Ten #2
I broke out of Acacia’s memory of the founding of the skerry with a gasp, horror clinging to my thoughts as I remembered how sure she’d been that this was going to be a paradise, that nothing was ever going to go wrong or sour between them.
She had been looking for a home, the Dryads already grown and their father gone, no longer available to help her have any more children of her own.
So much of Faerie depended on legacies and bloodlines.
Even living forever couldn’t change that.
Acacia was watching me, and I remembered that she had grown up with Eira lingering nearby, a terrible, frozen shadow. Had she learned the art of directing what a blood-worker would see by focusing her thoughts on the memories she most wanted to share?
“Think about the attack,” I said roughly, and lowered my mouth again.
Her blood this time was hot and rich against my tongue, copper mixed with maple syrup, and it burned as I swallowed. It burned all the way down to the base of me, and the memories came down again, blanketing and blocking out the world.
Luna. Little Luna, her/my youngest rose, grown now like all the others. She doesn’t need her/me the way she/I want her to; she doesn’t listen. Children grown will never listen.
She’s hauling that daughter of hers, the one who should never have been possible, whose blood was born in full rebellion against its own design.
Hair red as a rose, yes, but nothing left of me/her in her; the child is none of her/my concern.
Why has Luna brought her here? Does she think she can tease some mercy out of her/me, when she’s allowed this mutilation of what should have been her/my grandchild?
She’s always been na?ve, her/my Luna, always been inclined to believe the world would change for her pleasure, that she would somehow have all her heart’s desires, but this is the worst offense she has yet committed.
Why has she brought this distorted reflection of their/our family line home to her/me?
Maybe this is punishment for what she/I allowed Michael to do for all those long and terrible years: maybe she/I am forced to look into the eyes of a child who should belong to her/me and see only a stranger because she/I allowed so many children to be taken and transformed, forever forbidden their family. She/I don’t know.
But there is Luna, bruised and unbowed, and Raysel limp and silent in her arms. There is the child she/I once thought lost forever, the most precious rose of her father’s garden, and she needs her mother’s help. She needs a safe place to root. She/I can offer that.
She/I lead them deeper into the garden, into the safety of the walls, and her/my sweetest rose sets the warped child aside to embrace her mother, to come fully home at last. There is a sound from outside—
Finally. This was the memory I’d been looking for, the one that would show what I’d been missing and let me stop this dizzying descent into Acacia’s memory.
I took a deep breath, trying to let it reacquaint me with the shape of my own skin, then clamped my mouth down for a third time, chasing the memory.
—in the yard they’re in the yard and they shouldn’t be here this shouldn’t be possible. There are eight of them, all tall and broad-shouldered, armored so that she/I can’t see their faces, but they move like predators, swift and terrible, closing without mercy. The blades bite into her/my skin—
I screamed as I stumbled back from Acacia, borrowed pain lancing through my body.
It was only the memory of injury: no gashes opened in my skin, no bones broke.
It just felt like they did. I clutched my arm tight against my side and managed to stop screaming, panting as I clutched my bicep with my opposite hand and stared at Acacia, who was bloodied but unbowed as she watched me.
“Funny,” she said. “I don’t remember it hurting that much.”
And it hadn’t in the beginning, had it? The cuts had been muted when they hit her skin.
It was only when the memory had carried over onto mine that the true agony began.
She wasn’t wooden like her elder children or pith like her younger, but she was still more than mammalian, and she hadn’t experienced the pain the same way I had.
Faerie is nothing if not endlessly innovative in the way it finds to hurt us.
“They looked…” I wheezed, trying to get control of my breath back. “They looked like Riders.”
Riders were unique to Blind Michael’s lands.
They belonged to no specific descendant line, or maybe they belonged to all of them, transformed by his magic into something that was suited to ride forever with his Hunt.
They were large and muscular, effortlessly powerful, and many of them had been mentally boiled down to the level of hunting hounds, clever and loyal, but no longer what I could reasonably call intelligent.
