That was an alarming thought. I looked at the children again, trying to find any signs that they’d been transformed by the strange magic of Blind Michael’s stables. They were an odd assortment—odder than I’d assumed, even, when seen by the firelight. Almost all of them were a blend of at least two types of fae, or fae and human, and their only commonality was that they all seemed to have had at least one parent from the Undersea. That still left me the odd one out: neither of my parents is from the Undersea, unless I missed a lot more genealogy lessons than I’d ever realized.
I wasn’t as familiar as I probably should have been with the bloodlines of the Undersea, and I realized as I looked at the slumped, exhausted children that I wouldn’t be able to tell if half of them had been transformed, as long as it was in a small way.
The alarming question of whether I’d be able to tell if I had been changed followed quickly on. I swallowed hard. Medley had said it began with the magic. My magic has changed before, when October rebalanced my blood; it used to smell of hot wax and mustard flowers, candles burning in a dark meadow. After the change, it still smelled of hot wax, but the flowers were gone, replaced by crushed blackthorn fruit. I reached down into myself, and was relieved when the answering surge of magic was precisely as I expected it to be.
I’d been awake less than a day. I couldn’t handle another transformation, not yet. Maybe not ever.
Dean’s face softened as the implications of Medley’s words sank in, and he looked at me with slightly less scorn. “Well, then, your capture served a purpose. Still, it would probably be better if you’d try not to do it again.”
“I’ll get right on that.” I sat down on the nearest log, and the smaller Tangie rose, moving over to claim my lap. I blinked at him in surprise.
His brother followed him, sitting beside me. Looking me full in the face, he mouthed “Thank you,” exaggerating the motion of his lips until there could be no question of what he was saying. He touched his right hand to his chin and brought it down, palm-up.
Thanks are forbidden in Faerie, but it’s possible that injunction only really applies to spoken thanks. We gesture gratitude all the time. “You’re welcome?” I ventured.
He beamed at me.
“Can you—do you know how to write?” I asked. “If you do, I can read a little.”
“A little?” interjected Dean.
“I was a child when my Uncle Simon abducted me,” I said. “He locked me and my mother in an endless expanse of blackness, and we couldn’t exactly practice my letters down there.”
He blinked, looking stricken. “Simon Torquill?” he asked.
“Unless I have another uncle I don’t know about,” I said. “He was the one who grabbed us and—and broke me.”
“He didn’t do it to break you!”
“Is there a better reason to lock someone in a lightless prison and forget about them? Because I’d love to hear it.”
Dean glared at me. “You don’t know the whole story.”
I gestured to the dark forest all around us with both hands. “Well, it looks like we’re going to have time for you to tell it to me, now, doesn’t it?”
• • •
Of course, that time couldn’t be right away. We had fourteen confused children to deal with, children whose shocked malaise was quickly becoming restless whining as they grew hungry. What’s more, the changelings our age were starting to get belligerent as their situation sank in. They’d been abducted from their homes and thrown into the hands of a monster. They were allowed to be a little irritable.
Eventually, Medley gathered up the older changelings, turning her attention on the children. “I know I don’t have to tell you not to wander off, because you’re all reasonably clever, and you know the monsters are real, and they’re really here. If you’re not by the fire when we come back, I’m going to assume it’s because you don’t want to be protected, and I won’t come to fetch you from the stables a second time. Do you understand?”
I had never seen that many children that silent before. They nodded, none of them moving an inch or taking their eyes off of Medley’s face.
“You all probably think I’m really mean,” she said. “I’m fine with that, because if you’re thinking I’m mean, it means you’re still you enough to think at all. If Blind Michael’s Riders take you, your magic goes first, and then your body, and finally your mind, and once that’s happened, you won’t think I’m mean at all. You’ll think I’m prey. If you listen to me, maybe that doesn’t happen. Stay here.”
She turned to the older children. “You, though. You’re coming with me, so we can find something to feed this whole mob. This is more people than I’ve ever had to look after, and I’m not doing it alone.”
She glanced over her shoulder at me and Dean. “It sounds like you two have some things you need to work through. Go. Work them through. I’m not babysitting you, too. If you go that way”—she stabbed a finger at the trees—“you’ll find an old garden that sometimes has things worth eating in it. Bring back what you can.”
She turned then, herding her helpers off into the trees. I exchanged a glance with Dean.
“I don’t think she’s mean,” I said. “I think she’s practical. And terrifying.”
“So terrifying,” he agreed. “But she’s also trying to keep us safe, and I can respect that. I don’t want to be turned into something else.”
“I don’t either,” I agreed. “I’m still getting used to being this version of me.”
“You look different than you used to,” he said.
I started walking for the trees, not wanting to have this conversation in front of the kids. “Yeah,” I said, uncomfortably. “My blood was—bad.”
“What do you mean? Blood can’t be bad. Blood’s just blood.” His expression hardened as he followed me. “You better not be about to say that you’re not responsible for what you did because your blood was bad and now it’s not. I’m not listening to that bullshit.”
We stepped into the shadows under the trees, moving away from the safety of the fire. I shivered, desperate to turn and run back before we got too far. It had been easy to be brave when I thought Blind Michael would listen to me, before I’d learned that my mother had no idea who I was. Something very strange was going on here, and I wasn’t October, I wasn’t a hero. I just wanted this to stop.
And going back wouldn’t be what stopped it. I forced myself to keep walking.
“I wasn’t going to,” I said uncomfortably, even if I had been about to say something like that. “It’s just . . . you know how your dad’s Daoine Sidhe, like my dad? And your mom’s a Merrow?”
“Yeah . . .”
“Merrow and Daoine Sidhe are both mammals.”
“I know that. What’s your point?”
“My mother isn’t a mammal. She looked like one for a while, because she did some big magic I don’t understand and stole the skin from a Kitsune girl who’d been taken by my grandfather. While she was wearing that stolen skin, her natural magic was almost entirely suppressed—and it seemed her vegetable nature was masked, to such an extent that she was able to get with child, and I was born. But I should never have been possible. I was mammal and vegetable at the same time, and my blood was literally poisoning me.”