We rounded the building, and beheld the source of the light: a massive bonfire had been erected in what looked a lot like a medieval town square, wood piled high and burning bright. All around it, figures in armor were gathered, some sitting on hay bales, others standing, tankards or joints of roast meat in their hands. They chatted easily, apparently at rest. The ones not wearing helmets were . . . difficult for me to look directly at. Their features were subtly distorted from what I expected to see, as if they had been cobbled together from members of different descendent lines. Horns and fangs and gills where they didn’t belong met my eyes from all directions.
For all of that, they weren’t entirely monstrous: as with everything in Faerie, there was a strange beauty to their tatterdemalion forms, one echoed in the faces and shapes of the children who ran wild around the bonfire’s edges, their limbs bare and their bodies clad in patchwork rags that looked like they’d been harvested from a dozen different time periods. The stories said Blind Michael’s Hunt stole children, and either this was the proof or the refutation: looking at those children, I could think of no place in Faerie they belonged but there.
Two tall chairs had been set up on a platform to one side of the circle. The first of them held a tall man with skin streaked like the bark of an ash tree, auburn hair, and horns like a young stag’s. The outline of his body flickered as I looked at him, now powerfully built as any of the warriors, now thin and almost bony. I couldn’t tell which was true. In the moment, it didn’t matter.
The woman next to him had skin as yellow as a daffodil, and her hair was a mass of gold and brown roots that writhed and restyled itself constantly, never stilling. A scar ran down one side of her face, from just below to eye to her chin, pulling the side of her mouth up in a permanent sneer. She was still beautiful, and she sat in that simple wooden chair as if it was the grandest throne in all of Faerie.
The Luidaeg stood in front of them, saying something I couldn’t hear, her hands moving fast as she gestured to emphasize her point. Ginevra was with her, silently observing.
Grianne bumped her shoulder against mine as she stepped past me into the bonfire’s light. It wasn’t an accident; when I looked sharply up, she was looking at me, eyes calm.
“Think a lot hangs on what you decide you’re going to do next,” she said. “Make some decisions.”
Then she was gone, joining the crowd of impossible people in their easy gathering. None of them blinked twice at the sight of her; one of them handed her a tankard, and she laughed at something I was too far away to hear.
I stepped farther back into the shadows. I wasn’t ready for this. I wasn’t ready for any of this. I was no stranger to the Firstborn—I was raised by one—but the sea witch was her own level of monster, and Blind Michael was the horror we used to threaten naughty children. Supposedly, he snatched misbehaving changelings out of their beds in the middle of the day, saving their parents the embarrassment of knowing them. The children he took were never seen again. I’d been too old for him to target for years, but the fear was there. The fear had always been there.
I shivered, starting to turn away, and yelped as something slammed into me from the side, moving fast through the darkness. I stumbled, not quite falling over as I realized what had hit me was a girl about my age, tall and gawky, long-limbed and underfed. She clung to me like I was the rescue rope she’d been waiting for since time began, and I stared at her with wide eyes, not sure how I was supposed to deal with this.
Unlike the people around the fire, she wasn’t patchwork at all: she was Daoine Sidhe, with freckles across the bridge of her nose and a face rendered ashen and pale by the distant firelight. I couldn’t see the color of her hair or eyes, but the shape of her face and the points of her ears were dead indicators for her descendant line. I tried to push her off me, and she started to cry.
That was new. I’d never made a pureblood cry before. I froze, unable to figure out what to do next.
“I knew it I knew it I knew if I just waited long enough you’d come for me I knew it,” she said, voice shaking. “I knew it I knew you wouldn’t forget about me.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “I’m so, so sorry, but I don’t know who you are or why you’re hanging onto me right now.”
She let me go and stumbled back, staring at me. “What?”
“I’m sorry.”
“What?!” She shook her head, face twisting with confusion and dismay. “No. No-no-no you do not get to stand there and tell me you don’t know me either. I waited for you!”
“I’m so sorry,” I said, trying to calm her down before her shouting attracted the people at the fire. “I really don’t—let’s start from the beginning, all right? My name’s October. You are . . . ?”
“Rayseline. Everyone calls me ‘Raysel,” she said, more slowly. “You really don’t know me?”
“I’m sorry, but no, I don’t. Why should I know you?”
“My father is your liege,” she said. “You—when they woke me up after I was elf-shot, you claimed offense against me so I could get out of Shadowed Hills. I’m supposed to be serving your household for a year. You don’t remember any of that?”
“No,” I said, swallowing the urge to tell her to stop lying. I didn’t have a liege, but based on the rest of what she’d said, she was talking about my Uncle Sylvester. Who didn’t have any children.
“Four months ago. I was in my new room at your house, and then I was here, and no one knew who I was, and no one knew how I could get out of here, and you’re supposed to be the hero! You’re supposed to save me!” She started crying again, putting her hands over her face this time, and said, voice muffled by her palms, “You were supposed to save me.”
I just stared at her, not sure how I was supposed to respond to this. I’d never seen this girl before in my life. She was a sobbing stranger in a monster’s private playground, and no one could have blamed me if I’d turned and run away.
No one but me, and since I’d go with myself anywhere I went, I was the person I couldn’t afford to upset that badly.
Cautious, as if I were approaching a wild animal, I moved toward her. “Hey,” I said, keeping my own voice soft and level. “Hey, I’m sorry I don’t know who you are, but the people I’m with, they’re trying to find a way to fix that. They’re trying to figure out how we can put Faerie back the way it was before.”
Four months. The same thing Ginevra had said. If my reality had really only existed for four months, that explained why my early memories were so . . . flat, for lack of a better term. They really were just outlines, placeholders to support the weight of the world Titania was trying to construct.
Raysel raised her head, sniffling as she looked at me. “Really?”
“Really,” I said. I glanced around. Titania must have put her here for a reason. I just couldn’t figure out what it was. “Are you . . . Firstborn?”
“What? No!” She recoiled, staring at me again. “I’m Sylvester and Luna Torquill’s daughter. Not that she knows that.”
“She who?”
“My mother.” She said the word with absolute disdain, like she couldn’t think of anything worse.