Nineteen
RAYSEL WENT RIGID AT the sound of her mother’s voice, shoulders locking and head snapping up like she’d just heard the bell tolling for the end of the world. Her hand clamped down on my arm hard enough to hurt. That would have been enough to set me off, even without what followed:
She started to whimper. The sound was high and shrill and petrified, the keening of a fox with its leg caught in a trap, just waiting for the hunter to arrive.
I reached over and carefully pried her fingers away from my arm, then turned, lit candle held high, to face the architect of all this misery.
Luna Torquill, youngest daughter of two Firstborn.
She was standing between us and the Children’s Hall, backlit by the torches held by three of Blind Michael’s former children, their unfamiliar shapes made unsteady and indistinct by the dancing firelight.
She wasn’t injured anymore. Instead, she was dressed in a short gown made of rose leaves held together by strands of cobweb, her pink-and-red hair pulled over one shoulder in a thick, perfect braid.
There weren’t even any scars on her arms. She looked at us without pity or compassion, and hatred flared in my heart, hot enough to be almost sickening.
“We’re going home, Luna,” I said.
“I wasn’t talking to you,” she said dismissively. “You’re none of my concern, little changeling who didn’t have the sense to let your mother save you from your fate. I’m here for my own child, the one who can still be saved.”
Raysel’s whimpering continued, growing higher and shriller in pitch. Tybalt stepped in front of her, glaring at Luna. I moved to the side, until our shoulders were almost touching, until the two of us together all but hid Raysel from her mother’s sight.
Luna sighed like we were doing something endlessly tiresome, like she couldn’t believe we would be so brutally foolish.
“Come now,” she said. “I’m standing on my father’s ground, with his faithful at my back.
There’s only two of you. You know you can’t defeat me here.
You can’t defeat me anywhere. You never could. ”
“Shut up!” It took me a moment to realize who had yelled, and then I turned, staring at Raysel in disbelief.
She still looked absolutely terrified, but she wasn’t whimpering anymore.
Instead, she was glaring in the direction of her mother, her hands balled into fists so tight that I knew her nails were biting into her palms. I could smell the blood.
Raysel didn’t seem to notice. She stepped forward, and Tybalt and I stepped apart, a living curtain parting as we let her take the stage. She glared murderously at Luna, and I knew I would sooner drop dead where I stood than live to see Miranda or Gillian look at me like that.
“You took me from my home,” she snapped.
“It wasn’t Shadowed Hills, but it didn’t need to be, because it was a place where I was finally home.
Where I was finally safe. You took me from my home, and you acted like it was some magical favor you were doing for me, like we were going to have some wonderful adventure!
Instead, you handed me off to strangers who took me and threw me into the dark, where someone else’s magic started twisting me into shapes I never asked for!
You hurt me, and all because I wasn’t the daughter you wanted me to be!
Well, Mom, you weren’t the daughter your mother wanted, either, once, and she didn’t hurt you! ”
“No, she just forced me to hurt myself if I was going to get away from her! But you’ll never get away from me! You’re going to be remade in my father’s image, and you’re going to stay here forever, and we’re going to be a family!”
Her father’s image … The answer snapped into place with a click that felt like it echoed through my whole body. I must have gasped aloud, because Tybalt suddenly looked at me with wide-eyed concern. I kept my focus on Luna.
“You’re the one who gave the Riders access to the Thorn Road,” I said.
“My father was a son of Maeve,” she replied, almost serenely.
“That road was his to use by right. My own Rose Road runs parallel, and once Mother told me what your candle meant, I realized you would travel there again to return here. All I needed to do was open a passage and let my faithful through. All I had to do was wait.”
“Luna, this is … this is cruel,” I said. “This is worse than cruel. This is wrong.”
“Keeping a family together is never wrong,” she countered. “You may not like my methods, but you would do the same if you were backed into a corner. You would fight the world to save your child from being lost to it.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. I drew my horn knife with my free hand, then shot a glance at Tybalt.
“Find Acacia,” I said sharply. “I’ll protect Raysel for as long as I can.”
They couldn’t kill me: we both knew that.
