Chapter 54
The fae has a wife who is scarier than I am, even on my worst days, and a little girl who talks to herself.
She’s the most terrifying of us all, but I can’t find the energy to be afraid of this little family. Not when I don’t know where I am, who I am. And besides, the wife made me tea, and so far I’ve drained a mug and a half and haven’t shown any signs of being poisoned.
We sit by the fire, the husband and wife on a couch across from where I’m curled up on a loveseat, wrapped in a shawl their girl provided. She’s sitting on the floor, talking to herself as she draws, which would be less creepy were she younger or if she seemed less mature.
Still, I tear my attention away from the girl as the man—Nox, was what he said his name was—begins to speak. “I’m going to try to put this in a way where it won’t come as a shock to you.”
Blaise, his equally pale wife, peers over her teacup at her husband, her brow raised. “Good luck with that.”
“When you were a child, you were kidnapped by Queen Abra.”
“An excellent, non-shocking place to start,” says Blaise.
“Well, I figured we might as well rip off the bandage.”
“I’ve been kidnapped before,” I say. “That’s not as shocking as you might think.”
Blaise grins at me over her teacup, then nudges her husband. “I like her,” she whispers loudly.
Nox smiles at her fondly, as if she’s complimenting him and not me.
“What I don’t understand is why I don’t remember this,” I say.
“Right, I should back up,” says Nox. “You see, centuries ago, the fabric between realms was impassable, until…” He stops when he glimpses Blaise’s expression.
“Too far back,” says Blaise, patting her husband on the shoulder. Then she turns to me. “There are multiple worlds, multiple realms. That’s basically what you need to know.”
“That’s a bit of an oversimplification, don’t you think,” says Nox, and not at all like it’s a question. “But yes, basically, think of it that you originated in this realm. Our realm.”
I stare at him like he’s crazy, although I am the one who woke up only knowing what I could have very well possibly dreamed. “So what I remember? That was real too? It just happened in another realm?”
“That seems to be the most likely explanation,” says Nox.
My heart twists in different directions. The idea of being separated from my home realm—that it was never my home realm to begin with—competes with the relief that at least it was all real. John, Wendy, Michael, the N—
Well, at least I didn’t just dream it all up.
“When you were taken by Queen Abra, she placed you in a sort of magical slumber. She used a servant at the time”—Nox’s throat seems to close up, and Blaise holds his hand—“who was skilled at weaving tapestries like the Fates did, to weave not just your subconscious, but you, into several different worlds.”
“If he wove me into different worlds, why was my body still here? How could I have been two places at once?”
“Bodies are funny things, don’t you think?” says Blaise. “They’re both you, and also not you.”
Apparently that’s supposed to be an adequate explanation, because Nox continues, “For years, your body remained undisturbed. But then, well, through a course of events that would take several hours to explain—”
“—And a few rather embarrassing details for me,” says Blaise.
“A few embarrassing details for the both of us,” admits Nox, this time holding his wife’s hand before continuing, “the situation changed. The queen had a son who had died a long time before, whose death she mourned. She kept his ashes in an urn on her shelf.”
A chill creeps up my spine as I remember the Nomad’s seal, the shape of the mark on the back of Wendy’s neck.
“She found a way to bring him back,” Nox continues, “but there were consequences. Consequences to me. Not to mention, the son was a danger to this realm.”
“So I put the queen’s son to sleep, in the same way she had put you to sleep,” says Blaise. “And while he was asleep, his consciousness trapped in another world… Well, he ran into you.” She grins, like she knows something I don’t.
My heart patters in my chest as I hang on their every word.
“You must have made quite the impression,” she says. “Because he died in that world saving you.”
“How do you two know all of this?” I breathe.
“The tapestries,” explains Nox. “New ones keep showing up in the room where you’ve been kept.”
“We thought he was dead for good after the first one,” explains Blaise.
“But then we saw him in one of the tapestries. It was a tapestry of the three Fates. He appeared there, and it depicts him petitioning for something. When we kept seeing him show up in your tapestries, that solved the question of what he’d petitioned for.
He had asked them to put him back in the tapestries with you.
If he could follow you into the worlds where you wandered. ”
Wanderer.
I stand up. “I don’t understand,” I say. “None of this makes any sense. Why would the Fates agree to that?”
