Eleven #3
I couldn’t really argue with that, so I tried to relax, leaning against him and enjoying the strange sensation of being carried while I could actually breathe.
That was the strangest part, all things being equal: being held was supposed to be accompanied by an absence of light and air, not wind and starlight.
It was actually nice, being carried this way.
I relaxed further, sinking into the comfort of his arms, watching the way the shape of our bodies sheltered our respective candles.
Their flames flickered and danced in the wind, not going out.
I let my eyes follow the fire, trying to untangle tonight’s sequence of events.
How many people could have known that Luna intended to snatch Raysel if she lost her case?
It was hard to say for sure. “I’m planning to kidnap my daughter if the queen makes the wrong choice” wasn’t exactly the sort of thing people went around announcing, even to their friends—and it wasn’t like Luna had a lot of friends these days.
Maybe that was part of why she was so desperate for Raysel to come back to Shadowed Hills. She really didn’t have any friends since losing her Kitsune skin, and she and Sylvester didn’t seem very close anymore; maybe she thought that bringing her daughter home would mean she wasn’t alone anymore.
A lot of people forget that their children are people in their own right, with their own ideas about the world.
I’d learned that lesson about Gillian in a very hard and undeniable way.
All I could do now was hope that the lesson would stick when it came time to let Miranda out of my sight and out into the world.
Honestly, I thought that was going to be harder for Tybalt than it was for me.
Not only did I have Gillian, but Quentin had been reminding me for years now that I couldn’t do anything for the children in my care but love them, and hope that would be enough.
It had to be enough.
So Luna hadn’t been subtle, but she probably hadn’t gone around announcing her intentions for the night.
At the same time, everything about the decorations I’d seen at Shadowed Hills were as good as a confession of what she was intending to do.
The writing had been fairly plainly on the wall, and anyone who cared to look would have been able to guess her next moves.
Most of the people I knew at Shadowed Hills were loyal to Sylvester, not Luna.
They wouldn’t have helped her to abduct her daughter without his willing participation.
But Sylvester hadn’t been involved—had he.
Not after our conversation. Not after Simon came to see him.
He wouldn’t have dared the risk of losing his brother again, not when he could lose Raysel at the same time.
Helping his wife could have left him entirely alone.
So who could possibly have known?
Belatedly, I remembered how badly hurt Luna had been.
If I hadn’t shown up when I did, providing the blood she needed to recover, she could have died.
Luna wasn’t Firstborn. Killing her wouldn’t require a complicated ritual; it would just require a lucky shot to the heart or throat.
So whoever had known what she was doing probably wasn’t her ally.
I still didn’t think Sylvester could have known what was going on.
The fact that Luna had been hurt was an even-stronger indication that he hadn’t known: he might not be getting along with her as well as he used to, but she was still the love of his life, and he would never have gone along with any plan that could see her being hurt at all, much less being so severely injured.
I was back at square one. Although I did have a new lead: someone at Shadowed Hills must have realized what Luna was planning to do and moved to snatch Raysel while she’d be relatively undefended.
I needed to go back to Shadowed Hills.
We were racing through the woods, branches snatching at our hair. Tybalt was still running smoothly, not slowed down at all by the strain of carrying me. I rested my head against his chest, closing my eyes, and tried to focus on my next moves.
We were stuck here until Acacia left the woods in the morning, but as soon as that happened, I could ask her to send me back to the Summerlands. As long as I had the candle from the Luidaeg, I could hopefully come back as necessary. But for now, I had somewhere I needed to be.
Tybalt slowed, and I opened my eyes. We were back on the stretch of flat ground outside the building where Acacia and Luna had been attacked.
There was no one in sight. Tybalt slowed more, coming to a stop and swinging me down to my feet.
I stretched, trying to will my half-frozen legs back to life.
“You all right there, handsome?” I asked.
“I could do that all night,” he said, with calm assurance.
