Four
THE SCENE IN FRONT of us was precisely the one I’d been afraid of when I heard the shouting.
Tybalt was standing near one wall, where he’d probably been lounging while he waited for me.
Now, he was ramrod straight and upright, and if he’d had a tail in this form, it would have been lashing.
It wasn’t difficult to guess the reason why: the woman in front of him was way farther into his personal space than was a good idea for someone he wasn’t particularly fond of, jabbing her finger at him in a way that was probably going to get her hand slapped away very soon.
Duchess Luna Torquill, Sylvester’s wife and Raysel’s mother.
She was tall, with bone-white skin and long pink hair that started as a pale blush pink at the crown of her head and slowly darkened along its length, until it was red-black at the tips.
I blinked. For some reason, I had never realized how much her hair looked like the fabric of my wedding gown.
I suppose sometimes you just need to see something in a new light to realize what it resembles.
She was wearing a green dress in a generic “medieval” cut, the sort of thing that populates every Renaissance Fair and modern fantasy movie.
They’re simple enough for daily wear, easy to make, and easy to clean, all things that matter a lot when you’re talking about someone like Luna, who spent every spare moment she has out in her gardens.
She’s always done that, but it had only gotten more pronounced since she became fully Blodynbryd again, like she was trying to get closer to her beloved flowers.
She wasn’t trying to get closer to a beloved anything right now. She was glaring at Tybalt as she jabbed her finger in his direction, pollen-yellow eyes narrowed and mouth twisted downward into a brutal snarl.
“—no right to keep my daughter away from me!” she snarled.
“I assure you, madam, I am not keeping your daughter anywhere!” he snapped back. “Raysel is a grown woman and knows her own mind! If anyone is keeping her, she’s keeping herself!”
“Raysel is a child!”
“Raysel may not be an adult yet, but she certainly isn’t a child,” countered Tybalt. “She’s old enough to know what she needs to feel safe.”
“Are you saying my daughter doesn’t feel safe with me?”
Tybalt looked at her levelly. “Yes,” he said.
Luna launched herself at him, fingers kinked into hooks, clearly ready to claw at him with her nails, and Tybalt simply stepped to the side, letting her slam into the wall.
The sound of her body hitting the wood was thick and meaty, unchanged by her vegetable nature.
It was enough to snap me out of my shock.
I hurried forward before she could recover enough to lunge for him again, putting myself slightly between them.
“Luna, calm down,” I said, almost pleading, but unable to stop myself.
She had been almost a surrogate mother to me once.
But while Sylvester had been devoting himself to disappointing me recently, she seemed a lot more interested in shoving me off the first available cliff. “Tybalt didn’t do anything wrong.”
Her eyes widened marginally as she swung her head around and refocused her attention on me.
“No, he didn’t,” she said. “It was all you. First you failed to find and save us while my daughter was still in her right mind, and then you let her fall under Oleander’s influence.
You let me lose my skin, and now you’re letting me lose my child.
What else can you take from me? My husband?
My home? I thought I told you to stay the hell away from Shadowed Hills. ”
“You never had the authority to give me that command,” I said. “You may be the duchess here, but I’m a knight sworn to this demesne. The only person who can order me to stay away is Sylvester.”
“We are equals in the eyes of the crown,” she snapped.
“And he holds my oaths. I don’t have to listen to you.”
She narrowed her eyes again, nostrils flaring. “I won’t tolerate you speaking to me in this manner.”
“Okay, you know what, Luna? I am seriously done putting up with your bullshit. I’ve been doing it since you decided that it was okay to send me off to my death if it meant you could keep living your perfect little fairy tale life in your perfect little stolen skin.
You’ve never been able to forgive me for coming back alive. ”
“I’ve never been able to forgive you for not being able to save us, when you pranced around pretending to be a hero like you understood the meaning of the word!
My husband is your liege. You had no dearer duty than our salvation, and what did you do?
