Chapter 10
TEN
ALLERIA
My hand is touching my ear again. I snatch it down and tuck it beneath my thigh. It remains there for a heartbeat, then it’s back, my fingers moving over the tapered point.
It feels wrong. So horribly wrong.
My stomach churns the same way it did when I first saw my reflection in the mirror Cairn held for me. I pull my hand down again, and curl my fingers into the fabric of my pants.
It doesn’t help. My hand starts to rise again.
I need something to focus on.
My gaze lifts and scans the clearing. It’s quieter than it was when the four first arrived, but I don’t think I’ll ever forget the sounds some of them made.
Cairn is standing in the center. He hasn’t moved for a while now.
His head is turned toward a female with bandaged wrists, although I’m not sure he’s really looking at her.
His eyes have a distant look to them, his thoughts somewhere I can’t follow, fixed on something that holds him completely.
My fingers creep back to my ear. My throat tightens. My eyes sting.
I need air.
Scrambling to my feet, I walk through the ring of trees. No one stops me or calls out. They’re all focused on each other, and not worrying about what I’m doing. The ground beyond the trees curves down in a gentle slope, and I follow it, moving toward the water I can hear somewhere ahead.
At the base of the slope, there’s a small pool, fed by a spring that bubbles up between the moss-covered rocks at one side.
I kneel at the edge, trailing my fingers through the water.
The ground is cold and slightly damp, but I don’t care.
I lean forward over the water, and a face that isn’t mine looks back at me.
Her hair is pulled back in a loose braid, making it impossible to avoid the shape of her ears. Her eyes are longer, tilted up at the outer corners. Her jaw is sharper, and her brows arch with far more elegance than mine ever did.
I try to find my face in hers, but the image won’t hold. I close my eyes and try to force the memory of my own features to mind. All I see are pointed ears and delicate cheekbones.
I can remember the morning of my birthday hunt. I can remember the clothes I wore. I can remember the fear I felt when Cairn captured me. I can remember the night things changed between us.
But I can’t remember the face I wore for twenty-one years.
My stomach turns over, and I twist my head away from the pool seconds before the little I ate comes up on the grass beside me. My throat burns as I retch over and over, until my eyes are streaming and my lungs ache from lack of air.
A sob tears out of me, then another, and another, until they’re coming faster than I can draw breath between them. My fingers dig into the moss. I kneel forward pressing my forehead against the wet earth. I can’t stop shaking, and crying, and gasping.
After a while the sobs space further apart, growing softer until the air turns quiet. My breathing comes easier, still ragged and uneven, shuddering out of me with every exhale.
My head throbs. My eyes burn. My face is wet, hair plastered to my cheeks, my mouth full of the taste of bile and salt. The damp has seeped through my pants into my knees, and my fingers are still sunk into the moss.
The faint rustle of cloth sounds behind me. I don’t need to look to know who is there, but I do it anyway, glancing over my shoulder. Cairn lowers himself to the ground a few paces back.
He doesn’t say a word, just rests his arms across his knees and looks out across the small pool.
I wait until the shaking dies down, then I push myself up onto my hands. My arms tremble, threatening to give out from under me. I lock my elbows and force my body back until I’m sitting on my heels, my eyes on the moss between my knees. I’m not ready to look at him.
“I don’t look like me anymore.” My voice comes out thick. “I can’t remember what I should look like.”
Cairn doesn’t say anything, but I’m not really talking to him. I just needed to say it out loud. Now that I have, another thought occurs to me.
“When you … took me in the Dell’s forest …” I stop, remembering the shock of discovering he wasn’t a mindless beast, and the violence that followed it. “Why didn’t this happen when you healed me?”
“I barely had enough magic to heal what I’d broken. I was as vulnerable as a newborn afterward. Had you woken sooner, you could have easily escaped me.” He gives a soft, dry laugh. “There were several moments where you almost did.”
I twist to look at him. He’s sitting cross-legged a few paces off, his eyes still on the pool.
“I remember things very differently.”
“Of course you do. I wasn’t going to let a human female who was there to hunt me know how weak I was.”
“I’m sorry.” I whisper.
His head turns toward me then, and his golden-eyed gaze moves slowly over my face. “I know. As am I.” His lips curl. “But it turns out I was far more accurate than I first thought.”
“About what?”
“You really were a pathetic human.” His gaze shifts to the points of my ears. “Now we know why.”
A small laugh escapes me. It dies as quickly as it came when my hand finds my ear again.
“If I’m not human, why wasn’t I in the cages with the rest of you? Why did they hide it instead?”
He studies me. “My guess would be that they did not know until you came of age. By the time that happened, you were already known to the court. How would the king of a realm that treats fae like beasts explain your appearance?”
“What do you mean?”
He sighs. “Have you heard stories of changelings? Tales where human parents believe their child is not theirs, but one of the fae?”
“Yes, but that’s just folklore. It’s not real.”
“It is … and it isn’t.” He’s quiet for a moment. “How we look as adult fae isn’t how we look at birth. You can’t tell a fae or halfling newborn from a human one. Not without magic. We all come into the world wearing the same mask.”
