“I . . . I want . . .” It had seemed so easy from a distance. Walk up to Blind Michael. Tell him he was my grandfather and that I didn’t know how I’d arrived here. Ask him to take me back to October’s house, and to patch whatever hole in the wards had allowed for my abduction in the first place. But I hadn’t anticipated the weight of his eyes, unseeing but still somehow focused as he looked at me through his ravens, and I hadn’t known my mother would be there. She changed everything.
He chuckled, beginning to turn away.
I blurted: “I want to go home!”
“They all want to go home, in the beginning,” said Acacia, joining her husband in watching me. “Even the ones who came voluntarily—and there are more of those than the stories admit, especially among the changelings, who have good reason to run—but even they cry for the familiar in the first days after they’ve been taken. Your wanting to go home is no special thing, child. You have my sympathies, but you cannot have my aid.”
“I only wish I knew how you had come to be here,” said Blind Michael. A raven fluttered down and landed on his shoulder, giving him a closer look at me. “There’s been no Ride recent enough for you to be so untouched by this land. How are you here?”
“I . . .” I caught my breath, swallowing hard. Mother still hadn’t acknowledged my presence. “I caused offense to a noble household. I was asleep in the room that will be mine while I serve them, and then I was here. Today. I don’t remember a Ride, and if I seem untouched, it really is because I haven’t been here very long. I’m not supposed to be here. Please. Help me go home.”
“Why?” asked Mother, finally turning to look at me. She must have waited so long so she could school her face, because she looked at me like I was a stranger, like she had never seen me before. “If you were serving on a claim of offense, how is serving here any different? You’ll be a Rider for my father’s Hunt. You’ll be powerful, strong, and strange, and there won’t be anything like you in all of Faerie. And when it’s done, you’ll be free to Ride through the night on his business, and no one will touch or trouble you.”
“Mother, I know you didn’t want me to choose Daoine Sidhe, but this is more punishment than I deserve,” I blurted, reaching for her.
She shied back, eyes going wide. “Mother?” she squeaked.
Blind Michael laughed. “Calm yourself, my moon. She’s grasping at whatever ropes she thinks might pull her from the pit of her predicament. They always do. She casts no aspersions on your character, but it seems she doesn’t know to whom she speaks.”
“Our child—like all our children—is of a vegetable bloodline,” said Acacia, voice icy cold. “You, from the looks of you, descend from the garden of my sister, the Rose of Winter. You could no more be my daughter’s child than I could open the doors to deeper Faerie with my own hand. Your pretense finds no traction here.”
“But I—”
I stopped. Explaining the situation would take a long time, and would probably confuse us all even more than we already were, especially as my mother truly seemed to have no idea who I was. It felt as if I had been given my deepest wish in the worst way possible. I was finally free of the weight of my mother’s expectations and desires. Because I was entirely free of my mother.
“Perhaps one of your Riders has slipped his leash and decided to go collecting pretty pets for the empty stable stalls,” said Acacia. “Our Luna has named her a Rider, and so Rider she’ll be; the next we catch can be her steed.”
I took a step backward, and then another, stopping when my shoulders hit against a solid wall of flesh. Tilting my head back, I looked up at a hulking figure who seemed cut from the same patchwork cloth as Medley. It wasn’t the same blend of descendant lines, but it was close enough to be clear as kin.
His hands closed on my shoulders, and I was trapped.
“To the stables with her,” said Blind Michael. “Perhaps a night or three will ease her tongue, and tell us what we need to know.”
I was yanked off my feet then, and carried away from the three by the fire, who should have been my family but were strangers as they impassively watched me go.
• • •
The patchwork man threw me bodily into a low, dark space that smelled of stale straw and too many bodies pressed close together. I hit the ground and rolled, tumbling through the dark to land face-down in a pile of rotting leaves.
Spitting bits of leaf and loam out of my mouth, I pushed myself up onto my hands and looked around. As my eyes adjusted, I saw that the space wasn’t as dark as I had originally believed; sconces were set into the walls, although they contained fat white candles in place of lanterns or torches. I was in the long central space of the stable, and stalls lined the walls, each one locked with tangled briars that looked like they would slice and tear the hands of anyone trying to open them.
Something moved in the dimness behind me. I turned.
“Who’s there?”
The stable was long enough that even with my excellent night vision and the candles to lend their light, I couldn’t see the far end. It sounded like something was shifting back there, hidden by the shadows. I pushed myself to my feet, dusting leaf litter and bits of straw from my palms as I peered into the dark.
“Whoever it is, come out,” I called. “I’m not going to hurt you.”
Of course, they might be planning to hurt me, but if that was the case, better to get it over with quickly.
There was a sniffling sound, and then a small boy, no more than six or seven, with waving sea anemone tentacles in place of hair, came shuffling out into the light. I couldn’t name the bloodline he came from: as the daughter of a noble house, I should have been trained on such things from the time I was old enough to talk, and I had been, for the scant few years of my childhood in the light. But there had been no flashcards or etiquette lessons in our prison. What would have been the point?
October would know. Or Dean, if I saw him again. I could say “Hey Dean, what kind of person in the Undersea has hair like a sea anemone?” and he would just answer, and it would be a civil conversation with someone roughly my own age, and it would be amazing.
For the moment, though, there was a little boy creeping toward me, terror in his eyes and bands of soft white and blue pulsing through the waving tendrils of his hair.
“Hello,” I said. “Are you alone in here?”
He shook his head, not saying a word.
“I’m Rayseline, but my friends call me Raysel, and a man put me here because Blind Michael didn’t want me roaming free.” I wished I could take my grandfather’s name back as soon as I spoke it. The boy flinched away, looking more like a terrified animal than ever.
“He’s not coming here,” I said quickly. “He didn’t want me free, and he didn’t want me near his family, so he locked me up. Do you know how you got here?”
Again, the silent boy shook his head.
“He won’t answer you,” said a voice.
I turned. A girl had come out of the shadows near the main door. She was older than the boy and younger than me, perhaps twelve, with long, tangled blonde hair and fins running down the outside of her arms, translucent green with white edges that almost glowed in the dark. She was dressed in mortal-style clothes, blue jeans and a T-shirt with some boy-band idol printed on the front, and she was hugging herself defensively, which only put her fins into clearer view.