They were better than beasts, but barely, and their existence was part of why Acacia had chosen to remain here after her husband died; they couldn’t take care of themselves, and needed to be looked after.
“They can’t have been,” she said, offended. “That makes no sense at all. They don’t have—they can’t plan something like this. They pursue, they don’t ambush. I don’t know who those people were, but they can’t have been Riders.”
“If you say so,” I said, and looked down at my hands. Acacia’s blood was smeared across my fingers, thick and red and already drying to a murky brown. My head snapped up as I scanned the area for Tybalt. “Acacia, you can go to the wood now if you need to rest. We’ve got it from here.”
“Got what? What are you talking about?”
But I was already walking away, heading for the building where Luna was resting. Tybalt was outside, sniffing around the foundation, ears flat and tail lashing.
“Tybalt,” I called.
His head snapped up and he straightened, then stood. As always, the moment of transformation happened so quickly that I missed it; he blurred and he was a man again, already hurrying toward me. The candle, which had vanished when he transformed, was back in his hand. Magic can be fun like that.
“October?” he asked. “I heard you screaming, but I didn’t think you wanted me rushing to your rescue…”
“This time, no,” I said. “I was riding Acacia’s blood, and accidentally borrowed some of her pain. I wasn’t in any danger. In general, if you hear me scream, I am totally fine with a rescue, even if I didn’t actually need it.”
“Good,” he said, looking genuinely relieved. “What do you need?”
“The crew that jumped Acacia wound up pretty covered in her blood,” I said, holding out my bloody hands. The candle in my right still burned steadily, no shorter than it had been when we began. “They didn’t exactly have time to stop and take a shower before they grabbed Raysel and took off.”
Tybalt frowned momentarily before understanding flooded his expression and his eyes widened slightly. Slowly, he smiled, and it was a beautiful, terrible expression. “Oh, those poor, unwashed souls.”
“Exactly,” I said.
He grabbed my hand and pulled it toward him, lifting it like he was going to kiss my knuckles. At the last moment he paused and sniffed my fingers instead, pupils narrowing to slits as he took in the scent trail we would need to follow.
“Even if the blood is dried and my lady cannot trace it, I have the scent,” he said, and dropped back to the ground on all fours.
He lashed his tail for several seconds, then yowled, loudly, and took off across the flat ground, heading for the trees.
I ran after him, gathering my skirts high in my free hand to keep them from getting caught on the nearby brush.
There’s something refreshingly straightforward about chasing something, even when the something is your husband running slowly enough to be sure that you’ll be able to keep up.
The world seemed to narrow to just him and me and the obstacles around me, snatching at my clothing and tangling at my feet.
He ran, and I pursued, and somewhere along the line, this sort of thing had become a normal part of my life.
One thing I had to give Blind Michael: when he’d designed his poisoned paradise, he went out of his way to make it the sort of perfect gothic landscape that just cried to be run through.
The ground was smooth and even where it wasn’t broken by brush, and there were clear sightlines in almost all directions right up until we reached the woods.
Then we were there and they swallowed us whole, but the level ground continued, a narrow path extending onward like an invitation.
We ran, and the path was there to meet us, and there was no way anyone could have predicted the exact route we’d need to follow, but the way was clear.
The flame of my candle flickered and guttered in the wind created by our passage, snapping through all the shades a flame could hold before dying down to something barely greater than an ember and stabilizing there, ready to snap back to full brightness as soon as I stopped.
I wasn’t sure the wind could extinguish a candle lit by the Luidaeg, and even if it did, once we were here, Acacia could open us a doorway out again without too much difficulty.
I’d seen her do it before. Without Michael to insist that she hold us prisoner, she would be able to let us leave.
And I didn’t think she’d argue when I insisted on taking Raysel with us.
The thoughts I’d heard echoing in her memory gnawed at me.
Why did blood matter so much to everyone in Faerie?
Raysel was still her grandchild, still born of her youngest daughter, whether she was Blodynbryd or not.
Quentin was still my son, and we weren’t related even that tenuously.
Family was built on so much more than blood.