BUT BY DEGREES #4
“Hey, kiddo? Stay here. Eyes on me, okay, Quentin? Eyes on me.” The Luidaeg sounded shocked, and a little bit concerned.
Under other circumstances, I might have reveled in that: surprising the sea witch was no easy task, and surprising her enough that she actually expressed it was usually impossible.
Under other circumstances. In the moment, having allowed myself the grace of giving up, I found that I couldn’t revel in much of anything.
The floor was hard wood softened only by the thinnest of decorative rugs, and I heard her quick footsteps moving toward me, followed by the touch of her hand on my shoulder.
Gentle at first, then more firm, as she gripped with both hands and pulled me upright again, maneuvering me into a reclining position.
I let the back of the chair hold me in place and blinked at her.
Her eyes were still green; if anything, they were paler, moving from bright glass green to a softer, more muted sea green.
Whatever else she might be, she wasn’t angry.
Somehow, that didn’t make me feel any better.
I met her concerned gaze with my own, waiting for her to tell me what she wanted me to do.
Instead, she took her hands away and took a step backward, looking at me gravely. “Quentin,” she said. “Are you okay?”
I opened my mouth to respond and surprised myself by starting to laugh.
At first it was a genuine, delighted sound, but it went on and on, rapidly shaking off the delight and becoming hysterical.
I couldn’t stop. Try as I might to bring my lips together and block out the laughter, I couldn’t stop.
It didn’t take long before it sounded like I was sobbing.
And maybe I was sobbing. My eyes were burning, and my vision had gone blurry around the edges, like the world was too much trouble to keep focusing on.
My chest was still tight, my heart still hammering too hard.
I barely noticed when the Luidaeg put her hands back on my shoulders, twisting me toward her, pulling me forward, so that I was huddled against her chest. My laughter had given way entirely to sobbing by that point, great, wracking sobs that shook my entire body and showed no clear signs of stopping.
The Luidaeg rubbed my back with one hand, trying to soothe, not necessarily forcing me to stop.
Somehow, it was the lack of coercion that allowed the knot in my chest to loosen and let go, tears slowing and sobs eventually stopping entirely, until I was just leaning up against her, exhausted and ashamed.
“Hey. None of that,” she scolded lightly, taking a step away without removing her hand from my back. “You needed to cry or you wouldn’t have been crying. Don’t you go feeling rotten about something you couldn’t possibly have helped.”
“You don’t know that,” I said, mortified when my voice came out sticky with snot. I sniffled. “Do you have a tissue I can borrow?”
“No,” she said promptly. “I have a tissue you can have. We say ‘borrow’ because people used to carry handkerchiefs, which were actual articles of clothing in their own tiny, embroidered way. Getting those back was worthwhile. I do not want your snot-soaked tissue paper returned to me.” She reached past me with her free hand, then pulled back, offering me a box of tissues I was certain I hadn’t seen before I’d started crying.
I took several, gratefully, and blew my nose with one before I started mopping my cheeks with the rest.
“All right, so that answers one question: you’ve been avoiding me because you’re still all fucked up after what my dearest beloved stepmother did to you.”
“You hate her,” I said, before I could stop myself. “Why would you call her that when you hate her?”
“Because it’s true: she’s my dearest, most beloved stepmother,” said the Luidaeg.
“She’s also the only one I have, or else she’d never earn those titles.
She’s a lot of other things at the same time, but before everything else, she’s my dearest. That way when her children by blood hear me speak of her, they don’t jump immediately to her defense. They listen to me instead.”
It seemed like a convoluted way to tell the truth, but she’s had centuries to work around her geasa, and I was tired; I didn’t have the strength to focus, not with tears still burning my eyes and running down the back of my throat.
“Be that as it may,” I said. “Is it so unreasonable for me to avoid the company of the First after spending time as Titania’s plaything? ”
“No,” she said, with surprising gentleness. “But now I have a question for you: is it so unreasonable for me to have my feelings hurt after you’ve lumped me in with her, however unintentionally?”
