Once we're outside of the Golden Boar, Ben lifts me up so I can survey the market. "What now, milady?"

"Now?" I glance around the teeming marketplace. There's a garish purple tent to our left, decorated with glittering golden letters promising the passerby their heart's desire, while the drab grey stall on our right appears completely deserted. Smoke puffs in rhythmic bursts from a tent farther down the lane, accompanied by the jangle of bells; goat-like creatures bleat from a pen across the way. Though most of the people hurrying up and down the lane are smiling, desperation glitters in their eyes.

I can't help feeling a shade of that same sense of desperation. The glitter of Goblin Market seems to urge me forward, a siren song just out of hearing range that promises all I could wish for if I just venture a bit deeper into the market. Come, try your luck, it whispers. Anything you need, anything you want, anything you could possibly imagine can be found here if you just look hard enough.

I sigh. It might even be true, but I'm not sure I can take the time to look. In many ways, Goblin Market is a pocket universe all on its own, with more twists and turns than any labyrinth ever built. We could spend years here, and never notice the passage of time until we got back into Oberon's realm or the human world. If Underhill's relationship to time is that of a boat drifting to and fro on a long anchor chain, Goblin Market is an unmoored raft tossed on the stormy sea – there's no predicting or controlling where it goes.

"Mary?" A touch of worry has entered the huntsman's voice. "Are ya alright?"

With a start, I realize I've been silent for nigh on five minutes now. Shutting out the alluring call of the market, I shape my mask into a smile. "Yes, of course." I glance around one more time. "I think it might be best if we head back now."

Surprise makes the huntsman's eyes widen. "Are ya sure? Didn't ya say we could look for, what'd ya call them, time mages? Just cause we didn't find Quicksilver doesn't mean we can't find one of them."

Everything about that statement feels logical to me, so why do I waver? Is my irrational disappointment over Quicksilver clouding my judgement? Truth be told, I completely forgot that a tempus mage might also be able to help with our predicament.

But a little voice inside me warns me to be wary. Some instinct, buried near the part of me that enforces my geas to answer truthfully, is vibrating with alarm at the suggestion of finding a strange mage, yet I can't tell why. There's no compulsion that forbids me to seek out help, and it's not like we would simply waltz up to the first sorcerer we saw and beg for help. To do that would be foolhardy at best, and end in death or enslavement at worst.

Yet... I still hesitate. Tempus magic is chancy; most attempts to manipulate time end with the wielder dead or insane. Only the very powerful survive, and even they tend to be eccentric.

If I was human, I'd roll my eyes in frustration. Before talking to Orion, I was confident that a time mage would be able to help us should we fail to find my creator. But now my instincts are telling me otherwise. It's simply not logical! If I wasn't who I am, I'd suspect that someone had cast a spell on me to cause this abrupt change of heart, but surely I would have felt something like that. And what would be the point of such a spell, anyway?

With a sigh of annoyance, I push the niggling warning to the back of my mind. Instincts are all well and good for mortals, but I prefer to operate on logic, and logic dictates that we find a time mage.

When I tell the huntsman this, he smiles. "Alright, so where do we look?"

"Good question." This place really needs a guidebook – I'm sure one could be made with the proper enchantments. "We'll simply have to find a guide again."

"Did you lovely people say you needed a guide?"

The huntsman spins, hands moving to a defensive position, then gasps. I frown. "Are you following us?" Unless I'm very mistaken, the speaker is the same kitsune who gave us directions to the Golden Boar.

The kitsune grins at me. "Nope!" When my frown deepens, he lifts both hands. "Swear on my honor, I'm not! But..." He offers me an innocent, albeit toothy, smile. "Goblin Market does tend to make coincidences likely, if you know what I mean." He licks his lips. "There I was, minding my own business, when I got the sudden urge for some of the Golden Boar's delicious hot chocolate. So I wandered over – ignoring urges like that doesn't tend to go so well, you know? And that's when I saw you guys."

I turn his words over in my head. I hadn't known about this particular property of the market, but it does seem like a logical one. Permanent denizens of the market, as I assume the kitsune is, must have some way of navigating through the hustle and bustle, and I suppose 'intuition' is a passable method. I certainly can't sense any malice in the kitsune, at least.

So I tell my mask to smile. "Yes, as a matter of fact, we do need a guide. I don't suppose you know where a reputable time mage could be found?" I grimace. "Preferably a relatively sane one?"

The kitsune's tails twitch behind him as he frowns in thought. "Which is more important, power or sanity?" he asks at last.

The way he asks fills me with foreboding. Among sorcerers, power and sanity are often a tradeoff, but generally you can find fairly strong ones who are only slightly eccentric. "Exactly how, ah, unique are we talking about?" Never call a mage crazy when there's a chance they can hear you – and there's always that chance.

The kitsune's ears flick back and forth. "Well, he's an inveterate time traveler," he explained, sounding apologetic.

The huntsman blinks in bewilderment, but I sigh. "Say no more." Time travelers... why does it have to be time travelers? I haven't met many, but all of the ones I've encountered are an absolute headache to deal with. When they're not struggling to remember which timeline they're in, they're babbling about events that haven't happened yet or may never happen at all. Getting them to focus on the here and now is a monumental task.

