“Okay, so something really weird is going on,” I said. “That’s nothing new. And we may have negotiated a way to keep us all fed.”
“Negotiated?” asked Medley, sounding immediately and sensibly wary.
Quickly, I explained the conversation with the Luna who wasn’t my mother, and what Dean and I had agreed to do for her. When I was done, I shrugged, and added, “There are at least two gardens, probably more. I assume you know where they are. If they all have gardening tools, she’s not going to be upset that we’re taking care of her siblings’ plots. If anything, fixing up more than one of them may make her willing to help us out with something else in the future, if we think of something. If someone comes up with an idea for how we could all get out of here.”
Medley nodded, slowly. “It’s not something I would have done, I have to see and say that, but the gardens tend to be open spots in Blind Michael’s nets. When the ravens go there, they’re busy being birds—they’re looking to feed, not spy.”
“So we throw them little treats, and we keep them on our side,” I said. “It won’t stop them from reporting us if they’re on duty, but it might keep them from doing whatever they do to get his attention. And we’ll have something to keep us busy while we wait for a rescue, and food for our bellies, and a better shot at survival.”
“This won’t last that long,” said Dean resolutely. “People will realize we’re missing and come looking for us.”
It must have been nice to have that much faith in people. But then, he didn’t spend almost his entire childhood locked up in a lightless void. I shrugged. “Sure,” I said wearily, not wanting to start another fight. “It’s just that it may take a while, and we need to eat while we wait. This is a way we can try to do it safely.”
“So we do it,” said Dean.
We both looked to Medley. After a long pause, she nodded.
“Let’s be gardeners,” she said.
• • •
Days passed, turning seamlessly into weeks as we fell into a pattern of working and hiding—first the garden, to tend and harvest, then the forest and the fire, to evade Blind Michael and his Riders.
There were seven gardens, not counting Luna’s explosion of roses: seven abandoned plots of land with crumbling structures around them and boxes of strangely untouched gardening tools hidden somewhere nearby. Like the first, each garden we approached responded with unbelievable quickness, fruit growing ripe and plentiful almost as we worked, like the gardens themselves were thanking us for taking care of them.
In the third garden, we found a well, and Medley replaced the rope on the bucket with her own, allowing us to pull up bucket after bucket of water. It came up green with pond slime in the beginning but began to clear and, by the fifth bucket, was as pristine as anything I’d ever seen. We filled the garden water barrels. The older Tangie changeling, whose name was Adam, lifted his little brother, Seb, into one of the barrels, sending water cascading in all directions, and Seb laughed—the first sound we’d heard from him—before submerging entirely. I peeked into the barrel. The anemone fronds of his hair were pulsing wildly with bands of color, and bubbles were rising from his nose, presumably as he breathed. I straightened and looked to his brother, who smiled encouragingly.
Okay. Well, most of us were some blend of Undersea bloodlines, and water was a precious thing. Medley was lowering others down into the well, two at a time so no one was alone, and I had never seen our motley little group so energized. Dean was pulling weeds nearby. I looked over at him.
“Do you want a turn in the well?”
“Merrow live in saltwater,” he said, shaking his head. “And I do better without it than most of us do. The Daoine Sidhe is strong in me.”
“You should still go down if it’ll help you.”
“I’m a Count on the land, and my mother is a Duchess in the sea. It doesn’t matter if none of these people are my subjects, I still have a duty to place their welfare above my own.”
“If you get sick because you avoid the water, will that help them?”
He glared at me and stood. “I think the apple tree could use some pruning,” he said, and stalked off. I watched him go, swallowing a sigh.
Dean was under no obligation to forgive me, much as I was under no obligation to forgive my uncle, but he continued to insist that what Simon had done to me was somehow forgivable, while what I’d done to him wasn’t. And he was allowed to feel that way, I knew that, but at the same time, it wasn’t fair. Why did I have to be lost with only one person I knew, and have that person be someone with good reason to hate me?
A great spray of water radiated out from the barrel as the Tangie changeling inside grasped the lip and yanked himself up, declaring joyfully, “Words! I have water, and that means I have words again! Hello, hello!”
The Siren girl, whose name was Marlon, had told me Tangie could speak when they were in the water; apparently that applied to water barrels as well as ponds and the like. “It’s nice to be able to talk to you finally,” I said brightly. “Since you and your brother are the only siblings here, were you together when this happened?”
“Yeah,” he said, glancing sadly downward. “I sleep in Adam’s bed most mornings, because mine’s too small, but we haven’t got me a new one yet. So I go in with him, as long as he says he doesn’t mind. We were both in bed and then I was in the stable by myself, already all locked up, and there wasn’t any water anywhere.”
“Which meant you couldn’t talk to anyone,” I said. “That must have been scary.”
“Scarier than anything,” he agreed gravely. “We know how to talk with our hands, but it’s not so easy that people can learn just from watching us a while, and we can both read and write, but that doesn’t help much if you don’t have paper or a tablet or something for writing on.”
“How much water do you need? Would a bucket be enough?”
“I don’t know,” he said, sounding briefly downcast. “Can’t we just stay here always?”
“There’s no cover,” I said, glancing anxiously up at the sky. “We can’t bribe the ravens forever, and we’re exposed here. I’m sorry, Seb. We can’t stay here all the time.”
He drooped, visibly disheartened.
“But between me and Medley, we can make sure you’re always with the crew when we’re doing this garden,” I said. “Until we find a better source of water, that is. You deserve to be able to communicate.”
He brightened again, making the gesture I had learned meant “thank you.” I smiled.
“You’re welcome.”
Faerie forbids the act of saying thanks but not the reaction to it. Little things like that often make me think some of our rules weren’t thought through very well before they were decided on.
“Now come on,” I said. “We need to get a proper harvest to take back to the fire, or we won’t be eating very well tonight, will we?”
“Before I get out of the water . . . Miss Raysel?”
“Yes?”
“Do you think we’re going to get to go home?”