“Trust us, we have no idea,” says Nox.
But then I remember the tales of the Eldest Sister. The Sister obsessed with love.
I stop. “So you’re saying the man I know as the Nomad—he’s been following me into my various reincarnations?”
“That’s pretty much it,” says Blaise.
I sit back down, fold my hands together in my lap. “How many lives?”
“We’ve counted thirty-five. So far.”
My brain stalls. Freezes. “You said that in the first tapestry, he died saving me. How?”
Blaise and Nox look at each other before Nox explains, “Because of the way you’d been woven into the tapestries, if you were killed in another realm, you would die for good.
In the past, you’d always found ways to move in between worlds.
Sometimes you could remember who you were, sometimes you couldn’t.
It just depended on how bored the Fates were and how much they wanted to change the rules.
But there’s a rule about those tapestries, about inhabiting two worlds at once.
If you were killed before your time, you wouldn’t come back anywhere. ”
“You mean I would have died here too.”
“Exactly,” says Nox. “And Fa—the Nomad figured out how to make rips in the Fabric. How to send you off to the next realm, like you’d been doing. Your soul was so interwoven with the Fabric, a tear in your soul would rip it and take you with it.”
My mind goes back to the conversation the Nomad and I had in his office.
How he had known I’d never killed anyone before.
He’d said he could just tell, but all that time, he knew who I was and that, had I killed, I would no longer belong to that world.
Which must be why he stopped me from killing that faerie dust harvester in the tavern.
My mind races back to my last moment with him. How he’d looked at the wound in my side. He’d been assessing whether it was fatal before he turned on me.
Before he taunted me into killing him first.
And then I had been whisked away.
All of the nightmares come swarming back into my vision.
They’d always ended before I actually died. I’d always woken up before the Nomad’s murder was complete.
Except for the time I’d killed him in the dream instead.
“He’s been forcing me to kill him in self-defense all these years, all these lifetimes,” I whisper.
Blaise nods. “We’re not particularly fond of him, but even we have to admit, it’s pretty romantic.”
I can’t help that my heart soars at the idea that I’ll see him again, that…
“Wait,” I say, a terrible thought occurring to me. “If he always does this, if this is the way our story always ends, why did I wake up here? Why did I wake up in the first realm?”
“I’ve been trying to figure that out,” says Nox, “and I think I have a theory. You said that before you killed the Nomad, he had changed a tapestry so that it showed a woman waking up?”
I nod, my heart pounding.
“He did it. He finally did it,” gasps Blaise.
“Did what?”
“Found the original tapestry. Your original tapestry. It must have been the only way to wake you up.”
“But—” I trail off, feeling the vibrations of my voice against my throat. “That means he wasn’t lying when he said he’d help me get my voice back.”
Blaise and Nox look confused, but I ignore them. I scoot forward in my seat. “If it worked, why isn’t he here now?”
Nox swallows, blinks.
Blaise reaches out and holds my hand. “You said he was interrupted before he was finished.”
My hand flies to my mouth. “He was going to weave himself back into this realm.”
“Zora—”
“Stop calling me that!” I scream. “I don’t know who that is. All I know is that I killed him. I killed him before he had the chance to weave himself back in.”
Blaise and Nox go very still.
“Wait,” I say, grabbing onto the side of the couch. “You said the Fates always weave him back into whatever realm I’m in.”
“We’re not sure of the initial bargain,” says Nox. “All we know is what we can infer from the depictions we see in the tapestries that show up.”
I stare at them both, my mind empty, too blank to make words, to ask the question that needs asking.
“What Nox means is that we don’t know whether they’ll weave him back into this world,” says Blaise.
My heart stalls in my chest.
“Unfortunate as it is, it seems unlikely that they will. Especially if he was trying to weave himself back into this world on his own,” says Nox apologetically.
I stand there, empty-eyed, hearing nothing but their strange child talking to herself on the floor.
“Right,” I say, my throat forming a lump.
Nox goes to move toward me, but I take a step back. Sorrow fills his expression, and Blaise whispers something in his ear.
I don’t know what Nox is to me. Why he and his wife have been so invested in my comatose body, but for now, I don’t care. Don’t want to know.
“I want to see the tapestries,” I say.