If they tried to turn me into a tree again, I’d just stab myself before the bark could spread beyond my thighs, letting the knife embedded in my body tell him when he’d found me.
My knife had been a gift from Oberon himself.
Not even Luna would be stupid enough to try stealing it from me. I hoped.
Tybalt nodded. He folded inward on himself, the smell of musk and pennyroyal filling the air, and then he leapt in front of me, tail lashing as he put his ears back and hissed at Luna. It was a warning and a repudiation of her actions, and I could hear the anger it contained.
Message delivered, he turned and raced off into the trees, swiftly disappearing.
I moved to put myself back between Raysel and Luna, glaring fiercely.
“Normally this is the part where I start stabbing people,” I called.
“But it might upset your kid if she saw me gut you like a—” I fumbled for how to finish the phrase.
“Like a fish” was too close to home, and “like a pig” felt weirdly sexist. “—like a manticore,” I concluded, going for something dangerous but killable.
“And I want your mother to help me get out of here. So I’d really prefer not to stab you if there’s any way around it. ”
“Your preferences aren’t the point here,” she said smugly, just as Raysel was yanked away from my back, her fingers spasming as they were ripped from my shoulder. I spun. Two Riders were behind me, one of them holding Raysel under one arm like a kicking, snarling sack of potatoes.
“Athan?” I asked.
The Rider looked at me impassively. “I told you there would be no danger if you left her to her destiny. You claimed to care about the girl. Why have you come here when you knew that it would risk her life to do so?”
Raysel continued to kick and squirm, to no avail. Athan’s grip was too strong.
“Because she didn’t choose this destiny, and she deserves the chance to decide what her life is going to be!
” The magic that turned tormented children into Riders rewrote them both body and mind, but while the children could look like anything, from Satyr-Griffin hybrids to Glastig with wings or cow’s tails, the Riders always seemed to follow the basic bipedal body plan shared by humans and Daoine Sidhe.
Two arms, two legs, one head. It implied that the spell used to create them layered a second transformation on top of the first, and while I knew that it took multiple Rides with the full Hunt to manifest itself, it couldn’t be rooted as deeply as the first transformation.
“None of us chose either, and our lives are perfect,” said Athan. The second Rider, lurking beside them, said nothing, only leaned menacingly in my direction with their polearm raised, clearly ready to attack if I did anything to stop them.
Sometimes it’s nice to have methods of resistance that don’t involve charging headlong into danger.
I raised my knife, dropping my candle to the ground as I opened my hand and ran the blade across it, cutting deep enough that I felt the metal scrape against bone.
The pain was immediate and intense, almost as immediate as the blood welling up from the center of my palm.
“What are you doing?” asked Athan, wary.
I brought my hand to my mouth, drinking as deeply as I could before the wound knitted shut and the blood stopped coming. Then I looked at the Riders.
Both of them were wrapped down to the bone in the invasive, penetrating strands of the transformation from the Children’s Hall.
As I had hoped when I saw how the walls were still feeding the spell wrapped around Raysel, their spells were tied-off and complete.
They would be easier to remove. They would still be exhausting, and a weirdly larger undertaking than even Titania’s spells had been.
I was suddenly glad the Lady of Flowers had dismissed the children of Maeve as generally worthless.
If she’d been able to learn spell construction from Blind Michael, we might still be snared in her enchantment.
Over the primary transformation spell, however, draped around them like a lacy cloak, was a second spell, this one also constructed of green and gray, but not anchored to their bones.
Instead, it was anchored to the first spell, and all the connections were weak ones.
This was something I could touch without much effort. This was something I could destroy.
Blood in my mouth and fury in my heart, I reached for the spell-shawl draped around Athan, hooked my mental fingers through it, and hauled as hard as I could, so hard that I could feel it starting to shred even before I had it fully grasped.
Threads snapped. Athan screamed. Raysel shrieked, and then I felt her barrel into me, hiding her face against my neck.
I wrapped my arms around her as well as I could when I still had a knife in one hand, leaving a bloody handprint on the back of her dress.
She clung to me, and I tried desperately not to let her weight distract me as I continued ripping at the spell.
“What are you doing to him?” demanded Luna.