You failed. You left us imprisoned in the dark and went off to your own imprisonment like we were nothing to you. ”
I stared at her, briefly too stunned to speak. There are some things you just don’t say, some lines you just don’t cross. Which Luna had, apparently, forgotten.
When Luna and Raysel had disappeared, all those years ago, Sylvester had been shattered.
His wife and daughter were his world back then, even as they were now, and he’d been entirely unequipped to handle their disappearance.
Some of the signs had pointed to his own brother being the one to take them, and so he’d turned to me, the only private investigator in his service.
And maybe he’d also been counting on the fact that I was legally Simon’s daughter, thinking it would protect me from the man.
In a way, it had. When Simon caught me following him, he’d decided to take mercy and transform me into something that couldn’t spill any of his secrets, rather than killing me outright.
For fourteen years, I’d been imprisoned in a pond in the Japanese Tea Gardens, bound into the shape of a koi fish.
The less said about those years, the better.
Honestly, I try not to think about them.
When the spell holding me had finally worn away under the weight of fourteen years of sunrises, I’d been left with a severe fear of being surrounded by water, a pointed dislike of raccoons, and a preference for eating literally anything other than fish.
I’d been left without my fiancé, Cliff, and my daughter, Gillian, who’d been two years old when I disappeared.
Time’s unstopping progress had turned her into a teenage stranger who wanted nothing to do with me.
And to salt the wounds, the secrets I’d lost so much to learn were meaningless: Luna and Raysel had somehow returned almost two years before I did.
Whether they escaped or were released has never been entirely clear to me.
I’m not even certain they know. But either way, I lost everything to save two people who had turned out not to need me to save them.
Fun, huh? But no matter what else I wanted to think or do or say about the situation, Luna was right about one thing: I had failed to find them in time, and Raysel had grown up in a cold, lightless void, surrounded by nothing true or tangible.
It was one of the cruelest fates I could imagine for the two of them, a sunny, vivacious child and her mother, the sentient flower.
Simon’s mistress had known exactly what she was asking when she ordered him to take them.
I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that she’d been behind the design of their prison.
I also wouldn’t be surprised if she hadn’t been.
When he’d been serving her, Simon had been so desperate to please her that he would have done anything, including coming up with the most diabolical ways possible to hurt his brother’s family.
I was coming to love Simon as a part of my family, but that didn’t mean I had any illusions about the man he’d been before.
We don’t get to forget our pasts just because we choose to seek a better future.
“I lost just as much as you did when I went looking for you,” I said, voice stiff and words careful.
Luna didn’t care about hurting me, not anymore.
I still had to care about hurting her. Until the moment I was ready to burn the last of my bridges with Sylvester, I had to care.
“I lost my entire life. I lost my daughter. And then I went and built myself something new. I figured out how to live again, and how to love again, and that the only way Gillian was ever going to let me be a part of her life was if I gave her the space she needed to work through her justified anger. Because she’s right when she says I chose Faerie over her.
I chose duty over her. I lost everything, Luna, so don’t go pretending you’re the only one who suffered at all during those fourteen years.
I am not saying that what I went through was worse than what happened to Raysel.
She was a child. Children should be safe and happy, not locked in endless darkness because the adults are fighting.
But I didn’t put her there, and everything I’m doing now is so that maybe, someday, she can come back to you.
You can’t force her. If you force her now, you’re going to lose her forever. ”
“Are you threatening me?” asked Luna, sharply.
“No, just telling you the truth,” I said.
“You agreed, when we all got back to the real world, that the four months we’d spent in Titania’s Faerie wouldn’t count against her term of service.
We should have four months left before anyone even asks her whether or not she feels like her debts are discharged.
You can’t really intend to force the issue in three days. ”
“I spoke out of haste when I said that,” said Luna. “I was disoriented by the return of my memories, I still thought myself half in the safety of my father’s halls.”
“You called those halls a prison, once.”
“I was a foolish child when I thought of them as such. I should have recognized them as the haven that they were. Far away from the mortal world. Far away from the warring courts and the machinations of cruel Firstborn.”