Chapter 6 #2
I pinched my forehead. She sounded like Oriana. He’ll be horrible in different ways. All monarchs are. “Not if you leave,” I signed, rather than arguing that a different ruler could, in fact, change Mistei for the better, so long as we chose the right one. “The wards are gone. You can go home.”
She grunted. “Home,” she echoed. The movement was almost violent. “I have no home.”
“Your village—”
“Left fifty years ago. You think anyone in Alethorpe remembers me? You think they know what to do with a bent old woman with no tongue?” Maude was signing so quickly I was barely able to follow.
“They’ll call me Fae—” The end of the word was a complex movement my brain couldn’t encompass in time.
“They’ll bar their doors and leave me begging on the street. ”
What had that sign been? A dark thing was my best guess, but the angle of the motion had implied heaviness. Some terrible burden to carry.
A curse, I realized, recalling the word from one of our later lessons. Triana had been melancholy that day, wondering what we had done to deserve this fate, and Maude had said a curse must have been laid over our cradles.
They’ll call me Fae-cursed.
I started to deny it, but then I remembered a man who had stumbled into Tumbledown one afternoon dressed in rags and telling a tale of being stolen away by the Fae.
He’d played the fiddle for them for a night of revelry, he’d said, and when they’d sent him away in the morning, the gold they’d paid him with had turned to leaves.
He just needed some money from the good people of Tumbledown and he would be on his way…
A lie, certainly. I’d been ten years old, and even I hadn’t believed him—and now that I knew what happened to humans in Mistei, it was even more obvious what a charlatan he’d been.
He’d refused to play for us, his story had changed repeatedly, and his accent had been southern—a tourist’s dialect, not one belonging to the towns that bordered faerie lands.
Some in the village had thought him mad, but others considered him an opportunistic con man, there to fleece the superstitious northerners.
There were true believers in Tumbledown, though, quite a few of them, and tales of human abduction were common in the legends their ancestors had passed down.
The faithful agreed he was faerie-touched—but he’d miscalculated his mark, because they’d also agreed anyone the Fae had discarded should be avoided at all costs.
The faeries only took in the worthiest humans, and if he’d been set loose again, something was wrong with him.
Faerie-cursed , my mother had whispered that night as she’d barred the door against whatever evil that stranger might bring through it. The hidden folk will punish us if we give shelter to a man like that.
So he’d been sent on his way.
“They don’t speak our language there,” Maude signed when I didn’t reply. “How do you expect us to explain ourselves?”
“I could go with you and interpret,” I said, but Caedo’s caution was still ringing in my head. A princess should not leave her house.
Mistei was on the brink of war. I’d been resurrected—I’d died —for the sake of the magic now burning within me, for the sake of Blood House. Would it be right to leave?
Alethorpe was a day’s ride from Tumbledown, and Tumbledown itself would take hours to get to over the hills and across the bog.
There were humans who had been abducted from even farther away than Alethorpe.
What would happen during those days or weeks away?
What might happen to the precarious balance of power while I was shepherding the humans to safety?
Maude laughed, a ragged exhalation. “You will not,” she said. “Even if we could leave here without dying. Even if that were true. You are one of them now.”
One of them…“But also one of you.”
Her pursed lips said she didn’t agree.
I heard the sound of running feet, and then Triana skidded into the room.
Shock, hope, and horror danced across her face.
Then she launched herself at me, wrapping her arms around my neck.
She held on tightly, swaying us both back and forth.
Maude tried to tug her away, but Triana shook her head and clutched me tighter.
My heart ached, and I grinned into her short hair. She, at least, hadn’t abandoned me.
Finally, she drew back. “It’s true,” she signed, looking me up and down. “You’re Fae. An Underfae told me, but I didn’t believe it.”
I nodded.
Tears welled in her doe-like brown eyes. “How?”
I told her, speaking aloud considering the complexity of the story. How I’d been helping Lara succeed in the trials and how the king had found out and tried to kill me by throwing me into the swirling vortex. How the Shards had decided to keep me alive and gift me the powers of Blood House.
“They said I should restore the balance,” I said, accompanying the words with the gesture for straightening something, though it was typically used in the context of a crooked picture frame or an uneven hem, not a broken political system. “Bring back Blood House somehow.”
Triana looked enraptured. Her cheekbones were stark from poor nutrition, but her eyes were bright, and her reddish-brown hair was growing out after being shaved off.
It was nearly three inches long now, every day of growth marking more time away from her servitude in the brothel.
“It’s like the old legends of the Fae-blessed,” she said.
“A real faerie story, the kind with a happy ending.”
Was that the kind of story it was? There was a sudden knot in my stomach. My mother had adored those stories for the impossible dreams they promised, and I had learned to hate them for the same reason.
Maude cleared her throat. Her mistrustful expression had softened during my explanation, but she still kept a wary distance. “What if that isn’t her anymore?” she asked Triana. “The Fae can make us see things.”
Triana studied me so intently it felt like she was staring through me, right down to my bones. I held my breath, wondering what the judgment would be. Then she nodded. “It’s Kenna. I see it in her eyes. Even the Fae cannot trick us that well.”
Tears blurred my vision. How easily she gave me her trust. If our positions were reversed—if someone I knew had died and then returned as a type of creature who had hurt me terribly—would I be so generous? “Thank you,” I told her, touching my fingers to my chin and moving them towards her.
Maude sighed, but I saw a change in her bearing, a gentling in her expression. “It is hard to believe in anything,” she said. “They have taken so much.”
The Fae had taken much. Our lives, our happiness, our freedom. But that didn’t mean we couldn’t take something back. “If you don’t want to leave Mistei right now,” I said, “do you want to come to Blood House? You can stay there. Any human who wants to can stay there.”
Maude and Triana looked at each other. Then Maude dipped her chin slightly, and Triana turned to me with a wide smile and nodded, too.