Chapter 28
Changelings.
All this security—the hidden doors, the magic, the guard—was to protect this secret. These children of two houses, somehow growing up near Void House rather than being kidnapped and thrown into the human world.
These children weren’t hostages—they were in hiding.
The littlest girl clapped her hands in delight after Ria extinguished the smoking doll, and a rainbow sprouted above the new puddle on the floor. Illusion magic. “Again, again!”
Una smiled at them. “Just make sure there’s always an adult around when you’re trying to light fires.”
“No more fires today,” the lady at the bookshelf said, carrying over a pile of books. “It’s time for lessons.”
The sylph at the desk rose, too, grinning at the children’s protests. “Reading or meditation first?” he asked.
Ria scrunched up her face. “Reading, I guess.”
“I’ll make some snacks,” the asrai said, rising from the couch.
Una nodded at the faeries, then continued towards us. “Let’s find a place to talk,” she said quietly.
We relocated to a smaller study down the hall. I sat on a couch, mind spinning from the revelation. “How?” I asked. “Why?”
“It started with Kallen,” Hector said. He looked grim, and though Una sat next to me, he was pacing the room like a caged wolf. “He can tell you why and how it started. But we’ve been saving who we can for more than two and a half centuries.”
Centuries? How was it possible they’d avoided detection that long?
“We teach them to control their powers,” Una explained. “If they’re part Void, we raise them in the house so they can undertake the trials without anyone realizing they’re different. So long as they never let anyone see the other half of their magic, no one has to find out.”
“And if they’re not from Void?” Ria was clearly born of Fire and Earth—she couldn’t pretend to be a Void faerie when the trials demanded the use of her magic.
“It depends on the parents and how the children came here,” she said.
“There’s a whisper network among some of the Underfae midwives.
If the parents can be trusted, and if they want to keep their children, we work with them to help control the children’s magic so they can grow up in a house.
It’s a dangerous option, though—the parents must be reliable, and the children must be exceptional at magical control.
The slightest error, and they’ll be taken away and the parents punished for concealing the secret. ”
“The parents bring them to you?” I asked, shocked again. That would require collaboration between Void and the other houses, and Mistei’s faeries rarely trusted one another or worked together.
“Sometimes.” Sadness crossed Una’s features. “Or sometimes the parents are so terrified they abandon the babies and we find them in the hallways. Or the parents are killed. Or the parents give them to a midwife and say they never want to see the baby again.”
How awful. “What happens to the children who can’t grow up in a house?”
“They don’t go through the trials. Instead, they join one of the colonies of exiled Fae. They grow old and die, but at least they do it in Mistei, rather than being traded for a human.”
“How many have there been?” I whispered.
“Forty-six,” Una said. “Not as many as we would like, but Kallen wasn’t always able to learn about them or make deals with the parents in time.”
I pressed my lips together, overcome by a surge of emotion.
Forty-six faeries saved from exile. Forty-six human lives spared, too—babies who hadn’t been stolen from their mothers or had their tongues cut out before being forced into servitude.
While Mistei’s glittering court of fiends had danced through year after year of cruelty, Hector, Una, and Kallen had been quietly saving lives.
“I didn’t realize there were so many changelings,” I said, voice choked. Fae births were rare, and this kind of birth was a crime. But it had been happening anyway.
“Osric could make all the laws he wanted,” Hector said, a bitter look still on his face. “But love does not answer to laws, and our remedies for unwanted pregnancies are not as successful as they are for humans—not without Blood House to assist. For every child we took in, two more were sent away.”
Kallen had told me he’d done something that could put Void House in grave danger, and though Hector had thought it foolish at first, he’d accepted it.
He’d clearly done far more than accept it—he’d created a safe space for the changelings, ensured they were trained to control their magic, then claimed the ones he could for Void House, even knowing that should they slip up with their magic in the public areas, the secret would be out.
Over two hundred and fifty years…But Hector had only been prince for a quarter century. “Your father, Prince Dryx—he was part of this, too?”
Una sucked in a breath.
Hector stilled in his pacing. Shadows suddenly coiled at his feet like snakes, winding up his legs, and when he looked at me, his eyes were blacker than night.
