Eighteen #2
“Honey, I know you’re upset about what just happened, but I’m doing my best here, and it’s not like I got turned into a tree on purpose.
” I had to fight to keep my voice level, and keep reminding myself that while I’d been a tree, Tybalt had been forced to watch me become a tree.
We had different responses to trauma to begin with, and we were very much dealing with different traumatic experiences.
“If you could maybe chill out when we’re already running into certain danger, I would really appreciate it, and it would probably make things a lot easier, for the both of us. ”
He exhaled. “I’m sorry. I just didn’t expect—I’m sorry.”
“Apology accepted.” I slowed down, offering him my hand, as the black wall of the boundary around Blind Michael’s lands appeared ahead of us.
Together, we approached it side by side, each of us carrying a candle.
As we drew closer, we separated again, moving to hold our candles under two of the torches.
Their flames shifted from red to white, and the wall, slowly, swung open to reveal the skerry beyond.
We walked through, and it slammed shut behind us, and we were committed, if we hadn’t been before.
No horns sounded. Under the circumstances, I had to take that as a win. Slowly, we began making our way toward the distant glow of the bonfire. I kept an eye on the hills, waiting for the Riders to sweep down and attack us again. I did not want a second go at becoming vegetation.
No one came, and on we walked, until the first silhouettes of structures appeared ahead of us. I paused then, looking at them analytically, trying to remember which might be the Children’s Hall. Finally, after a minute’s study, I pointed toward one of the distant rooflines.
“There,” I said. “That’s where we want to go.”
“If you’re sure.”
“I’m sure. Can you scout ahead?”
Tybalt looked at me unhappily, then folded in on himself and ran on all fours into the dark.
I watched him go, holding my candle high, and when he vanished, I followed, much more slowly and cautiously.
I didn’t have his balance, his eyesight, or his agile feet.
I did have the ability to take a hit that would kill almost anyone else, and as long as the hit didn’t come with another transformation, I believed that would be enough.
In the distance, a horn sounded. I lowered my head and broke into a run, heading for the trees between me and the Children’s Hall.
The open ground wasn’t very wide, but my heart hammered the whole way, until I was ducking into the relative safety of the tree cover, letting the branches and rough-barked trunks conceal me.
The urge to bite my tongue and look more closely was strong.
How many of these trees were children who had gotten away and been transformed, Acacia granting them the only peace that she was capable of?
How much damage had really been done here, down the years and centuries?
How many children? I might never know the full answer.
Blind Michael’s Riders lived and died outside the reach of even the night-haunts, and there was no telling where their bones had been left to rest. And that didn’t include the children who had gone to the green, trading bones for branches.
If any of them had fallen, there would be nothing left to find.
I ran and kept on running until the squared-off shape of the Children’s Hall loomed ahead of me, its rough stone walls filled with phantom terrors, reminding me of what had happened there—and more, what had almost happened, how close I’d come to being lost forever.
I slowed to a trot, holding up my candle, and finally came to a stop.
Tybalt didn’t appear out of the nearby brush. I frowned, giving the area around me a slow look. Surely he hadn’t been caught. If there was anything in these woods fast enough to catch a running Cait Sidhe, they would have been able to catch me as well. I wouldn’t be standing here now.
I wouldn’t be standing here at all.
Cautiously, I approached the hall. There was a door, large, closed with a simple latch and locked with a loop of briar.
I eyed it warily for a moment, then thrust the hand that held the candle out toward it, watching the flame lick at the thorns.
They writhed like snakes, trying to get away from the fire, and then began to unsnarl themselves, slowly slithering out of their knot, until the door was free and ready to be opened.
They’d done something similar when I’d seen them used to lock the stables, all those nights ago.
Careful for once in my life, I transferred the candle to my other hand, reached down, and pushed the latch.
It clicked open easily, and the door swung inward, revealing a boxy entrance chamber.
There were several small, slitted windows, like half-open eyes.
I swallowed and stepped inside, letting the door swing shut behind me.
The next door wasn’t locked at all, only closed, and I pushed it open already knowing what I was going to see.
