“Why not?” I asked.
“He can’t,” she said, with a shrug. “His father was a human, but his mum’s a Tangie, and they can’t talk when they’re out of the water.”
Well, there went my potential conversation with Dean. I sat down against the wall, hugging my knees against my chest. “You know him?”
“Not really,” she said. “My mum pledges out of Roane Rathad, and he lives with his mum and brother all the way out at the edges of Saltmist. But sometimes she brings them inland, so they don’t lose touch with the human side of their heritage. I think she hopes that if they spend enough time on land, they’ll learn how to talk the way human people do, and have an easier time of it.”
The boy scowled at her and made an emphatic gesture, using both hands. She rolled her eyes.
“I’ve told and told and told you, I can’t read your hands,” she said. “It’s not that I don’t want to, it’s that I can’t. I’m sorry.”
The boy sighed heavily, lowering his hands and giving me a plaintive look. I shook my head.
“I’m sorry. I don’t speak any kind of sign language,” I said. “Some days, I feel like I barely speak English.” I looked at the girl. “Do you know how you got here?”
“I was playing Call of Duty with some friends of mine, and then I—I don’t know. It was like I blacked out or something. And then I was landing in this nasty little creek full of mud and crawdads. They pinched. I got out and went looking for a grownup, and what I found was a biker gang or something. They tossed me in here.”
“How many of us are there?”
She shrugged. “About a dozen so far. And I’m not sure if it’s an ‘us.’ You’re the only pureblood I’ve seen. All the rest of us are either changelings, or we’re a mix of at least two descendant lines. And we’re all Undersea. That’s the weirdest part. I don’t see what you’re doing in here with us, because you’re not Undersea at all.”
“Undersea?” I asked blankly.
She held up her arms, showing me her fins. “Siren,” she said. She pointed to the boy. “Tangie. We’ve got Merrow and Fuath and Nixie and even a pair of Roane. We’re all scooped out of the Undersea, and you’re not. So why are you here?”
Dean was Undersea, with his Merrow mother. I worried a lock of hair between my fingers, trying to puzzle out the connection. “Do you know Dean Lorden?”
“Duchess of Saltmist’s older boy, currently Count of Goldengreen in the Mists, so it’s questionable whether he’s my superior or not, since technically the Undersea and the land are distinct political entities,” she recited, and I heard the echo of my own short-lived etiquette lessons in her carefully chosen words.
“He’s here.”
She perked up, losing her air of studied disinterest in an instant. “Here?”
“Not in this room here, but in this realm here. I saw him before they took me. If he’s not in here, they haven’t managed to catch him yet.” Hopefully, Medley’s presence meant he wouldn’t be captured at all.
She nodded, looking toward one of the holes in the roof with sudden hope. “If he’s loose, he might come and save us,” she said. “My mother always says the Duchess of Saltmist is brave and stubborn and not very clever, and that her sons inherited all she is, so I’m sure he’ll be fool enough to try and rescue us all if he knows we’re here. Does he know we’re here?”
“I think he knows there’s more than just him and me and a boy named Scott, but I don’t know how much more than that he knows.” I also didn’t know whether he would come to my rescue if he thought I was the only one who’d been captured. Even Medley’s dire proclamations about the nature of the stable and its changes might not be enough to make him willing to save me.
Maybe it had been foolish to go to my grandparents expecting help. But how was I supposed to guess my mother would be there, or that she would somehow not know who I was?
I didn’t think she’d been pretending, either. There had been no recognition in her face. I was a stranger to her, and my grandfather was alive, and something was very, very wrong.
I hugged my knees more tightly to my chest. “October will come for me,” I said, voice low. “She’s a hero. That’s what she does. She comes, and she saves you.”
“October Daye? The knight?” asked the girl with the finned arms.
I looked up at her and nodded.
“You know her?”
“I . . .” I didn’t really know how to describe our relationship anymore. She’d been my father’s knight when I was a child, and then she was my uncle’s child, by law if not by blood, and now she was my guardian, at least for the next year’s time. So what were we to each other? Finally, desperate to finish the sentence, I said, “She’s my cousin.”
“Whoa!”
The girl flounced over and sat next to me on the stable floor. “Tell me everything.”
I blinked. But she looked hopeful and fiercely brave, like she was doing everything in her power to keep her terror hidden. If I could help by telling her stories, what was the harm in that? I cleared my throat.
“She eats weird stuff,” I said. “Jam on meat sandwiches, and cheese in soup, and I saw her put peanut butter on roast carrots once. She used to be allergic to strawberries, but she’s not anymore, because she’s given away too much of her humanity trying to keep Faerie safe. I was . . . I was really rotten to her for a while, because I was hurting after some bad stuff that wasn’t her fault, but she still saved me when I needed her to, because she saves everybody when they need her, whether they deserve it or not.”
More kids crept out of the shadows as I talked, including the Tangie boy, who wedged himself right up next to me, so that his shoulder was pressed into my arm. He still didn’t say a word, just looked up at me with wide, trusting eyes, and waited for me to continue.
So I did. I told them every pointless little thing I could, although I stopped short of making things up. They began drifting off to sleep, one after the other, lulled by the dark and the rhythmic sound of my voice. Their breathing evened out, until I was the last one awake in the great bulk of the stable.
And then I wasn’t awake either.
• • •
I woke to the sound of footsteps impossibly, improbably overhead. Opening my eyes, I looked up, and beheld Medley’s mismatched face, staring down at me from one of the holes in the ceiling.
“How long did you sleep?” she asked.
I looked around me. All the kids were still sleeping. None of them was going to tell me how long I’d been out. I looked up at her. “I don’t know,” I said.
“Best hope it wasn’t long, or you don’t get caught again,” she said, direly. “What’s given here is given for good, and what’s taken is never seen again. You won’t like what you’ll lose.”
That didn’t sound good.
“Are you here to get me out?”
“I was originally just going to come and laugh at you for being silly enough to think you could argue with Blind Michael to begin with,” she said. “You think like a princess, princess. You’ll have to get over that.”