“That way,” said Medley, pointing into the trees. “Close enough for a quick walking, far enough that he won’t hear us as long as we’re a little careful. Easier to steal supplies when you’re close, easier to get caught when you’re too close.”
“I’ll be right back,” I said, and turned to go.
“Raysel!”
Dean sounded genuinely concerned. I stopped, looking back at him. “Yes?”
“Just . . .” He scowled. “Just be careful, okay? Toby will be pissed if a monster she already killed kills you when you’re supposed to be serving her for a year.”
“I will,” I said, and started walking again.
This time, he didn’t call me back, and I didn’t pause.
• • •
Medley was telling the truth: her fire wasn’t far from Blind Michael’s. When I got back there, he was still seated in his tall chair, the trees around him dense with candles and ravens. The other chair was occupied now as well, by a yellow-skinned woman in a brown velvet dress with a scar along one side of her face. He was holding her hand, the two of them looking for all the world like a king and queen of the wood attending on their court. And in front of them . . .
I stopped, breath catching in my throat, and pressed a hand against my mouth like I could physically stop myself from gasping and giving my position away.
In front of them, on the other side of the fire from where I now stood, was my mother.
She was as she had been since her recovery from my attempt to assist Oleander in assassinating her: skin as white as polished bone, and long pink hair that changed shade between the root and the tips. She was taller than I was, and slimmer, two things I could easily attribute to the fact that no matter how much she looked like a mammal, she wasn’t one. She was Blodynbryd, a Dryad of the Roses, and the yellow-skinned woman was her mother, Acacia, better known as the Mother of the Trees.
We call the children of Oberon, Maeve, and Titania “Firstborn,” because all descendant lines of Faerie spring from them, but they’re not the first of us, not really. Their children are the first of us, two steps removed from the Three and finally stabilizing into whatever Faerie needs them to be. According to the family history, Acacia bore the Dryads before she took Michael as her husband, and together they birthed the Blodynbryd.
If Acacia had taken another lover during the period Blind Michael spent dead—temporary as it had apparently been—she might have started a third descendant line, or simply borne slightly modified Dryads or Blodynbryd. It’s always hard to guess, when the Firstborn are involved. Mother’s children would always be at least partially Blodynbryd, if she had any more now that she didn’t have me, and she wasn’t going to be having them with Father. Their biology and their magic were too far removed from one another to make that possible. I should never have been born.
I remembered what it had been, to feel the sun nourishing me, to taste the soil beneath my feet, to sit among the roses and hear their slow, thoughtful whispers in a space that was not sound but was deeper than that, a communication buried in my bones. When my uncle had cast us down into darkness, he had been even crueler than I think he knew. He deprived two roses, both cloaked in flesh, of the sun.
Had either of us been purely Blodynbryd when he took us, I don’t believe we would have survived long enough to find our freedom. I glanced at the dark sky above and wondered how Mother and her siblings had ever been able to survive here at all. There didn’t seem sufficient sun for their thriving.
That was a question for another time. For now, the question before me was whether I could face my mother. I had fled Shadowed Hills more due to her than to my father, who would have been happy to begin training me in the ways of my newly modified magic, but who had always bowed before Mother’s insistence that I was more her child than his. It was Mother who had always most wanted to control me, to shape me into a younger duplicate of herself.
In the darkness, she had been my only companion, my only company, and so I had clung to her as tightly as I could, unable to move more than a few feet away without the risk of losing her for hours or days—not that we’d had any reliable way of marking the time while we’d been trapped. Her voice had been the thin tether to reality keeping me sane through all those terrible, torturous hours. I’d believed she would always be my best friend in the world, my only friend . . .
And then we’d been freed, and suddenly she’d wanted nothing more than to open her eyes and find me exactly as I’d been on the day when we went gathering flowers and found ourselves thrust instead into a lightless hell. She wanted a sweet, malleable child, not a furious, broken young woman who didn’t understand her own temper, who got quickly overwhelmed in crowds, who couldn’t handle sudden noises or too many people. She’d been intending to raise me as a show dog. What she got instead was a half-feral creature kept too long in chains.
In a world where I’d never been imprisoned, where my magic could have been recognized and trained sooner, where they would have seen the signs of the war my body was waging against itself before that war turned unwinnable, I might have been happy to become her perfect daughter. I might have chosen a softer balance than all or nothing, willing to let October experiment with the warring factions in my bloodstream and seek a way to keep both sides of my genetic heritage intact. And—the greatest change between that world that never was and this one—if I had still needed to choose to make myself one thing or the other, I might well have chosen Blodynbryd. Father had a duchy to manage, after all. Mother had only ever had, well, me. Without the abduction changing everything, I would probably have remained her gleeful shadow, gathering flowers and fighting the growing rot within me as best I knew how.
Here, though . . . she wasn’t supposed to be here. To be fair, I wasn’t supposed to be here either; none of this made any sense, and I just wanted it to all be over.
Which began with speaking to the man who watched her as she spoke with my grandmother, a small, indulgent smile on his face. Careful to move slowly and avoid attracting too much attention, I started across the clearing, weaving between the haybales as I made for the trio.
More oddities presented themselves as I drew closer. Mother’s feet were bare, exposing toes that darkened from the dead white of the rest of her skin, becoming brown and gnarled. Her dress, while it fit her well enough, clearly tailored to her form, was simple and largely shapeless, brown linen with green embroidery around the hems. It was the sort of dress worn by a daughter of the house when she wasn’t meant to be attracting attention or commanding respect. A child’s dress, in other words. Why would Mother, a married woman with a demesne and duties of her own, be wearing a child’s dress?
Her hair had been pulled back and braided at the temples, forming a complicated knot at the back of her head, and that, combined with the dress, made her look younger than she ever had before.
It was strange enough that I almost turned and ran. I wanted to. I wanted to speak with Blind Michael even more, and I wanted this to end most of all.
I continued forward, until a raven croaked above me and I knew I had been seen. Still, Blind Michael didn’t turn to face me until I had walked right up on the edge of their conversation, when he finally tilted his face in my direction and said, “Bold intruder. I have few uninvited guests. Fewer yet are willing to approach me so very openly. Why did you come back here?”