I winced. “No,” I admitted. “I didn’t mean to…”
“I know you didn’t mean to hurt my feelings, and I’m reasonably sure you didn’t intend to imply that I would do any of the things she thinks of as acceptable.
No matter what else, I’m still Firstborn, and it’s reasonable for you to be afraid of me, if not for the things I’ve done, then for the things I have the power to do to you.
But Quentin, I’ve been able to do those things as long as you’ve known me, and I’ve never done any of them before now, and I wasn’t even a part of my stepmother’s world.
Her spell bound me inside a hawthorn tree.
She couldn’t reach far enough back to rewrite my story the way she did so many others, so she put me somewhere that I’d be out of the way and not trouble her until she was ready for me.
I wasn’t there when she was hurting you that way.
Doesn’t that mean you should trust me more, not less? ”
“I’m not angry at anyone but her for the things they did under that enchantment,” I said hastily. “Her, and perhaps Amandine, who proves over and over again that some people should never have been entrusted with the gift of children. They’re monsters.”
“Yes,” agreed the Luidaeg. “And if either of them had been barred from having children, you wouldn’t be here, and neither would October.
Sometimes the ends truly do justify the means, no matter how much I sometimes wish I had stabbed my sister and stolen her youngest daughter from her cradle.
I would have, if I’d known the girl existed.
I only learned of her birth later—my visions of the future often refuse to settle when the other First are involved, and won’t focus at all when our parents have a part to play, damn the limitations of my magic. ”
I blinked at her, unsure how I was supposed to react to that.
Sometimes the safest reaction was no reaction at all, and so I continued as if she hadn’t spoken: “Not everyone was crowned in glory during that version of our world, and I don’t blame them.
They were caught in a greater web than any one of us could weave. They had no choice.”
“But somehow, you’re not extending that grace to yourself. Why not?”
Her voice was gentle, the voice of a mother who had soothed a million bruised knees and almost as many bruised hearts. There was no judgement there, only a quiet need to understand something that might otherwise escape her.
I could have handled anger. I could have stood up forever against frustration, against blame. But this quiet acceptance was more than I could bear. I hunched forward again, wrapping my arms around myself, and looked down at the floor as I replied:
“Because I don’t deserve it. All she did to change the course of my life was remove October from my path.
I left my parents’ halls for the cold comforts of Shadowed Hills, even as I had in the real world.
I walked in the presence of a grieving, half-broken man, and I sought purpose in my training.
I all but threw myself upon Sir Etienne’s mercies, begging him to educate me, to make me the proper knight I yearned to be.
And when that world offered me supposed truths about our changeling kin, I accepted what I had been told.
I didn’t question or quarrel. I only believed.
I was a small, cowardly enough person to believe something I should have understood as a cruel falsehood as soon as I heard it!
And listen to me, listen to the way I’m talking.
I even sound like the other me. As soon as I stop focusing on being my real self, he comes out again, the pampered little princeling who was never questioned, never challenged, never asked to be anything better than he was!
She offered him to me like a bespoke coat, and I slipped him on, and I hate him.
I hate him, Luidaeg. He’s everything I never wanted to be, everything I so easily could have been, and it’s not fair that he gets to come and take my life away from me! It’s not fair.”
“And see, just that phrase tells me he didn’t take everything,” she said, lightly.
“Only someone who’d learned most of their morality from Toby would still think Faerie gave a single damn about being fair.
You’re still you, Quentin. You’re just you with a few messy extra bits mixed in and making everything harder for you to understand right now.
Breathe. That jumped-up old florist doesn’t get to undo everything you’ve worked for with a little sorcery. ”
I blinked at her. “I— What do you mean?”
“You’ve been talking like you just escaped from a fancy restaurant where everyone pretends they’re in Arthurian times ever since you stopped crying, and now you’re telling me that’s the other you coming to the surface,” she said.
“That tells me you understand the difference between who you are and who she tried to turn you into. You know you’re not to blame for what happened in her reality. So why are you holding on so tightly?”