“You’re thinking like a young thing,” said the Luidaeg. “I know you’re only a few decades old—”
“I’m twenty-two,” he interjected stiffly.
“—but you need to try to think like a pureblood, one who’s been around for centuries. I’ve seen empires rise and fall. I’ve seen mountains born. A few months in isolation is nothing. By the standards of the older fae, Titania has done you no harm at all. Illusions aren’t harm. They’re cruel and they’re wicked but they aren’t considered harm. Father would never have thought to forbid her the use of her own magic. I’m not sure he could. As long as she raised no hand and dealt no injuries, she hasn’t broken her bindings.”
Dean’s face screwed up in disgust. “That’s just . . . You’re just twisting things around until they say what you want them to say!”
“Welcome to Faerie, kid,” she said, dryly.
“Hold on,” I said. “Dean, you’ve said twice that you were my brother. What do you mean by that?”
“I mean your father married my parents after he divorced Amandine,” said Dean. “You chose him in the divorce, and that makes you my sister, sort of. Which is weird only because I was already dating your squire, and he thinks of you as his mom, but we just don’t think about that more than we absolutely have to.”
I blinked at him slowly. The idea of Father divorcing my mother was unbelievable, and one more reason not to accept their version of Faerie as the superior one. But increasingly, I was starting to think I didn’t really have a choice. There were too many people like Raysel and Dean, people who couldn’t exist in Titania’s Faerie and had been pushed into the corners to get them out of the way. This wasn’t stable.
It wasn’t going to last, even if I tried to hold on to it with both hands.
“So we’re family,” I said, and looked back to the Luidaeg. “We’re family, but not by blood, and if there was a marriage, Titania unmade it when she rewrote the world. And right now, I don’t remember any of this, which means I don’t think of him as family. Would your father’s binding still protect him if Titania wanted to use him as her sacrifice?”
The Luidaeg frowned, deeply. “I don’t know,” she said, after a moment to consider. “I want to say yes, but I think that’s more me trying to find a bright spot in all this than anything real. ‘Maybe’ is about the best I can do without treading uncomfortably close to telling a lie.”
“Would a member of Toby’s family be a powerful-enough sacrifice to achieve what Titania’s trying to do?” asked Ginevra.
“Depends on who it is,” said the Luidaeg. “I know where most of them are, and they’re as safe as they can be, under the circumstances.”
Ginevra’s eyes abruptly widened, pupils narrowing at the same time, until they were black slashes down the centers of her irises, almost invisible. “Tybalt,” she said. “She could go for him.”
“She could, but I doubt she’s going to want to bribe the Heart with someone she considers a beast,” said the Luidaeg. “Toby’s dead on her feet, and she needs to eat something that isn’t blood. If we let her keel over, we may as well give up. None of the rest of us can break my wicked stepmother’s spells.”
I shoved the remaining garnets into my jacket pocket, abruptly remembering they existed. “So we’re going to rest here?” I asked, glancing around at our admittedly unsettling surroundings.
“Yes,” said Acacia, rising from her chair and moving to join us. Grianne was close behind her, Merry Dancers bobbing by her side. “I have access to my late husband’s halls, and while you may not remember it, Sir Daye, you are always welcome here.”
The name meant nothing to me, but she looked at me as she spoke it, and so it wasn’t hard to guess who she meant. “Cool,” I said. I could ask more questions, but more and more, I was coming to understand that the questions would never actually end. “I think I could really use a nap. I think we all could.”
The Luidaeg nodded, and for a little while, the time for confusing conversations and questions with answers I didn’t understand was over. Acacia waved the Riders back to their firelight celebrations, and they went with surprisingly little reluctance, apparently willing to accept anything as long as one of their lieges told them it was all right. The Luidaeg carried Anthony, and Ginevra half-carried me, while Dean and Raysel followed close behind us, unwilling to let me out of their sight.
Blind Michael’s hall was as dismal and dire as his bonfire ring when viewed from the outside, a crumbling stone edifice that seemed held together by creeping vines and cobwebs. The torches lit themselves as Acacia led us through the gate and into the great hall, which was filled with shadows that twisted and flickered when I looked at them. The motion made my head spin, so I stopped looking and leaned on Ginevra as Acacia led us farther onward, into a smaller dining hall.
Twinned fireplaces took up most of one wall, flames already burning high inside, and a long table had been set up, loaded with all the pieces of a proper feast. Roasts, trays of buttered greens, baskets of rolls, and platters of delicate sides warred for space. I turned to blink at Acacia.
She shrugged. “The hall knows what’s needed,” she said. “You should eat.”
My stomach rolled, as if suddenly reminded that all the blood I’d shed had to come from somewhere, and I collapsed into the nearest open chair, beginning to fill a plate even as Dean and Raysel fell on the meal like wild beasts, not bothering with plates or cutlery.
The Luidaeg gave us all an indulgent look, walking over to lay Anthony gently down in front of the fire. She took a moment to straighten his limbs and brush his hair away from his eyes, letting her fingertips linger against his skin.
“Will he be all right?” asked Acacia.
“I don’t know,” said the Luidaeg. “Everyone else just has the wrong set of memories for their actual self. He had a whole new self, and I don’t know how deep or detailed that was. I want to think he’s just in shock, and I know that because of the binding, she won’t have done anything she knew would hurt him—but I don’t have any experience with a personality revision of this scope. Did he seem like himself, these past few months?”
“A little standoffish, a little kinder than usual—it was almost like he was remembering what it had been like in the days when we courted, before Luna ran away,” said Acacia. “Now, I can attribute that in part to the fact that neither of us remembered Luna running away, but at the time, it was just my husband. I was still sure I had done something to upset him, somehow.”
“Why?”
“Because he wouldn’t touch me. Not once in the last four months, not even a kiss. At the time, it hurt my feelings. I thought he was falling out of love. Now, of course, I can only be relieved.” Acacia sighed. “I wish I could say I don’t believe my own mother would do this to me, but then, she cast me from her care when I fell in love with a son of Maeve, and would not have me back even when that love turned sour and broken between us.”
“Excuse me.” Raysel pushed between Grianne and Ginevra to face Acacia, half a loaf of bread in one hand. “You’re . . . you’re Acacia, aren’t you? The Mother of the Trees? Blind Michael’s wife?”