'yes' as well?"

She hesitated, so I breathed a ghost of a breath into her ear.

At once, she flushed, curling away. "You-!"

I laughed, cackling away. "You only have to say one word. I will take you as I have him." Her reddening face was amusing. "Of course I mean it in contract. I am no romantic or sexual being unless you wish that of me."

"Do not mock me. It is...I am unused to directness. In the courts, our language is built upon traps and schemes."

"How inefficient," I said. "I will tell you directly. For our contract, I want but one thing."

"If you wish my heart--" Already she had her trembling hands at the laces of the back of her dress, but I slid to the puppy again and swept it into my arms. I stroked the back of its head lovingly.

"I will take this little one for our contract," I said. "I have grown fond of it. I will tame it yet."

She looked at me, as if frozen, confused. The queen for a moment became the same girl she had been decades ago, before she regained herself. "Just the puppy?"

"You wish to give me more?" I asked. Lazily, I swept my wrist into a circle, and the magic began to form. Laces and patterns and webs that mirrored her finery, and it swept around her.

"No, just... What you required of him--"

"He wished for glory. A kingdom. A legacy. A life's purpose." Already, I had spent too much time here. I watched as they spun, smaller and smaller, and flicked my wrist. It came into my palm, and I offered it to her--a beautiful necklace befitting a royal, for this queen wore no jewelry except for her protection rings. "And what you wish of me simply is companionship. It is an even trade, my Queen."

Like for like, as fickle as we spirits are.

And so, though my King had spent decades vying for her favour, I had achieved one thing he never had. On that eve, she smiled at me, brilliantly, and so I learned to smile back.

The king was not smiling when he found out.