“Mmm, no,” said Mother, sounding almost regretful. “You have to understand, it’s not my choice whether you stay here or run free. But it is my choice whether you hide in my greenhouse, in pleasant plenty, or whether I call my father’s guard back to take you to the stable where you belong. I named the last one we captured as a Rider. Would you prefer to be a steed? It seems you’re already careless with your hands. A few more lost fingers won’t change things for you.”
I looked desperately around myself. There were no gardening tools. There were, however, more stones like the one she’d used to prop the greenhouse door. I grabbed the largest I thought I could lift and carried it with me as I moved toward the open greenhouse.
“Please,” said Dean, sounding almost anguished. “You don’t have to do this. I haven’t done anything to hurt you.”
“The Riders who brought you to me said they found you nibbling around the edges of my sister’s garden,” she said, voice losing its sweetness as it turned dangerous. “Ceres isn’t here to defend what’s hers, and so it falls to me to do it for her. I have to guard her garden, so that when she comes home again, it’s waiting for her.”
The gardens. I paused, suddenly understanding why abandoned gardens of half-dead produce would be scattered throughout Blind Michael’s lands to begin with. I knew Mother wasn’t an only child. I’d known that even before I knew she was a rosebush and not the fox she’d always pretended to be. She’d never been willing to talk about her siblings, only that there were more than one of them, and she had loved them very much, and they had each left home before she did, leaving her behind, which was why she’d never tried to find them.
Well, now, I was pretty sure the real reason she’d never tried to find them was that they would have blown her cover in an instant if she had, but the rest of what she’d told me in our long years in the dark still rang true. She had loved her brothers and sisters, and she had hated them for leaving her alone with their parents.
The gardens weren’t accidental or planted by other escapees from Michael’s stables. They were the homes of his other children, the ones who’d gotten away. He controlled the skerry, and so they had never completely rotted or been destroyed, but he didn’t believe any of his lost children were ever coming home, so he didn’t spend extra effort or attention on keeping those gardens healthy.
“I’m sorry,” said Dean, with an air of desperation. “I didn’t know!”
“You’ll make a handsome horse,” she said. “That green in your hair—why, I wager no one will be able to tell you from a kelpie.”
She laughed then, a bright, tittering sound. I crept closer, rock in hand.
Hopefully, I’d be able to grab Dean and run without assaulting my own mother. Blind Michael wasn’t actively hunting us right now—if he had been, there was no way I’d have been able to reach her house unchallenged, even if the ravens were still eating, or preening, or whatever it was they did after a meal. That would change if I hurt his daughter. There was no way he’d be able to forgive that.
Peeking through the greenhouse door, I saw all the fruits and vegetables she hadn’t planted outside, ripe and bright and perfect in a way the discarded gardens weren’t anymore—couldn’t be, because the hands that planted them were gone. She was between me and Dean, but his eyes widened slightly as he saw me in the doorway, and she turned, eyebrows raising as she saw me there with the rock.
“Come to attack me, little liar?” she asked. “How did you get out of my father’s stables? I doubt he gave you permission to leave.”
“He didn’t,” I said, dropping my rock. Time for plan B, whatever that was. I didn’t see a lot of options. “I let myself out. And it would be great if you could just let Dean go.”
“Why would I want to do that?”
“Because we’re asking nicely? Because we haven’t done anything to you, and so there’s no reason you need to do anything to us? Because your father’s right when he says there hasn’t been a Ride recently enough to bring us here; we don’t know how we got here, just that there’s been some sort of a mistake, and we’re trying to stay alive long enough to get home. Because . . .” I paused, taking a deep breath. “Because if you let him go, and you let us go, then as soon as we make it back to our world, I’ll find your sister and tell her that you miss her. You miss her, don’t you? You wish she would come and visit you? I can tell her that.”
She froze, expression going slowly blank. Then, with a small frown, she asked, “Which one?”
“What do you mean?”
“Which sister? I have several. Brothers, too. They all left me. They left me here with our parents, alone, and I don’t want to leave, not like they did. The children who come here are better for it. None of my father’s Riders regret.”
Maybe not, but Medley had described the last change the stables made as the mind. Maybe they couldn’t regret. “That’s good,” I said. “It would be awful to be turned into something you weren’t, and feel bad about it after. But they cry when he puts them in the stables, don’t they? They cry and they ask to go home.”
“They’re wrong.”
“Why are they wrong? If this is your home, and you’re happy here, why can’t they be happy in their homes? Why can’t they want to go back to the families who aren’t here with them? Dean has a brother, like he said. If you tell your father where we are, and we’re taken, he’ll never see his brother again.”
Mother’s frown deepened. She had never told me what caused her to finally run away from her parents and steal a child’s skin in order to flee the skerry. I couldn’t remind her of something she had apparently never done—and I couldn’t keep thinking of her as “Mother,” either. She was a cutting, somehow taken from the woman I knew, a rose who’d never grown in any other soil.
“Please,” I said, trying to keep my voice gentle. “We just want to go home. We haven’t hurt you, we’re not hurting anything, and we were only near your sister’s garden because we need to eat. We can stay away if you want us to.”
“The gardens are in disrepair with my siblings gone,” she said, slowly. “We could make a trade, if that was something you wanted to do?”
“What kind of trade?” I asked.
“Weed,” she said. “Weed, and hoe, and remove such stones as you find. If you can rebuild a wall or patch a fence, do those things as well, and whatever yet grows in the gardens is yours to have.”
For a dizzying second, I thought Luna was asking me for weed. Then I caught up with the rest of what she was saying, and realized she was telling us what she wanted us to do. Carefully, I said, “To be sure I’m understanding you correctly, you’re saying that if we’ll take care of the gardens, we can have what we want from them?”
Luna nodded. “I won’t shelter you—I can’t shelter you—but I can’t maintain their gardens on my own, either. It angers Father to be reminded that they left us. I think he’d wipe their remnants away, if Mother didn’t insist he leave them as they are.”