“I won’t.” She shook her head, then shot a venomous glare at Tybalt. “Threaten all you like, you can’t force me. I refuse to risk losing my sister as I fear to have already lost my father, as he swears I will lose my mother before this all comes to an end.”
“I’m not on the tower wards,” I said.
She stiffened, slowly turning to face me.
“Mother removed me in the other Faerie, after the divorce,” I said. “She took me off the wards, and it seems she never added me back on, because I went there when neither you nor Father was in residence, and I couldn’t get inside. Whether she remembers it or not, I’m not her family. You are my family. You, and Father, and several other people, some in this room, who I don’t currently remember the way I should. You don’t want to unbind me because it might cause you pain. Well, you’re causing them pain by leaving me as I am. And I think . . . I think you might be causing me pain, too. Please, August. This is something you can do. This is something only you can do. We know the last four months were real, even if everything before it was a dream. For four months, I have loved you desperately, with every waking hour. That doesn’t go away just because I remember who else I love.”
“There’s so much iron here . . .” August demurred.
“Here.” I dipped a hand into my pocket, coming out with several of the blood gems, offering them to her. “The sea witch made them for me. They make my blood magic stronger. I assume they would do the same for you.” I glanced to the Luidaeg, waiting for her to contradict me.
She didn’t.
“Please, August,” I said, and looked up, at Tybalt, the man I didn’t know but might, if this went the way I believed it would, love with all my heart in just a few seconds. “If you’ve ever loved me as I’ve always loved you, let me remember.”
She glanced away from me, tears shining in her eyes, even as she took the blood gems from my hand. “Am I not enough for you?” she asked. “Is my love not sufficient to feed your hungering heart?”
“I don’t think anyone should depend on just one person to love them,” I said. “From what Dean tells me, I’m not the only person who loves you. You don’t need to keep me bound to have my affections, August. Please.”
Tybalt began to step forward. The Luidaeg’s hand on his arm stopped him.
“Let them,” she said, softly. “They’re getting where you want them to be, you just need to trust Toby to take it the rest of the way. This is what she does. Every version of her. She convinces people to do the things that don’t seem like they should work.”
August looked back at me, a single tear escaping to run down her cheek. “Promise me,” she said. “Promise me that no matter who we were to each other in that other world, no matter what neither one of us remembers right now, you’ll still be my sister, and you’ll still love me.”
“I’ll always be your sister, you walnut. If that were something that could be changed, I would have changed it long before now.”
She laughed, the sound thick and half-swallowed, and popped the blood gems into her mouth, closing her eyes. I tensed, waiting for the pain I knew was sure to follow.
I had been on the other end of this several times now. I knew it hurt to pull the spell away, and I knew that all the people I’d disenchanted had screamed through the process, as if it were their bones and not a false reality that I was taking from them. I still wasn’t prepared for the feeling when August hooked her magic into the spell surrounding me and started to pull. It wasn’t just the strands she was actively interacting with. The whole spell seemed to light up, making its presence known as a web of venom wound around my entire body, lurking just beneath the skin. It burned.
It burned like onion juice rubbed into a fresh wound, like bee venom dripping into my eye, and I instinctively tried to recoil, only to find myself stopped by hands on my shoulders. I thrashed against them, my own magic trying to rise and force hers away. I shoved it down as best as I could with my every nerve on fire, making it difficult for me to concentrate. If I fought her—really fought her—I knew I’d be able to knock her working aside. It was a knowledge as profound and unlearned as breathing, instinct dictating reality.
I also knew this wouldn’t be any easier if I made her stop and start over again. So she pulled and I screamed, and the person behind me held me in place, hands on my shoulders anchoring me.
And then the spell began to shred, threads snapping one by one, and the pain, intense as it was, became less essential than the flashes of memory that were threatening to overwhelm me.
These weren’t bathed in red and borrowed from blood. They were bright and vibrant and mine, memories that had always belonged to me but had been sealed away against my will. They burst into sight and slipped away just as quickly, but they remained, as much a part of me as they had always been.
I saw myself alone in the tower with Amandine, a cold, almost loveless place, no Simon, no August, no one to shield me from her constant disapproval of the daughter she had borne in the mortal world and expected to abandon there.
I saw myself fleeing the Summerlands, desperate to find a way to prove myself in a Faerie that treated changelings, not as a built-in work force but as an inconsequential nuisance best ignored when possible, saw myself going Home and falling into Devin’s machinations, and while I could look back now and see how predatory he’d been, how much he’d been taking advantage, at the time, it had felt like salvation.
I saw my relationship with Cliff, serious and sweet in the way young love can be when it’s good, bitter and beautiful, saw myself pregnant with Gillian and winning my freedom from Devin. Saw my knighthood and my service to Shadowed Hills, my time under Etienne’s tutelage, begrudging as it had been.
I saw Simon and Oleander, and heard his laughter as he thrust me into the pond. It ached even in memory to see the man I knew as my father doing that to me, although the version of me that Titania had made had an easier time understanding why transformation had been a kindness, not a cruelty. Set against the amount of time he had, that I had even as a changeling, it was a way to escape killing me when he had clearly been expected to do exactly that.
I saw my return from the pond, my binding by the woman I thought of as Evening Winterrose, my defeat and then my victory.
And through it all, I saw Tybalt, my sometimes enemy, sometimes friend, eventual love of my life. I saw him confessing his love for me. I saw our engagement. I saw—I gasped, the sound breaking through the screaming and making the hands on my shoulders tighten, grounding me momentarily in my body, back in the world where August was unwinding Titania’s enchantment one clinging strand at a time. I saw the moments right before the spell came crashing down, and what I’d learned there, and part of Tybalt’s haggard staring made sudden, horrible sense.
He’d been trying to figure out whether I was still pregnant.
With a final wrenching pull that felt for all the world like some terrible briar was being yanked by the root out of my bones, the spell snapped in August’s hands, and the pain stopped, not leaving so much as a ghost of itself behind. It had all been in my magic and my mind, after all, not in my flesh. I still sagged, panting, and the hands behind me caught me and held me up, keeping me from collapsing. I opened my eyes.