Tam trusts no one, but he trusts her. When you have been fooled by someone disguised as your father, you are slow to believe anyone else. He opens up to her about the things he cannot at school. At school he is self-contained and distant, but it’s known he can hold his own in a fistfight, so they let him alone. Which is good, because his choice of subject matter doesn’t help him stay under the radar. Tam reads fey tales. All of them: Beauty and the Fey Beast, Rose-Red and Violet-Blue, Bluebeard, Queen Maud and her Pirates, everything. He reads the ones that humans wrote; he reads the ones that dwarvven wrote. And when he is visiting Dorie in the country, he goes around to the old women in town and drinks their chamomile tea and listens to them spin out the stories they knew from their childhood. He has heard some new ones this way, and he ambles home, staring past his spectacles into nothing, and tells them to Dorie. Dorie’s heart beats the most then, for it is as if he is telling her stories about herself.
