I made a noncommittal noise, which Ginevra seemed to take as some sort of agreement, because she relaxed, just a little, before she asked, “What did you see?”
“Pink lines. In the air all around everyone but you and him. August, did you know our descendant line could see magic when we focused the power we get from blood the right way?”
She blinked, looking utterly baffled. “What?”
“Maybe Mother never taught you either because it’s not a power she has, and she didn’t realize we did,” I said. “But yeah. If I have access to blood, and I close my eyes and focus the way I do when I’m trying to pick up on the scent of someone’s magic, I can see spells. They look like webs in the air, like someone’s knotted them out of moonlight or . . . or wind, intangible but solid at the same time.” I wasn’t explaining this very well. I wasn’t sure it was something that could be explained very well. How do you breathe? You don’t think about it, you just do it. Some functions of magic work the same way. The harder you think about them, the more difficult they become.
“There have been a few times when I bit my lip or something, where I saw a flash of what you’re talking about, but it never lasted,” she said.
“Maybe because you weren’t focusing on it? It doesn’t seem to happen unless I focus really hard,” I said. “April—the little girl in Dreamer’s Glass—told me I could do it, and when she cut me and I tasted the blood, I saw myself doing it in a . . . very bad situation. So I just did what the blood already knew how to do. I looked the right way, and I saw the spell.”
“Can you show me the memory?” asked August, sounding genuinely interested and not at all upset for the first time since this conversation had begun.
“I think we’re moving away from the point,” said Garm.
“I think we lost the point a while ago,” said Grianne.
That was more than the normally taciturn Candela sometimes said in an afternoon. I blinked at her. She looked calmly back, her Merry Dancers circling her head like tiny satellite extensions of her self.
“You tasted blood,” she said. “You looked at us. What did you see?”
“I saw threads wrapped around you like a net, until they almost obscured your own magic,” I said. “Pink and iridescent and glistening—the magic’s alive, it’s responsive, it’s still being powered by the caster.” I wouldn’t speak Titania’s name, not aloud. Not yet. If these were her spells I was destroying—and they were, all the denial in the world wouldn’t change what I knew deep down to be true—then I was committing treason by even looking at them.
“All of us?” asked Ginevra.
“No,” I said, frowning a little at being asked to repeat myself. “I already said there weren’t any wrapped around you or Tybalt, and the ones around Garm are frayed, like something’s been nibbling at them.”
“Arden went to meet April and her mothers in Dreamer’s Glass,” said Ginevra. “She said you were able to break the threads around January, and doing so restored her memories of the other world. The one that existed before the illusion.”
“I did, and it did, but it was exhausting, and it gave me a horrible headache,” I said. “Then Sir Etienne grabbed me and took me to do it again to his daughter—did you know he had a daughter?” I turned to Father. “He’s been hiding her in the mortal world, with a human woman. He says she’s his wife. Is that even legal? Can we marry humans?”
“It has always seemed such an impossibility that no prohibitions have been set against it,” said Father, brow furrowed in thought. “Assuming he never told his wife of the existence of Faerie, he committed no actual crimes. Begetting a changeling and not immediately surrendering their care is allowed, or families like ours would never happen.”
“Okay,” I said slowly, feeling my way through the syllables. “He said he’d been hiding her because he couldn’t subject her to the way our world treats changelings, and that . . .” I faltered. “He said he knew for a fact that our mother could turn changelings fully fae, and that she had done it before. He knew.”
“You need to stop your tongue, October,” said August sharply. “You speak of family matters.”
“These secrets are no secrets to us,” said Garm. He shrugged. “Our liege drinks. Everyone knows he drinks. And when he does, his tongue loosens, and he shares things he should perhaps leave mired in silence.”
“As should you!” snapped August. “You shame your liege by repeating the lies wine tells him.” She glanced to Father. “Tell him to be silent.”
“August,” said Father softly. “I can’t.”
She blinked, her rage dying in the face of her confusion.
“I’m no threat to your secrets,” said Ginevra. With a note of humor, she added, “This version of Faerie doesn’t even want to admit I exist, much less listen to whatever wild stories I want to start spinning about their precious Firstborn.”
I focused on Father as I continued. “He said if Mother could do that, he believed August and I could, too. And he said he knew this was true, because you and Uncle Sylvester were born changelings.” I was coming dangerously close to admitting what I had sworn never to discuss with anyone outside my immediate family. But I had to know. “Is that true? Were you born mortal?”
“I . . .” He looked away from me, taking a deep breath. “October, you have to understand that I . . .”
That was all I needed to hear. My father had always been one of the most talented liars I’d ever met: he could charm the petals off a rose, or the feathers from a bird’s wing. But I’d never known him to lie well when it mattered. When faced with something that could harm him or someone he cared about, he stumbled and stammered and was quickly reduced to incoherence. If he was stumbling over his words, that meant Etienne had been telling the truth.
Which meant he had been somehow deserving of Mother’s magic, but I was not, and never had been. He hadn’t been born destined for servitude, forbidden to have a home and family of his own. Oh, no. Somehow, he’d managed to catch the eye of the only Firstborn who could open Faerie’s doors for him in their entirety, granting him place, prestige, and patronage.
I’d always known what Mother could do. As long as I could remember. But she had never offered to do it for me, and I’d never been certain that anyone had experienced her magic in that way, much less someone I was so close to. To find out what could have been, well . . .
It stung. As much for August as for myself. I could have been a full part of Faerie. I could have belonged. And she could have known her sister would never leave her, that my mortality wouldn’t eventually, inevitably, pull us apart.
“He asked me to strip the humanity from his daughter,” I said, my gaze returning to Ginevra. Somehow, she had become the most neutral person there, the one I could look at without fear of censure or shame. “He wanted her to have all of Faerie as her own, not to be forced to the fringes and left there to starve while he was sat at a feast beyond consuming. He asked, and his human wife asked, and his daughter asked. They said it was within the limits of what I could achieve. And so . . . I tried.”