“Yes?” I said, too confused to say anything else.
April’s speech appeared to make more sense to Li Qin, whose eyes widened before she gave a quick nod and said, “I accept your terms and conditions.”
“Always read the terms and conditions,” said April, with a flicker of amusement. “Very well. My name is April O’Leary. I was originally a Dryad tied to an oak copse that stood some miles from here, closer to the human city of Fremont. When our trees were razed by mortal developers, I was afraid. I did not wish to die. So I grabbed a large branch from my broken tree, the sap still quick and bright within it, and I ran for the first knowe I could find. The humans did not see me. I was not fully within the Summerlands during my flight, but Dryads are protected as pixies are, when we are in our truest and most unfiltered state.”
“So did they see a branch running by itself down the road?” It seemed like a reasonable-enough question.
April still looked at me like it was the most foolish thing she’d ever heard. “No. A Dryad is her tree. If the branch died—when the branch died—I would die with it. Until then, it was as invisible as I was. You promised me no interruptions.”
“Sorry,” I said, chagrined. It felt odd to be chastised by a girl less than a quarter of my age, and perfectly natural at the same time. All Dryads are purebloods. While the Hamadryads can have changeling children, their cousins, the Dryads and the Blodynbryd, cannot.
“Do not interrupt again,” said April. Her eyes fixed on Li Qin, she continued. “I arrived in the County of Tamed Lightning and begged the aid of its countess, January O’Leary, who was working late, much to the chagrin of her wife. She disliked how willing Countess O’Leary was to spend time in her lab, when she could have been home in the arms of her loving spouse. They had discussed children, but as neither wished to lie with a man for the purposes of getting them, they were waiting for the appropriate time to adopt. I knew none of this, and when I crashed into her presence, January did not think of children, only saving my life. The first thing she did upon knowing me was look at someone who was by many measures already dead and move to save me. That was the moment she became my mother.”
She paused to take a deep breath, voice shaking on the inhale. Calming herself, she continued, “She worked through the day and late into the next night, using the talents of her company alchemist, Yui, to keep the remains of my tree from dying as she sliced off slivers of the wood that was my flesh and integrated them with a server she had been preparing to decommission. She warned me before she turned it on that if it worked, things would be different, and she . . . she called her wife.” Still watching Li Qin, she said, “She had married a Shyi Shuai, and she begged her to bend the luck around the moment as thoroughly as she could, even knowing this would bring a backlash down on one or both of them. It was the only means she had of saving me. And she had become determined that I should live. Her wife agreed. January put down the scalpel. She tightened the final screw. She asked if I was ready.
“How can anyone be ready to face their own annihilation? Especially in Faerie. The humans live expecting death, understanding that it already knows their names and waits to claim them when the time arrives. We, though . . . we were made to live forever. A Dryad’s tree may look as mortal as any other, but its roots drive deep and time will not fell it. I told her I was afraid. She told me she would take care of me. I nodded to say what my voice would no longer support, and she pressed a button and everything was gone, replaced by darkness.
“My thoughts—we are so defined by our forms. I had been a tree, slow and green and growing, and now I was splinters and silicon, electricity and the movement of information. It took what felt like years for me to gather myself and reach out to meet her again, and when I did, she wept, she clasped me close and told me I was safe now, safe forever. She agreed to be my parent. Her wife did the same. They loved me long and well, and with all the compassion they had to offer. I was strange to them, and they to me, and still we found our common places, until we were truly a family.
“Mama was working on a new form of immortality, one that would remove all inequalities within Faerie. She wanted to digitize and upload our world. No more barriers of blood, no more differences of power, just people, stripped of everything else. It was a ridiculous idea. I can see that now. But at the time, she was trying her best to resolve what she saw as unreasonable barriers in the path of the people she loved. She hated that we could be killed. Even more, she hated that changelings in her care didn’t need to be killed. Over time, they would simply . . . die.”
She stopped, going silent as she stared off into the distance. Li Qin and I exchanged a look, each of us wordlessly asking the other if she was finished and we could speak again. Finally, Li Qin decided to risk it:
“It didn’t work?”
“Not as intended,” said April, snapping back into the moment. “The upload stripped a person’s mind and magic from their body, storing it in a temporary matrix until it could be uploaded to a machine. Once there, the packets of information the people had become were entirely static, frozen and inert. I could enter the server, but I could not get them to interact with me. Mama was still attempting to resolve the problem. I believed in her. I knew she would succeed, given sufficient time.
“What about the people who’d been uploaded?” asked Li Qin, in a tone of fascinated horror.
“They died,” said April. “My other mother said this had to end. Said it was the backlash from bending the luck to save me, and that she was equally responsible. She said there was blood on both their hands. My mothers fought. They had never done that before. I did not like it. I asked them to stop. And my mother, my Shyi Shuai mother, said she couldn’t stay and watch as everything fell apart, not when she knew this was partially due to her intervention. She never blamed me, but still, I knew I had been instrumental in creating the circumstances which demanded such an extreme twisting of luck. Mama owned a manor house in the mortal state of Oregon, one which had once been connected to her family’s holdings, before the War of Silences. My other mother went there to spend a period of time in contemplation, and to purify her luck. She was gone when Mama died.”
Somehow, I had known that was coming, the knowledge imparted by both the inevitability of the child’s story and the ghosts of impossible memory I’d plucked out of my blood. It still stung to hear it put so baldly.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
April waved my apology away. “She got better. My surviving mother returned and, feeling guilt over her own part in the losses, found an ancient blood ritual which could potentially be used to bring back the dead, in conjunction with the files contained on our server. She contacted the most powerful blood-worker any of us knew, and arranged for their resurrection. Mother’s body had been burned after her death. We had no means of recovering her. But I remembered a time when the blood-worker we called had summoned the night-haunts to her aid, and I was able to blackmail them into building Mother a new body. She was restored as well, and we were able to return to a life of mundane existence and peaceful scientific exploration. We were happy. All of us.
“But life doesn’t cease because you’re happy, and the blood-worker I mentioned was a magnet for complications. She continued to attract them, and while we were rarely present, I had befriended her squire and supplied him with a cellular phone, which he used to keep me apprised of developments. The last series of messages I received from him told me of a huge and terrible battle against Queen Titania, Mother of Illusions, who had been returned from her long exile.”