BUT BY DEGREES #5
“Because he was almost me!” I half-shouted.
Raising my voice to the sea witch wasn’t the best idea I’d ever had, but just then, it didn’t feel entirely voluntary.
“If Toby hadn’t come back when she did, if Duke Torquill hadn’t decided to send me to talk to her, I could have been that version of myself in this world, and I—I hated him!
I still hate him! I hate the things he did, almost as much as I hate the fact that he used my hands to do them. He had no right. She had no right.”
The Luidaeg raised an eyebrow. “There are people who’d say Titania had every right. She helped make Faerie, after all. We’re just here to be impressed when she does something big and flashy. We’re the audience, she’s the show.”
“Those people are wrong.”
“Okay. We can come back to that. Quentin, have you told anyone else how you’ve been feeling? Have you talked to anybody about all this?”
I looked away. “No,” I said, sullenly.
“Toby’s your knight, Quentin. That means something. Something I think is outdated and kind of stupid, but something. When you’re unhappy, you should talk to her. Give it a try. You might be surprised by how good she is at listening.”
“I can’t,” I protested. “In that other world I was—I was so sure that being a pureblood meant that I was better than her in every possible way, and I was jealous of how much attention the Duke used to pay to her, that I was just absolutely awful whenever I got the chance. I teased her, and I baited her, and I even put my hands on her. She bled because of me.”
“This is Toby,” said the Luidaeg dismissively. “She bleeds because it’s a Tuesday afternoon. If we all start feeling guilty when we draw blood, we’re going to spend all our time feeling awful, and we’ll never be able to get anything done.”
“In that world, she didn’t bleed the way she does here,” I said. “She really didn’t bleed at all, only stayed in her mother’s tower and tended to August and tried to be a good daughter. She tried to be invisible.”
“And you made people see her.”
“I did,” I admitted. The words stung, not least because I could remember how good it had felt to abuse a changeling woman twice my age, to force someone to acknowledge how much power I had over them.
She’d been trying to do what she saw as her duty, and I …
I had been the sort of person who would assault her just because I could.
“This sort of trauma used to be a lot more common,” said the Luidaeg.
At my shocked look, she almost smiled. “You think this is the first time my stepmommy has decided to remake Faerie in her own image? It used to be an almost-annual event. Dad would do something she didn’t approve of, like asking her to stop murdering her sister’s kids or whatever, and she would go off and weave some great illusion of Faerie as she believed it should be.
She never pushed it this far, mostly because Mom was still around, and she was great at shutting down her sister’s bullshit, but she tried, again and again.
Our history is full of contradictions, because sometimes people couldn’t find their way back from her version of reality.
So lovers became enemies, or enemies became lovers: entire descendant lines changed alliances.
Firstborn were lost to history. It really kinda sucked, and the best thing about Mom going away was her sister disappearing not too long after, before she could get it in her head to rewrite us all one last time and make it stick.
I guess this was her try at doing it for real.
Thank Dad you assholes were around to screw it up the way you always do.
I just got my descendant line back. I don’t want to lose the whole damn Undersea. ”
I blinked at her, repeatedly, before blurting the only thing I could think of: “She’s done this before?”
“Oh, yeah,” said the Luidaeg, waving a hand.
“Not that most people would remember. The last time was more than five hundred years ago, and even most of the purebloods who were alive back then will have purged their memories by now, forgetting everything they didn’t want to carry with them anymore.
Immortality means sometimes having to prune the pieces that have stopped serving you.
I remember what she did, but that’s just because so many of my siblings died in her dreamworlds.
That’s the one thing that doesn’t snap back when you break her mirrors, you see—if someone dies in the dream, they die forever.
There are graves I’ve never been able to find, because I don’t know where the bones are really buried. ”
I didn’t say anything, struck silent by the enormity of what she was saying. The Summer Queen, mother of my First, hadn’t become a monster because Oberon bound her and forced her to live a life that wasn’t her own. She’d always been a terrible person.
