August was still on her knees in front of me, hair stuck to her forehead and cheeks streaky with sweat, expression pained and pleading. I knew she remained wrapped in Titania’s enchantment; until I unbound her, the false world where we’d grown up together was the only one she knew. She needed to know that I was still her sister, even if I remembered another world now.
“Hey, Aug,” I croaked, mouth dry and tongue heavy, unwilling to respond easily to my requests. “You okay?”
She stared at me with wounded eyes. “It hurts,” she said.
“Every time,” I agreed. “Thank you.”
She blinked, confusion clear. “I . . . I don’t . . .”
“You can always thank family, August,” I said. “Don’t be ridiculous, you walnut, it’s not polite.”
Her expression relaxed, relief washing over her. “I’m only impolite because you were rotten first,” she said, and all but threw herself at me, flinging her arms around my shoulders and squeezing me as hard as she could. “I thought I was going to lose you,” she whispered.
“Things are going to be different now,” I admitted, patting her back with one hand, “but you were always my sister. We just never had the chance to find out what that meant for us as a pair. Now that we know, not even Titania herself is taking me away from you. I promise.”
She pulled back, sniffling as she let me go. I offered her an encouraging smile. Her insecurities were all well and good, and she needed the reassurance, but there was someone else I needed to reassure. For his sake, and my own.
I turned to look behind me, more than half-expecting to find him on the other end of the hands that were still clasping my shoulders, refusing to let me fall over. Instead, I found the Luidaeg standing there, her own expression grim, feet braced as she held me up. She nodded knowingly when she met my eyes, and jerked her head toward the other side of our cell.
“He couldn’t bear to come any closer,” she said. “Might want to go make sure he’s okay.”
“Right,” I said, and pushed myself off the floor as she took her hands away, glancing back to August as I did. She offered me a watery smile, and didn’t try to stop me. She’d already done her part in this. She’d released me, and when the time came, I would release her, and we would be able to go back to our lives.
It was an oddly bitter thought. I could see now—really see, in a way I hadn’t been able to a moment before, when the system had been all I’d ever known—just how wrong it was to have children just for the sake of having servants. Changelings weren’t less than their pureblood parents, and we didn’t exist just so those parents would never need to do their own damn dishes. Putting a system in place that forced changelings to exist and then made them something between pets and people was horrific. It was wrong in ways I couldn’t fully articulate.
The humans figured this shit out centuries ago, or at least the basics of it. How could we not do the same?
And I had been complicit—more than complicit—in the horrors of Titania’s vision. Maybe only the last four months had actually existed to be lived through, but I had lived through them. I remembered the people I’d turned away on my last night in the tower, the “eight tappings at the door and eight parties turned away” as I’d so casually described it to August, and it turned my stomach.
But the guilt could come later, after we ended this and had time to contend with what we’d done when we were different versions of ourselves. Right here, right now, I had a husband to reassure. I turned.
Tybalt, as promised, was standing in the far corner of the room. Like all of us, he was staying as far from the iron door as the space allowed. He had his arms crossed and his shoulders slightly hunched forward, like he was trying to protect himself from a blow that had yet to fall. I took a step toward him.
“Tybalt?” I said, voice more hesitant than I intended it to be.
He didn’t look at me.
“It worked. She broke Titania’s illusions. I know who I am now.” I paused. “I know who you are. I’m so sorry I wasn’t strong enough to break it on my own.”
“I couldn’t have asked that of you,” he said, still not looking in my direction.
“But you’re hurt because I didn’t somehow do it anyway,” I said. “You’re not looking at me, and you only do that when you’re really upset.”
“I know . . . I have no right to be angry that you were captured in a spell cast by one of the founders of all Faerie, especially not one which I knew to be tailored specifically to do you harm,” he said, words coming brutally slow. “I know you are not to blame, and in all honesty, I feel a relief so vast that it aches behind my breastbone right now, like an injury in and of itself. But I’m still angry. I’m so angry I could scream and throw myself against the walls of the world raging at the injustice of it all.” He finally glanced in my direction. The loss I’d been interpreting as murderous rage was still there, only partially masked by misery. “I don’t know what to do with these feelings. I thought I had already experienced every form of anxiety you were able to inspire.”
“Pretty sure there’s always another form of anxiety.” I moved toward him until I was within arm’s reach, until all he’d have to do was reach out and he’d have me. “That’s what loving someone means.”
Sweet Maeve, I hoped he’d reach out.
“It was like you were dead, and someone else was walking around in your body.” He finally reached for me, hands shaking, and I let him. “You looked at me, and you didn’t see me.”
“I see you now,” I said.
He closed the remaining distance between us in a single step, sweeping me into his arms, into the safe, familiar scent of pennyroyal and musk. I wrapped my arms around him and held on for dear life, feeling, for the first time since I could remember, like I was home.
When I finally let go and began to pull back, I found him watching me. He wasn’t smiling anymore. Instead, his expression was grave, like he was looking at something so fragile that he feared he might break it into a thousand pieces with nothing more than a word. I met his eyes, and waited.
“If you ever do anything like that again . . .”
“You’ll have to get in line,” I said, and leaned in, and kissed him.
We had been apart for four months, and in that kiss, I could feel every one of those long, awful days and nights from his perspective, watching his wife walk through the world with no idea who he was, or what she was risking when she was careless with herself. And I’ve always been very good at being careless with myself. It’s a gift.
I kissed him back with equal fervor. I might not have been aware of missing him, not consciously, but I’d been alone in so many ways, and I wasn’t used to being alone anymore. August and Simon were no replacement for a loving family that I’d chosen and assembled entirely by myself. Not that I’d ever been as isolated as I’d liked to think. My time under Titania’s enchantment was probably the longest I’d gone without the people I loved, who also loved me, in my entire life.
When Tybalt at last relaxed his grasp and allowed me to step back, he was smiling, and so was I. “I missed you, little fish,” he said.