The air grew cold. “My father would have torn them apart with his bare hands,” he said, each word sharp as a knife.
“Not that he had the time or attention to notice what we were doing. He was too busy drinking his failures away and beating my mother.”
“Oh.” The word left me like a whimper. “Forgive me. I didn’t know.”
There was frost forming on his sleeves. “I do not want to speak of this again after today.”
I shuddered at the fury in his voice. “Of course. I promise not to tell anyone about the children—”
Una reached over and gripped my hand, squeezing hard. She shook her head. “He’s not talking about them.”
Confused, I closed my mouth.
Hector paced away again, shadows swirling in his wake.
“Decades ago, Kallen brought an Illusion lady here to give birth,” he said, staring at the door.
“That was often the deal—a safe place to give birth, a new life for the child, and in exchange, the mothers would become his informants. They would often direct other expecting mothers to us, the ones who were desperate for a solution but hadn’t wanted to or been able to end the pregnancy themselves. ”
He slammed his fist into the door suddenly, making me flinch. “Fuck,” he snapped. “I hate this.”
“You don’t have to,” Una said. “I can tell her.”
“No. Kallen was right.” He looked at me over his shoulder, eyes narrowed. “You want proof that I mean to help the people no one else does. So I’m not writing you an essay. I’m cutting out my heart to show you. You understand?”
I didn’t, but I nodded anyway, throat thick with apprehension.
“That lady brought a maid with her. An asrai named Eluna.” It sounded like he had to force her name out. “She was clever and sweet and pretty as a winter’s night. She had the most incredible eyes—black and infinite, like she saw everything, but when she was happy, they shimmered with an aurora.”
Realization filled me. This Illusion Underfae…she had meant something to Hector.
The pained tilt of his lips deepened. “She was good , in a way I could never hope to be. She believed in things like justice and gentleness and an afterlife beyond the stars where everyone would be equal in the end.” He swallowed, throat bobbing.
“Where everyone would be happy—and what was astounding was that she truly thought they deserved to be.”
The way he spoke about her— gods . Even though whatever story this was had concluded years ago, I still felt the swell of fear.
Una’s dark eyes shone with welling tears as she watched Hector. She already knew the ending, and even she looked afraid to hear it.
“The Illusion lady left and pretended it never happened,” Hector said, “but Eluna came back to us over and over. She wanted to help teach the children. She didn’t have Noble Fae magic, but she read to them. And I—”
He broke off, making a rough noise. Then he strode towards a bookshelf and grabbed a book at random, as if he needed something to hold, to look at, while saying this.
“I loved her,” he said, fingers tightening on the cover until they went bone white. “As I have never loved before and never will again.”
My heart ached for him. This forbidding, rough, restless prince had once loved a servant. And not just any servant—one from the king’s own house.
“We had fifty years together,” he said, staring at the book in his hand.
“Fifty years that were as terrible as they were wonderful, because this love we had discovered, this thing that was…that was divine beyond any gods or magic, beyond anything I had ever known how to believe in—no one could ever find out about it.”
Una was crying openly now, tears slipping silently down her cheeks.
My own eyes prickled. “You couldn’t—” I broke off, clearing my throat. “You couldn’t claim her for Void House, the way you claimed the changelings?”
He shook his head. “There’s no way to tell which house a Noble Fae belongs to by looking at them.
Eluna’s eyes, though, and the rainbows—” His voice broke, and he cursed harshly before starting again.
“The rainbows that followed where she went, she couldn’t hide those.
My father might have been blinded by drink and hate, but he would have noticed an Illusion asrai in the house, or someone would have told him about it.
And she wanted to stay, anyway. To be a resource for the Illusion faeries who needed help.
” He looked at the book in his hands, then roughly shoved it back on the shelf.
“Talking about this makes me want to break something,” he snarled.
“Then break something,” Una said.
He shook his head. “I’ve set enough bad examples for you over the years.”
She looked around, then stood and crossed to a writing desk topped with a row of vases holding dried thistles. She picked through the papers and pens on the desk, then grabbed a paperweight made of swirling black glass. “Here,” she said, offering it to Hector.