I stare at him.
“Our features change later. Around five or six. The eyes first, then the shape of the face. Both of those can be mistaken for a child growing into themselves. Parents see it and think nothing of it.” He pauses. “But then the ears change, and that isn’t something that can be explained away.”
My fingers find the point of my ear again. I pull my hand away, locking my fingers together in my lap.
“Some halflings never change at all. They live entirely human lives, and die after a human lifespan. They never know any different. But the ones who do change …” He shrugs one shoulder, and I’m suddenly struck by how tired he looks.
“Their parents wake up one morning and realize the child they have raised isn’t human. And then, they typically turn on them.”
“Turn on them how?”
“It depends on the family. Some abandon the child. Some kill it. Some take it to one of your temples, hand it over, and say it was never theirs. The story of fae creeping into nurseries to swap human babies for halflings was invented to make that easier. It’s more bearable to tell your neighbors you were robbed of your child than to admit you slept with a fae, or that your husband did, and raised the result for six years without noticing. ”
“But how would a married woman not notice her husband has a child she didn’t birth?”
“Magic. It’s a simple trick to convince a human something happened when it didn’t. The human female would be certain she had carried and birthed the infant.”
A slight breeze ruffles his hair. I shiver.
“It won’t have been until you were five or six that a mage would have been called to hide what you really are.”
“You’re saying one or both of my parents might not really be—” I have to force the words out because my mouth doesn’t want to form them.
“Yes.”
I can’t look at him. I look at the water instead, at the stranger blinking back at me from the surface of the pool. Someone made a choice years ago to use magic on a six-year-old child. To hide the evidence of what I was.
I consider the possibilities.
My mother lay with a fae. She kept the child and convinced my father I was his.
And then one morning, when my ears changed, she realized what I was and called a mage.
Did she know from the start? Had she looked down at me in the cradle and wondered?
Or had she only understood what she’d done when she saw my features begin to shift?
The other possibility is that my father is the one who lay with a fae. He brought me home, and used magic to convince my mother I was hers, or she accepted me anyway.
If that is what happened, then my mother is not my mother at all, and every memory I have of her belongs to a woman who was raising someone else’s child.
I don’t know which of them is worse, and I can’t stop myself thinking about them. Every version of it opens a door into the memories of my childhood, and changes the truth of them. And I’m not ready to think about that yet.
But both raise another question …
“My mother got sick just after I turned six.” My voice sounds hollow, even to me. “A wasting sickness. She stopped leaving her room. She stopped eating. And then one morning, Nella’s mother blocked me from entering her bedroom. That was the day she died.” I close my eyes.
Was she really sick or did something happen to her?
If she was my mother and used a mage to hide me, did my father find out? Or if my father was the one hiding the truth, did she find out, and was that the thing that killed her?
I always knew you were tainted. Brennan’s words come back to me again.
He knew. And if he knew then surely that means my father knew … which means …
I scoop up a palmful of water and splash my cheeks and forehead. The shock of the cold does nothing to ease the pressure pounding behind my eyes.
“What am I? Am I full fae or half?”
“I believe you to be a halfling.”
“Why?”
“Because it required human blood to break the collar around my throat and the wards around the Dell’s forest. Had you been full fae, you wouldn’t have been able to do that.”
Halfling. I am not human. The stranger in the water proves that. But I’m not fae either. Not the way Cairn and the rest of the Guard are. I am something in between. Part of both, belonging to neither.
I splash more water onto my face, washing the dirt away and rinsing my mouth. I don’t look at my reflection again.
“I think Brennan knows. He told me I was tainted.”
Cairn turns to stone. I don’t need to look at him to feel the sudden, icy stillness radiating from him.
“When did he say that to you?”
“On the scaffold. I thought he meant I was tainted because I defended the fae. Because I refused to tell my fa—the king what I knew.” I swallow hard, the words tasting like ash in my mouth. “I thought he meant I’d ruined myself by being with you. But he didn’t mean that, did he?”
“No.” The word carries a low, dangerous vibration. “I don’t believe he did.”
“He knew. Before the hunt. Before any of this. He knew when I was a child.” My hands are shaking again. “That’s why he wanted me. He knew what I was.”
“If he does know, then it’s because he saw you before the mages changed how you looked, or someone told him.”
My father. It has to be my father.
I press the heels of my hands against my eyes. I don’t know what to do with any of this.
The wind moves through the trees, and somewhere up the slope, someone laughs.
I lower my hands and look at him. Sunlight catches the planes of his face and the gold of his eyes, highlighting the dark fall of his hair. He looks tired.
“You should be up there.” With his Guard. Not sitting here with me at the edge of a pool.
“They’re not going anywhere.” He guesses my thoughts without me needing to put them into words.
“Cairn—”
“Aethryn.” He cuts me off, leaving no room for argument. “They are not going anywhere.”
I look back at the water. The stranger is still there. I study her this time, instead of trying to find myself in her features. She looks like someone who could belong in the clearing above us.
And I don’t know how I feel about that.