I blinked. “Your mother? Is she here?”
“She is. Blind Michael’s her father. She spends most of her time in her private rose garden, and I think she’s happier there than she ever was at home with her family.” Raysel frowned, petulant and angry. “This is a version of her who never ran away from home, and I guess it’s easier to be happy when you live in a walled garden your whole life and never realize what you might be missing.”
Her words, innocent as they were, still stung, and it was all I could do not to wince. “Okay,” I said. “Well, I think the Luidaeg is asking Blind Michael for help getting out of here and back to the Summerlands. Do you want to come with us?”
She nodded, immediate and vigorous.
“Is there anyone else here who’s going to want to come with us?”
She stopped nodding and, instead of petulant, looked briefly guilty. “What I said before, how no one knows who I am, that wasn’t altogether true,” she said. “There’s one other person here who knows me. But he and I aren’t friends, and it’s not like he knows the way out of here any better than I do.”
I blinked. “Okay. Where do I find this person?”
“Blind Michael divides his people into Riders and Ridden,” she said. “The children become one or the other when he hosts a Wild Hunt, but he doesn’t have one of those until tomorrow night, so right now, there’s lots of children just running around, and we’ve been hiding among them. I don’t know what’s going to happen after his Ride.” She shuddered. “The children who sleep in his stables, they . . . they change. We haven’t changed, because we’ve been staying away from the stables and gathering our own food. Follow me.”
She started to move then, heading quickly off into the dark and leaving me to follow. I did, as quietly as I could. We had managed not to attract any attention from the fire while Raysel had her little meltdown, but I couldn’t imagine the Luidaeg would be thrilled to hear that I was running off with strange girls who insisted I was supposed to save them.
Or maybe she’d be delighted, since that sort of behavior seemed to fit with the person she thought I was. A person who married beasts and made friends with little girls of living light, who transformed changelings into pure fae out of some weird sense of justice. A person at least two people had called a hero.
I wasn’t sure I could be her, even if I wanted to be. I wasn’t sure I could learn how.
Raysel climbed over the ruins of a crumbling stone wall. I followed. There was a smaller fire on the other side, and a scattering of people sitting around it. None of them had the same patchworked look as the people at Blind Michael’s fire, but they were all blends of at least two types of fae, judging by the looks of them. Some were mortal as well, changelings in more directions than one. All of them looked up as we approached, Raysel raising her hands defensively.
“I’m not here to make trouble,” she said. “I just want to talk to him.”
I stopped, still some distance back, to see how this was going to play out.
It wasn’t a long wait. There was an explosion of motion at one end of the rough circle, as a Daoine Sidhe in torn pants and a stained shirt surged to his feet, stalking toward Raysel. His hands were balled into fists, but even so, I could tell his fingers were webbed to the first knuckle, and one of them was missing. His hair looked black in the firelight, shot through with impossible glints of green, and even with the fire behind him, I could see his scowl.
“Go away, Rayseline,” he snapped. “I’m not in the mood for you to tell me again how we’re never getting out of here.”
“That’s not why I came,” she said, voice quick and anxious. “Dean, I—”
But he wasn’t listening to her anymore. Instead, he was looking beyond her to me, scowl melting into a look of profound confusion.
“Toby?” he asked, voice cracking on the second syllable of my nickname.
“Um, hi,” I said, raising one hand in a small wave. “I’m October. It’s nice to meet—”
He didn’t give me time to finish before he was rushing at me, just like Raysel had, and wrapping me in a tight, desperate hug. He clung, shaking, and I patted him awkwardly on the shoulder, trying to figure out how I was supposed to extricate myself from this situation.
“Meet you,” I finished.
“Meet me?” He loosened his grip enough to lean back and blink at me, searching my face for the answer to a question I didn’t know. He didn’t find it, because he let go and took a step back, profound disappointment blossoming in his expression. “You don’t know us, do you?”
“I was trying to tell your friend here that I didn’t,” I said, gesturing to Raysel.
“I believed you,” said Raysel wearily.
“Look, I’m here with the Luidaeg, one of my uncle’s knights, and a Cait Sidhe, and they’re trying to convince Blind Michael he should do . . . something and let us go back to the real world.” Which might not actually be all that real, and the fact that I was starting to question that scared me more than a little. “I’m sorry, but I’ve never seen you in my life.”
“But . . . I’m your brother,” he said, a little stunned.
“I don’t have any brothers.”
“Oh, for Pete’s sake,” said the boy, shaking his head as he turned away. “Raysel, she can’t help us if she’s as tangled up in this thing as everyone else.”
“April and Ginevra say Titania cast a really big illusion and caught everybody up in it,” I said. “So why didn’t she catch you?”
“Because they were impossible,” said the Luidaeg, from behind me.
I turned, slowly, to find the sea witch standing there, watching the scene with weary eyes. “What do you mean, ‘impossible’?”
“Look. Titania hates a lot of people. She hates me, big time. But I’m pretty sure you’re currently at the absolute top of her shit list. She hates you with a capital H. So when she set up her brave new world, she couldn’t do it in a way that would spare you. She wanted you to suffer.” She shrugged. “So she took away everyone she knew you loved, and she shoved you into your mother’s tower with a man you used to hate and a sister you barely know, and gave you a head full of memories that told you it was your job to be obedient and dutiful—two things you’ve famously never been good at. But she’s the Summer Queen. She’s not good at being loved, or at loving other people without conditions. She didn’t consider that you’d adapt and find ways to survive in the position she put you into, or that Simon’s greatest failing has always been loving too hard and not knowing how to let go, or that August was a little shit because she was starved for affection. And that’s on Titania, and all the more to our benefit. At the same time, she was trying really, really hard to make all the pieces of her pretty little picture make sense. Which meant getting rid of the parts she couldn’t easily control, like the cats and the fishes. Dean here is the son of a Merrow and the Daoine Sidhe she loved.”
Dean raised one hand in an awkward wave.
“If the Undersea has been sealed for over a hundred years, Dean’s existence is literally impossible. But Titania can’t actually wipe people from reality—not unless she gets the Heart to intercede on her behalf tomorrow night—and she couldn’t risk having him elf-shot. What if someone managed to find him? The impossible boy, sleeping in a tower somewhere? No, she needed to put him, and all the other impossible people, the ones born where the sea met the shore, someplace safe and out of the way. Enter my brother’s kingdom.” The Luidaeg spread her hands, indicating the forest, the fire, and everything around us. “Normally, a skerry like this one would be out of her reach, since my brother was a child of Maeve, and Titania had no claim over his lands or treasures. Sadly for my peace of mind, he went and married a daughter of Titania, Acacia, known as Mother of the Trees. Acacia’s roots run deep through this skerry. She’s been here for a long, long time. Through her, Titania had access. And she tossed all her misfit toys through that access, then let it slam shut and walked away.”