The kitsune wrinkles his nose. "There's also Rose, if you don't want to deal with a time traveler, but they won't be back till next week at the earliest, and you're more likely to be waiting two or three." When my mask falls involuntarily into a frown, he winces. "Sorry."

I stifle a sigh. When did I start picking up so many mortal expressions of emotion, anyway? No matter. I bring my mask back into a neutral expression. "That's too long," I tell him, glancing at the huntsman for confirmation.

Ben nods reluctantly. "I don't think I should be away from the princess for that long," he informs me. "I'm sure Lily is taking good care of her, but still, she's my responsibility." He doesn't sound particularly happy about this, but I get the sense that he won't simply abdicate his responsibilities either.

The kitsune flicks his tails. "So, you want me to guide you to Kestrel?" At my dubious look, he hastens to add, "He's really not so bad, for a time traveler! Mostly he's just... ah..." He glances around. "Unique."

The huntsman lifts an eyebrow. "Unique?"

"Never criticize a mage when they might hear you," I tell him dourly. "Especially here, in the market, don't say anything bad about anyone. You never know who might take offense." Just because the market prevents direct retaliation doesn't mean anyone is totally safe here. A tempus mage in particular can get revenge in some very nasty ways, and some of them are unpredictable enough to do so on a whim.

The kitsune grins. "Yep! So..." He waves his hand in the general direction of the center of the market. "Are we going?"

"What'll we owe you?" Ben inquires. "This is the second favor you've done us, after all." He glances at me for approval, and I smile. He's learning so much about the fae realm, and we've only been here a few days. I'm proud of him.

The kitsune pouts. "Well, since you don't have chocolate..."

"Didn't you say the Golden Boar has hot chocolate?" Ben asks. When the kitsune nods, he grins. "Can we buy you some of it, then, before we leave?" He nods towards the tavern. "Truly, it'd be no trouble."

The kitsune licks his lips, eyelids falling half-closed as he murmurs, "Mmm, chocolate..." His tone implies that there's nothing better in the whole universe.

Ben quickly turns a laugh at the kitsune's blissful expression into a cough. "So, is that a yes?"

The kitsune nods eagerly. "Buy me hot chocolate, and I'll take you anywhere you want to go!"

***

Time travel.

No other pair of seemingly innocuous words has captured the mortal imagination quite so thoroughly. From dystopian horror stories to fantastical tales of twisted causality, mortal writers have been fascinated with time travel for generations. The earliest tales depicted a simple compression of time, such as that produced by Underhill, but more modern stories include every possible variant of time travel imaginable – forwards, backwards, even sideways.

Like all mortal stories, though, these ones are approximations at best and wholesale fabrications at worst. Those telling the stories are rarely tempus mages themselves – tempus mages, on the whole, are not actually very good at telling stories. There's a certain sense of narrative causality that you need, but which time travelers lack, to tell a good story. So the storytellers are working off of secondhand information and their own imaginations – it's no wonder they get it wrong.

However, they do get one thing right – the butterfly effect. In more mathematical terms, it's known as sensitive dependence on initial conditions, but the name 'the butterfly effect' has stuck in the mortal collective consciousness. Basically, it's the theory that tiny changes to the initial conditions can cause drastic changes in the outcome, like the flap of a butterfly's wings leading to the creation of a hurricane. Move a stone from a path, and you could change the outcome of a war by allowing the vital message to arrive. Carelessly show off modern technology when you're in the past, and you could inspire a whole new religion. The butterfly effect is nothing to trifle with.

And, to their credit, most mortal stories do a good job of portraying it. Things may always end happily for the protagonists, for that's what stories – of a certain kind, at least – do, but the hapless time traveler will surely stumble over the butterfly effect at least once in the course of achieving that happiness.

Where most stories break down, though, is in their treatment of paradox. It is impossible to create a logical impossibility. You cannot go back in time and kill your grandfather, no matter how much you might want to – the multiverse abhors paradox, and will take forceful steps to protect itself from it.

Incidentally, this is why most time travelers are insane. The multiverse has rewritten their history and their future so many times that they simply can't keep it straight anymore. Some of their memories tell them that they used to have a family and children, while others insist that they've always been alone; they're simultaneously orphans, only children, and one of a large group of kids. Even small preferences, like that for coffee over tea, can get erased.

The less fortunate ones find their entire selves erased. After all, it's impossible to create paradox if you never existed in the first place.

Then again, they may be better off in the end. Is it better to live your life not knowing which of your memories are real, and which are fake, or to never live at all? Better to live locked in the prison of your increasingly unstable mind, or to have that mind simply erased from the timestream?

Neither is a pleasant fate. One instance of time travel may not lead to either, and you may be safe enough with two, but three, or four, or five? Eventually, even if you don't purposely create paradox, the butterfly effect is going to trip you up, and the multiverse will be forced to correct itself. Hopefully, you only lose something minor, like your love of roses. But there's no guarantee of that.

You might think that the solution is obvious – if you must experience time travel, only do it once or twice. But time travel is addictive. Tempus mages get a high off of riding the currents of the timestream, a high better than any drug any mortal has ever invented. It's comparable to goblin fruit, that vicious substance that has enthralled mortals so much that they die for lack of it. Once a time traveler is hooked, they're caught for life.

So, if you value your life and your sanity, don't mess with time magic.