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the two couples. Jintaya frowned softly, then left the heart of their new, possibly temporary home. Sun crystals illuminated her path, a piece of magic picked up from a world visited by the Fae long ago. The mineral threaded through rock, leading from chamber to chamber up to a mass of crystal that absorbed sunlight all day long. It reflected some of that light down into the rooms below, and released the remaining stored light through the night, efficient and gentle.
    There were spells to control how much glow each room and corridor received, particularly in the rooms she visited, but she didn’t bother brightening the dim light. Ban and Rua, having little to do with the shaping of their new home, had taken to occupying their time by selecting rooms for various uses and moving furnishings and supplies into each place. Each one of the pantean members now had a private suite with bedchamber, bath, a sitting room for guests, a workroom or three for personal projects, plus spare suites for guests, rooms for storage, and more.
    Previous outposts had not been nearly so lavish, but apparently Kaife had decided that since they had an excess of magical energies to work with, he would craft an excess of chambers and passages. Most of those rooms were empty of all but a few furnishings and supplies. None of them held the tall, black-haired foreigner. Neither did she find Rua in her quarters. Guessing where the other woman was, Jintaya climbed one of the many winding sets of stairs, shallow and gracefully curved. It took her a few minutes to make her way to the chamber that, if their entry point was the heart, would correspond with the stomach of the stronghold.
    Here the cavern was vast, if still somewhat natural looking with its rugged granite replacing the old former sandstone. Great pillars of stone had been left in place here and there, supporting and anchoring the vaulted domes of the ceiling. Those domes were made of thick, sturdy sun crystal, concealed by illusions on the outside to look like solid, bare rock. The amount of sunlight that got through, with much of it diverted to the rest of the stronghold, made the cavern perfect for growing things.
    Below those vaulted panes, racks of dirt had been erected by spell and will, filled with good soil imported from home, and planted with seeds. Already, a tiny shimmer of green graced those beds, which were being fed by a watering system created by Parren. A spell pumped water to the top, where it trickled through all the beds, layer after gently sloped layer, before dropping into a basin filled with fish eggs. Unlike the plants, those could not be spell-rushed in their growth. Still, once they were grown, the pantean that Jintaya still hoped to establish on this world would be able to eat without worry.
    That was the key to a good pantean; expeditions visited other worlds in the hopes of gaining new ideas, new objects, new sources of information and trade. Some worlds might have much worth trading for, or beautiful, exotic things to see, but nothing in the way of foods considered edible by Fae standards. She often thought Ban was lucky that Fae food was not just edible to him, but tasty as well. There had been that one world she had visited in her youngest days where everything had smelled and tasted like rubber sap to her . . .
    She found the missing pair working near the far end of the sprawling, winding cavern. The sheer number of planting beds impressed her. It also bemused her. Coming to within conversation distance, she waited politely for the dirt-and-gravel-slinging pair to notice her, then gestured at the latest set of tiered, sloped beds. “Are you planning on feeding all those natives as well as ourselves, Rua?”
    The younger Fae looked up at her, wiped a smudge of dirt from her cheek—or rather, smeared it around even more—and shrugged. “They know we are here, and they seem to be refugees . . . I thought it would be advantageous