“Hey,” said the Luidaeg. “Hey, come out of there. You don’t need to be wandering around alone in your head right now.
The person who did the things you’re all twisted up about, he wasn’t you.
He was someone you might have been, if things had gone differently, but they didn’t go differently, and even if they had, I don’t think he was inevitable.
See, even if you hadn’t met Toby and figured out that changelings were actually people, you were still here, in the Mists.
You would have encountered all the other assholes who’ve helped you grow up to be the kind of kid who brings burritos to the sea witch and challenges her to games of chess.
You’d barely known Toby for any time at all when your human girlfriend got snatched by my little brother, and you were still willing to go charging into the dark to get her back.
That was always in you. My stepmother’s kids are selfish and petty and awful, sure, but some of them are heroes, too.
It’s all down to how you choose to use the tools that you’ve been given.
And you, Quentin Sollys, have always been a hero looking for a cause to brace yourself behind.
In our world, that cause was Toby. In another world, who knows what it might have been? ”
I sighed, the sound coming from deeper in my chest than should have felt possible, and leaned back in my chair. “I hate knowing who I could have been.”
“That’s okay. We’re all allowed to hate what we have the potential to be. You think I don’t hate the sea witch sometimes?”
I blinked. The Luidaeg had always seemed to revel in her power, in the fear she could spark in people who didn’t know her well enough to trust her not to hurt them. “I … don’t know what I think?”
“I was never a monster before my stepmother bound me,” said the Luidaeg.
“I was a mother and a seer and yeah, sometimes I was a little bit of a recluse and I wasn’t always friendly.
I stayed in my skerry and I took care of my kids, and when my siblings found their way to me, I took care of them, too.
I can’t say I didn’t care who their mother was—I cared a lot, and toward the end of that age, I stopped offering sanctuary to the children of Titania, for what I think of as very good reasons.
But I did what I could for them no matter where they’d come from, because they were children, and they were innocent, and they deserved to be safe.
And yeah, when someone tried me or threatened my family, I could be ruthless, but I wasn’t a monster.
And then she made it so that I couldn’t say no anymore, but also couldn’t do most of the things I was capable of without demanding payment.
She made me stand in front of other parents, terrified for their children, and charge them for a cure, a treatment, a solution.
She made me into everything I didn’t want to be. ”
“I knew you couldn’t say no,” I said slowly. “But I didn’t know it was as bad as all of that. Why did she do that to you?”
“Because her eldest daughter resented the fact that I was more powerful than she was. Blood comes from Oberon: Titania’s first true descendant line takes their magic more from their father than from her.
Flowers are amazing if what you want is illusions, but I had blood and water, and that made me the strongest among the First, even back in the beginning.
My sister could never forgive me for that.
So she slaughtered my children knowing it would bring me to hunt her, and she led me to her mother’s court and company, where she told my stepmother I was intending to hurt her for no good reason.
The Lady of the Flowers knew better. She knew I was following her daughter because of what her daughter had done, that she had had the first blow, but she bound me anyway, in the cruelest ways she could think of.
She stole my choices and my freedom in the same strike, and the only mercy she showed was accidental. ”
“What mercy was that?”
“No matter how terrible I become, how unforgivable the things I do, I know I do them because she left me no choice in the matter,” she said.
“I have to carry the guilt of what I’ve done, and the knowledge that Faerie hates me and considers me a monster, but I’ll always know that she’s the reason I do these things.
In the end, after everything, she’s been the monster all along.
That version of you that she created, she made him.
His cruelties were hers, just as much as mine are.
Yeah, you get to live with the knowledge that your hands did the harm, but at least you get to know that she was standing behind you, pushing you along. ”
I looked down at my hands. “I wish that didn’t help, but it does, a little. Honestly, just being able to talk about it helps a lot. I’ve been walking around with this, and it’s just been getting heavier and heavier.”
“That’s why you can’t breathe.”
“I—What?”