I moved over to join them, the unsteady light of the Merry Dancers making it difficult for me to tell what they were staring at. I blinked, and my eyes adjusted, finally allowing me to see the naked teenage girl crumpled motionless on the ground. Her long black hair was loose and tangled all around her, hiding a considerable amount of her body from view; her ears were round. If someone had asked me, I would have said she was entirely human. But she was there, in a place humans had no reason to be and probably couldn’t survive, and that meant whatever she was, it was probably something I didn’t want to mess with.
And she looked strangely, disturbingly familiar.
“Who is this?” I asked.
“Her name is Antigone of Albany, and we’ve been trying to find her for months,” said Ginevra.
Grianne, as usual, was more succinct. “Sea witch,” she said.
I yelped and danced backward, away from the pair. “Sea witch?” I demanded. “As in—you mean the—the Luidaeg?”
Ginevra nodded. “Yes. She was one of the people Titania had to get out of the way in order to establish her own version of Faerie. The Luidaeg isn’t powerful enough to fight her stepmother’s enchantments forever, but she’s too strong for Titania to just rewrite the way she did almost everyone else. So Titania put her away.”
“You didn’t tell me we were trying to find the”—I dropped my voice, in case my yelling hadn’t already been enough to wake her—“the sea witch.”
“Would you have agreed to help if I had?”
“I barely agreed to help as it was! I’m only doing this because . . .” I stopped. Why was I doing this? I wanted them to leave my family alone, and I wanted these people to be able to go home, but since I also wanted to hold on to the Faerie I knew, where I was happy and loved and understood how things were supposed to work, maybe helping them was a bad idea. It didn’t seem like our two versions of Faerie could exist in parallel. All or nothing, that was the way this went.
Was I only doing this because I was mad at my father for telling me I couldn’t? The thought was dauntingly accurate. Maybe this was all just me throwing a fit about being denied something I didn’t even understand wanting.
“Because you’re a hero,” said Ginevra.
The words sounded perfectly true and utterly false at the same time. I couldn’t be a hero. I wasn’t built for it. I was a changeling. I existed to do laundry and wash dishes and serve Faerie, not save it.
The woman on the ground—the Luidaeg—groaned and pushed herself up onto her elbows, head still bowed.
“Anyone get the license-plate number for that truck?” she asked. “That was a rhetorical question. Please don’t answer. I know what happened.”
“Luidaeg! Are you all right?” asked Ginevra, moving to help her up.
The Luidaeg waved her off. “I’m fine. Sore, pissed, and my mouth tastes like a Macy’s perfume counter, but fine.” She paused then. “You have Toby’s jacket. Why do you have Toby’s jacket? What did my fucking stepmother do?!”
“Toby’s right here,” said Ginevra, gesturing toward me. The Luidaeg turned, following the motion, and I looked directly at the sea witch for the first time.
She still seemed almost dauntingly human, impossibly so, given her setting and surroundings. Little scars dotted her cheeks and chin, the ghosts of acne or pox, and she had freckles across the bridge of her nose. But her eyes were black from side to side, and unlike Li Qin’s eyes, they were predatory and sharp. She looked at me like I was on the menu, like everything was on the menu, and the only limiting factor was how hungry she was at any given moment.
She took a step toward me. I took a step back. She stopped, an expression of slow bewilderment spreading across her face. Then she turned to Ginevra.
“Short version, now,” she said. It wasn’t a request.
“Titania managed to ensnare the Mists and two of the neighboring Kingdoms in a complicated illusion, creating a revised version of reality where Oberon was the one who vanished after Maeve’s Ride was broken, not her,” said Ginevra, quickly. “She rewrote history and built herself the illusion of a perfect pureblood paradise, where there aren’t any so-called beasts and all the changelings know their place. But she didn’t count on the cats.”
“You always were our safety valve,” said the Luidaeg. “Where’s kitty-boy?”
“He can’t really handle looking directly at some aspects of this reality, so he’s off wrangling our allies and not making things worse,” said Ginevra.
The Luidaeg’s attention swung back to me. I shied away, forcing myself not to back up any farther. It was a struggle, and I was proud when my feet didn’t move.
“I think I can guess which aspects you mean,” she said, and fully turned in my direction. “Do you know me?”
“By myth and reputation only,” I said, before adding a hasty “milady.”
“Oh, Dad’s fucking fruitful testicles, this is bullshit I did not need today.” The Luidaeg scowled. “You don’t know me at all? You don’t remember who we are to each other?”
“I’ve never seen you before in my life. Please don’t hurt me.”
“Okay.” The Luidaeg turned back to Ginevra. “So this is going to be fun. You haven’t convinced her to take the enchantment off herself yet?”
“She says she can’t,” said Ginevra. “Says she can’t get a proper grip on the spell.”
“Shit. She’s probably right about that. We’ll have to go down to the Undersea, get the other one.”
“August? She was on the surface when the spell came down. She’s here. She doesn’t seem to be able to see the threads the way her sister can. She can’t unravel Titania’s enchantments.”
“She can, she just doesn’t know how,” said the Luidaeg. She looked around. “We shouldn’t linger here. How did you even get here?”
“Toby bled on the Summer Roads key and used it to open a door,” said Ginevra.
“Oh. Well, I guess that’d do it.” The Luidaeg looked at me again. It was all I could do not to cower. “Okay, look. I am not your enemy. I’m not always your friend, either, but that’s beside the point. I am literally incapable of lying to you. If we walk away and leave you here, you will die. The forest will eventually claim its own. Most people, I’d be down for that if they annoyed me. You, though, I’ve put a lot of time and effort into, and I’d rather not start over with your gormless excuse for a sister, so I’m gonna need you to come with us. Get it?”
Arguing with one of the Firstborn is never a good idea. Arguing with a naked daughter of Maeve somehow seemed like an even worse idea than that. I forced myself to nod.
The Luidaeg threw her hands up, turning away from me. “There, was that so fucking hard? Now we just need to reset her back to her normal irritating baseline before kitty kills someone, and we’ll be fine.”
“You’re naked,” said Grianne.
“Am I? I hadn’t noticed. I was too busy spitting out roses and hawthorn tree, which, very funny, ha ha, Stepmother. I am not Merlin, nor was meant to be.” The Luidaeg snapped her fingers. The dead leaves on the clearing floor rose up and slithered along the length of her body like a great, rustling serpent, becoming a form-fitting dress in shades of decay, black and brown and bruised gray-green. “That better?”