“You know, I believe you, but that doesn’t make me less inclined to ask you how you’re doing,” I said.
“Fair enough,” he replied, and kissed my temple. “We’re here, all is well, and we can speak with Acacia about what we found—or didn’t find.”
“Not until she finishes healing,” I said. “For right now, we’ll have to speak to the next worst thing.”
He quirked an eyebrow.
“Luna,” I said, and started for the building.
Naturally, Tybalt followed.
Together, we squeezed through the gap in the wall and into the bloodied room where Luna had been attacked.
The smell was almost overwhelming, and now that I knew the magical signatures of some of the attackers, I could pick them out of the ambient background aroma.
None of them had bled, but several had cast spells, and I’d be able to track them if I encountered them again. That was something.
Luna was still there, now slumped in a rough wooden chair with her head lolling against her shoulder.
Most of her visible injuries were gone, although she was still heavily bruised.
The skin that covered her gashes was almost translucent, seeming to virtually glow in the dimness.
She was always white, but this was like rice paper.
I would have been afraid to touch her, if she hadn’t opened her eyes and looked at me with the sort of venom that most people would reserve for their greatest enemies.
“You,” she spat.
“Hello, Luna,” I said, moving toward one of the open chairs. Tybalt moved toward the wall, leaning up against it and crossing his arms, lounging indolently. His candle was still as high as it had ever been, burning steady and pale in the darkness.
“Why are you here?” she asked.
“I’m glad to see all that blood I gave you did something for your injuries,” I said. “I was worried you were too far gone. I didn’t want to have to explain to Sylvester why he’d lost his wife and his daughter.”
“Where is Rayseline?” she asked, struggling to sit further upright. “If you’ve hurt her, I’ll—”
“What? Kidnap her again? I didn’t do anything to hurt her,” I said.
“You were the one who snatched her when she dared to let herself feel safe for a moment. Do you have any idea how hard it’s been for us to convince her that she can leave the house without being terrified something’s going to happen?
She has no idea how to trust the world. She’s scared all the time, and you’ve made it worse.
I don’t know yet how much worse it’s going to be, but I can tell you that it’s not going to be pretty. ”
Luna actually flinched, and for a moment her expression flickered from rage to distress.
The moment passed, more quickly than I would have thought possible, and she was back to glaring at me. “If she’s frightened, it’s because you’ve done something to scare her. I have never done anything to make her believe the world is a dangerous place.”
“No,” I said, earnestly. “You never did anything to hurt her, not on purpose. All the damage was done by other hands. But then, when she needed space to heal, you couldn’t give that to her.
There’s a thing the humans call a crush injury, where someone has been pressed under something so heavy for so long that their body adjusts and forgets how to exist under normal pressure.
When you take the weight away, their tissues start to swell, and it can kill them.
Raysel has been trying to recover from a psychological crush injury, and you’ve been trying to heal it by crushing her back down. ”
“It sounds like you’re accusing me of harming my daughter,” she said, voice gone frosty.
I took a moment to count to three and think about my reply.
Because she was harming her daughter; she just couldn’t see the shape of the harm through the veil of her own expectations and unhappiness.
She was hurting Raysel by expecting her to be someone she was never going to be, by asking her to be a perfect Blodynbryd daughter of the nobility and not a traumatized Daoine Sidhe who’d grown up essentially at the bottom of a well.
“I don’t think you’re harming her intentionally in any way,” I said finally. “No more than your parents intentionally harmed you by raising you here.”
She sat bolt upright, eyes blazing. “I am nothing like my father!”
“We’re all like our parents in some way, even when we don’t want to be,” I said.
I could see flashes of Amandine in myself, in the way I sometimes kept cards closer to my chest than was safe for the people around me, in the way I feared losing them if I did things even slightly wrong.
Nature and nurture both play a role in the people we become, and we don’t get to excise the parts we don’t like.
“I didn’t hurt her.”