I blinked. “That wasn’t very nice.”
“Oh, because brainwashing you into thinking you were some sort of enthusiastic Cinderella figure was all sunshine and lollipops?” The Luidaeg glared at me. “The fact that she needed my brother to serve as her monster if she wanted this little puppet show to work is possibly the least nice thing she’s done, and she’s got a lot of not-very-niceness to answer for at this point.”
“But Blind Michael is a monster,” I objected. “He steals children!”
“He did, and I won’t make apologies for that, because it was always wrong, no matter what his motivations,” she said. “He hurt a lot of people, and he destroyed a lot of families, and he had his reasons, but that doesn’t make them good ones. He wasn’t a monster, and then he was, and then he wasn’t, because a hero took the Blood Road to his lands and killed him for what he’d done and what he’d tried to do. My brother is dead, October. He’s nobody’s monster anymore. You killed him. You took up iron and silver and you killed my brother on his own land because he’d hurt people who belonged to you, and I . . . I helped you do it. So the fact that someone is here, in his land, wearing his face? Is a travesty, and one more reason we’re going to kick Titania’s teeth so far down her throat she has to chew by burping.”
I stared at her for a long moment. Finally, a little overwhelmed and unsure what else to say, I said, “I thought you couldn’t lie.”
“Fortunately, when that binding was placed on me, it didn’t cover dramatic exaggeration or humor, or I’d be a lot less fun to be around,” she said.
I rubbed my face with one hand. “Blind Michael is dead.”
“Yes.”
“You say I killed him.”
“Because you did.”
“I . . . I’ve never killed anyone before yesterday, and now you’re telling me I killed one of the First?”
“I am.” For a moment, she looked almost amused. “The first time you told me he was dead, I said there was a time when I’d have ripped your heart out of your chest and eaten it in front of your dying eyes for saying something like that to me.”
I flinched.
She sighed, amusement fading. “Seeing you scared of me hurts more than I thought it would, and I’ve just been talking to someone wearing my brother’s face like a mask from a children’s pantomime. This is quite possibly the nastiest thing my stepmother has ever done to me, and that woman invented nasty.”
I bit my lip, turning my head as I looked at the people around me. Raysel and Dean were watching me with expressions of fragile, uncertain hope, like they expected me to vanish at any moment; all the others around the fire just looked exhausted, like even the potential for hope had been beaten entirely out of them. “Four months? All of you?” I asked.
“That’s how long it’s been,” said Dean. “How long . . . ?”
“This is all I remember,” I said. “The world as it is goes all the way back to my birth, and for centuries before that. Four months is nothing. It’s a blink.”
“It’s how long she’s had you all ensnared,” said the Luidaeg.
“And you say Blind Michael is dead?”
She nodded.
“But that doesn’t make any sense.”
“Now she gets it,” said the Luidaeg. “Ginevra and Grianne are still trying to convince him to open a path for us, so we can get out of here, but they’re not having a lot of luck. He keeps saying he promised Titania he’d keep the doors shut until she came to choose her horses, and getting him to break his word has never been easy. He likes his rules, and he likes to know that people will follow them. Acacia already agreed to give me the blood I need. Titania couldn’t turn her into a totally dutiful daughter and still marry her off to my brother, so she’s as defiant of her mother as ever, thank Mom.”
“I may . . . I may have an idea about how to convince him,” I said, hesitantly. I looked around again, this time scanning the people for weapons. If anyone was armed, they weren’t openly so, and I frowned. “I need something sharp. A knife would be best, but a bit of briar would do.”
“Planning to bleed?” asked the Luidaeg.
“I think I need to.”
“Then here.” She reached into the leaf-rot depths of her dress and pulled out a single thorn, as long as my middle finger and wickedly sharp. Holding it carefully by the base, she offered it to me. “Just try not to drive it too deep. It’s thirsty.”
“Not sure I’m comfortable with something you describe as ‘thirsty,’” I said, but took the thorn anyway, holding it as gingerly as she had. I turned to the group around the fire. “Do any of you know how you got here?”
They answered in a ragged chorus of negation, denying any knowledge of how they’d been transported from their homes and beds to Blind Michael’s lands. A few of them began to cry. I nodded, turning away.
“I don’t think we need to worry about these folks,” I said, and started walking back toward the other fire, still holding the thorn carefully away from myself.
The Luidaeg followed. So did Dean and Raysel, who seemed determined not to let me out of their sight.
“Mind telling me what’s going on in that ridiculous marble you like to pretend is a brain?” asked the Luidaeg.
“I have an idea, and I’m going to see where it goes.” It felt weird, talking back to a pureblood, especially one of the First, but I didn’t really see any other option. I could do what she told me, let her control how this story went; I could refuse to do anything, let Titania control it all; or I could start pushing and see how far I could get.
I liked pushing. I liked pushing a lot more than I expected to. It felt sort of like I was a person built for pushing, and had been missing out on my true purpose for my entire life—or just for these last four months, if what everyone was trying to tell me was true. And I was increasingly sure that it probably was, although the Luidaeg’s description of my life being designed to make me suffer made me want to throw up. I loved my family. I didn’t want that love to be built on someone else’s lie.
When we reached the building where I’d met Raysel, I paused, then pricked my finger with the tip of the thorn. Unlike all the other things I’d used to hurt myself since this began, the thorn prick didn’t hurt.
No wonder the Luidaeg had been concerned about my cutting too deep. It would be easy, with something that pierced painlessly, to drive it all the way down to the bone.
I pulled the thorn away and put my fingertip in my mouth, closing my eyes. Shunting away the blood memories was easier every time I had to do it, and I reached out, looking for the traces of Titania’s magic.
As I’d expected, neither of my new companions lit up pink: whatever else they might say, Raysel and Dean were telling the truth when they said they hadn’t been enchanted by Titania. The Luidaeg was still carrying the tightly woven spell I had seen beneath the tree.
I turned sightlessly toward the fire, continuing to look into the empty, unseen space where magic hung in shimmering strands. All the people there had traces of pink dancing over their skins, little revisions to make them a part of Titania’s revised reality. None were as dense as the webs I’d removed from January or Chelsea: apparently, the residents of Blind Michael’s lands hadn’t needed as much revision to accept this world.