Fourteen
MY WORDS SOUNDED DEAD to my own ears, and from the way the color drained out of Melly’s cheeks, they sounded even worse to her.
She took another look around the kitchen, furtive this time, almost guilty—although that may have been me projecting the guilt my heart said she should feel—before striding rapidly toward me and grabbing me by the upper arm.
Hobs are small as fae go, with the average adult woman barely topping out at four feet.
Melly was not a tall example of her line.
They’re also deceptively strong, and when she pulled me toward the far end of the kitchen, I couldn’t help but stumble along with her.
The other Hobs watched us go, but didn’t say anything, only turned back to their chopping and stirring.
They knew what it looked like when someone was about to get a scolding, and they didn’t want to get involved.
Melly shoved open a door set between a large woodburning stove and what looked like a medieval pizza oven, revealing the pantry on the other side. Then she stormed through, dragging me along with her, before turning to scowl directly at me.
“We do not speak of her,” she said, voice sharp and clipped. “Kerry is my only child yet living, and she deserves that distinction, not to be standing in the shadow of a girl she’ll never be nor know.”
“How long ago?” I asked.
She looked at me with the weariness of decades in her eyes.
“Before Kerry was born. Long before. I came to Shadowed Hills when I realized I was pregnant again. We had all heard the tales of the one Duchy where they lit no candles, lost no children … where his Hunt would never trespass. Although we didn’t know the reasons, then.
We only knew that somehow, impossibly, this was the one place where Blind Michael never hunted.
I’d been foolish to trust that the Duchy I served before coming here could keep my Nara safe. ”
That wasn’t a name I’d heard in Blind Michael’s halls. I had no idea how long ago she’d been lost, or whether she’d become a Rider or stayed in the Children’s Hall forever. All I could say for certain was that she had never been saved.
“I’m so sorry, Melly,” I said. “How long ago was this?”
“Ninety years or so,” she said. “I put her to bed on a Monday morning, and all was right with my world. Then, when I woke, it was to find her gone and the smell of wax and candle smoke hanging in the air. I never felt him coming. I was her mother. I should have known the moment he seized her, should have felt something, but I slept through it all. I had one last night of peace before he broke my world forever.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said again. What else was there to say?
“But I came here, where he never hunted, and I found a way to carry on even with the weight of my failure. I made a life, again, and I did it for my daughter. It was the only thing that I knew how to do.”
Hobs work. It’s built into their magic, and magic wants to be used.
I don’t know why it works that way for us; I only know that it does.
Hobs build things, communities, homes, and they shore them up with the labor they’re compelled by their own natures to do.
For Melly, building a safe place for Kerry to grow up had probably felt like the best apology she could offer to the daughter she’d lost.
She paused, seeming to realize how much more she’d told me than she intended to. Collecting herself, she looked at me with all the gravitas of a judgemental parent. “October, who told you about her?”
“One of Blind Michael’s Riders.” I didn’t see any point in being coy about it. If Melly tried to run from me, I’d follow. I was faster than she was, and even if she had the heart to attack me, there was nothing she could do that would hurt me in any meaningful way. “Melly, what did you do?”
The color, which had barely begun to return to her cheeks, drained from her face yet again, leaving her pale as paper. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I’m pretty sure you do,” I said. “Kerry never told me about having an older sister. How else would I have heard about Nara?”
“Kerry doesn’t know,” she said. “I wanted her to grow up without feeling like she was only a replacement for someone she was never going to know.”
That was something else Kerry and I had in common: we were both second daughters and only children at the same time. But while August was alive and part of my life now, it was unlikely that Nara still existed outside the whispers of the night-haunts.
“I understand,” I said gently. “That doesn’t change the fact that one of the Riders told me about her, or at least about you, and you’ve confirmed it. I need you to tell me what you did.”
“He knew, did he ever tell you that? He knew what she was before he married her.” Melly’s voice was suddenly sharp, filled with a venom I hadn’t known she could hold.
“He knew who her father was, and he knew that her presence would give her subjects a measure of protection against that monster, and he kept it secret. He could have opened his gates, invited us all inside, and kept our children safe, but instead, he let it become a rumor that we didn’t know was true. He let us stay outside the walls.”
I didn’t have anything to say to that. She wasn’t wrong.
Sylvester had known before Blind Michael’s final Ride, if not from the beginning, and he’d never told anyone.
For the first time, however, I wondered whether he had made Luna co-regent of his duchy in part because doing so made all his subjects hers as well.
If that was the thing that kept Blind Michael from taking them, that thin layer of loyalty to his daughter, however secondhand, then Sylvester had been spreading it as far as he could without telling her secrets to the world.
But did he have the right to keep those secrets?
Did I have the right to keep hiding the secret of what my descendant line was capable of?
I’d been careful to keep the knowledge of my magic as contained as possible, to prevent myself from being mobbed by people rightly seeking immortality—or its opposite.
Changelings age and die like humans do, if more slowly. My culpability was nowhere near Sylvester’s, but if I was going to blame him for the children who’d been harmed by the consequences of his silence, what did that say about the consequences of my own?
“It sounds like you’ve been angry with Duke Torquill for a while now,” I said carefully. “Melly, what did you do?”
“I’m not angry, I’m furious. And I’m disappointed.
My Nara’s blood is as good as on his hands, and he never even knew her name.
He could have stopped all this so long ago, but no, it took a changeling girl I helped feed up with my own hands to finally put that monster down.
He’s supposed to be a hero, October. You became one in part because of what you did to that man, but my own Duke couldn’t save my daughter. ”
She was starting to breathe heavily, chest heaving with the effort of keeping her tears contained. I was ripping holes in old wounds, and while that might allow them to drain, that wasn’t going to heal them. Not by any means.
“He wasn’t your duke when Nara disappeared,” I said.
“No, but I saw what happened when you broke his final Ride, you and your little band of wild things. I saw how many of the lost children came home after all hope seemed long, long lost. Not my Nara, though. She’d been gone too many years.
So I asked them what they remembered, those children; I brought cookies and compassion to their parents, and I asked to speak with the children, and because they knew my child was lost while theirs had been found, so many of them agreed to let me.
Not all, but enough. The children told me.
They told me what that monster did to the ones he stole away from us, they told me how he changed them, body and mind, to be sure they would never go running back to the families they had lost. By the time they sat astride a horse, they no longer remembered who they were before.
He stole that all away from them, that thieving bastard. They told me…”
She stopped for a moment, catching her breath and composing herself.
“They told me they still loved him. They’d go back to him if they had the opportunity.
Even after so many of them had died. They died, October, they stopped their dancing, and it wasn’t because anyone fought back against him.
It was because when he wasn’t sending them on Rides, he kept himself entertained by setting them against each other!
They killed each other, and they never knew who they were killing, because they didn’t even ask each other’s names.
That is what he did to my daughter. What would you do to someone who did that to your daughter? ”
“Exactly what I did to him,” I said. “He’s dead, Melly. He can’t hurt you anymore, and he’s not going to hurt any more children, ever again.”
“You killed him. You got to watch him die. I wasn’t there. I didn’t get that moment. I can’t … I can’t let go of how angry I am with him for what he’s done. Someone needs to pay.”
“Did that someone have to be Rayseline?”
Melly paused, and for a moment I could see the woman I had loved so long and so well.
Then the moment passed, and fury wiped that look away again.
“She was born into safety, despite her grandfather! She was protected, right up until his Rides were ended, and she never had to go to bed in fear of what would happen to her before she woke. Sylvester knew, and he was never afraid. It’s not fair. ”
“Melly, what did you do?”
Maybe if I kept asking the same question, she would eventually be able to give me an answer.