A decrepit ballroom, devoid of furnishings, with most of the curtains and draperies long since ripped off the walls and piled on the floor to create primitive bedding; all that remained to blunt the echoes were the tatters too high to be reached.
The ceiling was full of holes, showing patches of the sky beyond.
Once, this room would have been filled with children waiting for their chance to Ride, their bodies and magic already twisted by Michael’s influence, but still partially their own.
Now, there was only one figure, huddled in the corner farthest from the door, her knees drawn up against her chest and her forehead pressed against them as she hugged her legs, holding on like she could somehow stop them from changing if she just didn’t let go.
I wanted to shout her name. I wanted to run to her side.
I didn’t do either of those things, just walked deliberately toward her, careful to step hard enough that she could hear me coming, that she could hear for herself that I didn’t rattle like an armored Rider or have the heavy hoofbeats of a mounted hunter.
I was just a woman walking, and hopefully that wouldn’t terrify her as completely as something else might.
When I was close enough that I wouldn’t need to raise my voice, I held up my candle and said, gently, “Raysel. You can get up now.”
She shuddered at the sound of my voice, then shook her head hard from side to side, refusing to move beyond that.
“Raysel, sweetheart, it’s Toby. You can get up. I’ve come to take you home.”
“You can’t,” she moaned. “I can’t leave.”
That didn’t sound good. “Raysel, why can’t you leave? Did someone say you can’t leave? Because I say you can, and I’m the one that’s here.”
“Promise you won’t be mad at me.” Her voice was barely above a whisper.
“Oh, honey, I’m getting mad, but I’m not getting mad at you.
” She sounded so scared. When I found out who’d made her sound like that, they were going to learn real fast why you didn’t mess with heroes, or with their families.
I would have saved her anyway—I’d been trying to save her for years—but she was part of my household until her term of offense ended, and she was Simon’s niece.
That made her family, and that made her mine.
“You will,” she said, and lifted her head.
I blinked, trying to process what my eyes were seeing. It took a moment. Finally, in a soft voice, I said, “Oh. I see.”
Her eyes had always been the standard Torquill honey-gold, an unmistakable sign of her parentage.
Not any longer. Now, her sclera were pitch-black, and her irises were a bright, obscenely cheerful pink, surrounding yellow pupils.
That wasn’t nearly as much of a problem as the bark that covered half her face, pale as birch and patterned with woodgrain whorls.
The changes continued into her hair, which now looked like it had been braided with tiny flowering vines.
Only there was no hair in the braids, only vines, which extended upward to join with her scalp.
She was blooming. Rayseline Torquill was blooming.
“It started almost as soon as they threw me in here,” she said, voice flat. “They come back every few hours and drag me around the courtyard, and when they put me back, it’s worse.”
“They who?”
“The Riders,” she said. Her head drooped, and she looked down at her knees as she said, “My mother.”
“Your—what?” That couldn’t be right. Luna had been hurt, so badly hurt that she would have died if I hadn’t interceded. She couldn’t possibly be involved with this.
Or could she. Acacia was her Firstborn: if she hadn’t been anticipating how badly the Riders would hurt her mother, she could have assumed Acacia would be able to heal her, somehow.
Maybe by transforming her into something.
Maybe a tree. Spending a few weeks gowned in bark probably wouldn’t bother her as much as it would bother a lot of us, and when she woke up, Raysel would be properly adjusted to her new life here in her grandfather’s lands.
It was a chilling thought. Luna had been such a loving mother, once.
But even then, she’d been willing to go against what Raysel wanted in order to achieve what she wanted Raysel to be: she’d married her traumatized, not yet fully adult by fae standards daughter off to Connor to secure a political alliance, and she’d never asked Raysel how she felt about it.
I’d never even gotten the impression that she cared.
That was when she’d still been wearing a Kitsune skin, when she’d been mammalian enough to experience emotions the way her husband and daughter did.
What was it like for her now, when she was purely vegetable?
I couldn’t dismiss the possibility that Luna had been an active participant in her own assault.