Seeing is Believing - Cody Dayton, The Rowan, Robin

“Okay, who moved my glasses?” Cody asks. “Ha ha, very funny, but I can’t exactly search the whole house to find them, without them.” He’s patting his hands over the kitchen counter with a frown.
“I didn’t move them,” Robin replies. “Don’t try to pin this one on me.” He’s peeling carrots at the kitchen table, a job everyone has deemed he can handle without ruining a meal. He still hasn’t quite figured out how to make his fire affinity stop raising the temperatures on the stove and making everything boil over or burn. Grandda insists that there’s no way a quarter-blood fae should be that strong, but Robin knows it’s not just that he’s clumsy, it’s his magic.
I’m not just trying to get out of the household chores. He was a perfectly good cook until he turned twelve and his magic started to mature. Baking, now, he’s never been any good at that.
“Well, they’re definitely not here.” Cody opens a couple of the cupboards. “Can you help me look?”
Robin sets down the carrot and the knife, washes his hands, and checks all the cupboard shelves, and inside the canisters of flour and sugar.
“I only took them off for a few minutes because the steam was fogging them up,” Cody says, glancing back at the pot on the stove. “I don’t think I knocked them off onto the floor, I would have heard them.”
“I’ll look just in case.” Robin crouches down and glances along the baseboards. There’s a peach pit and some shriveled dried peas apparently even the mice won’t touch, but no glasses.
“You’re sure this isn’t a prank?” Cody asks. “I won’t be mad if it is, you know. You can tell me.”
“No, I wouldn’t take your glasses.” Robin isn’t above hiding books, sometimes pencils, once Cody’s hat, but his mischievous tendencies do not extend to truly damaging pranks. Some fae find those amusing, apparently, but Robin has never been the sort, and neither is Grandda Hamish. He’s always reminded Robin that the fae are hated enough as it is, and Robin doesn’t need to be giving humans any more excuses to be angry.
Even if Grandda was the kind to play pranks like that, he’s not here to blame. He took a chess set and two chairs down to the city broker to sell today. Since only registered fae can have storefronts, they usually provide places for unregistered ones like Robin and Grandda to sell their goods. Well, Grandda anyway. Robin doesn’t seem to have a talent for anything but trouble.
“Maybe one of the birds took them?” Robin offers. It’s a weak attempt, but he’s running out of ideas. “Some of them like shiny things.” A whole pair of glasses is quite the feat, though.
“Maybe.” Cody grabs his backpack off a chair in the kitchen and pulls out a pair of battered glasses with tape on the nose, his backup pair. “Mom is not gonna be happy.”
When Robin mentions the incident to Grandda after he gets home, Grandda suggests it might be a latent protection spell. There’s several on the house that he’s forgotten the exact locations of, and hasn’t been able to undo yet.
The two of them spend the evening trying to track down the source of any overzealous spells, but finally admit defeat.
Cody loses another three pairs of glasses to the house before Robin leaves. Eventually, Robin and Grandda both come to the conclusion that while they may have scruples about playing more serious pranks, the Rowan does not.
It’s probably a good thing, all things considered, that Cody’s such an imaginative storyteller.