Eleven #4
“You asked her to be someone she’s not. You refused to listen when she told you what she wanted.
You grabbed her from a place where she should have been safe, so you could impose your own version of reality on her.
You need to stop, Luna. You need to back off and leave her alone, or you’re going to lose her.
If you haven’t lost her already. Who did you tell about your plan to grab her from the Queen’s court? ”
“No one,” she said, but her eyes darted to the side, making it obvious that she wasn’t telling me the full truth.
“Luna. Who did you tell?”
“No one,” she repeated, more firmly. “I told no one what I was planning … but I suppose if someone had been watching me closely, they might have seen some signs. I asked the staff to prepare a room near my quarters.”
“Not Raysel’s room?” Privately, I filed away the fact that she had referred to “her” quarters, not the ducal quarters. Had she and Sylvester moved to separate rooms?
She shook her head. “I wanted her closer to me, and not where she’d be in the path of prying eyes. I do care for my daughter’s well-being, however little you may think of me.”
“I know you do, Luna,” I said. “I never thought otherwise of you. We may have our differences, and you may not always know what’s best for her, but you’ve never done anything that would make me think you didn’t want the best for her.”
“It wasn’t supposed to be like this,” she said. “I got away from here. I was supposed to have my happily-ever-after. Why couldn’t you leave us alone? Why couldn’t you just let me have what I deserved?”
“Luna…” I stopped myself, then tried again: “Luna, I never meant to hurt you. I was just trying to save the children Blind Michael had taken. Surely you understand.” I was careful not to call him her father. Accurate as that was, it wouldn’t have done us any good.
“You showed them where to find me,” she snapped. “You reminded them that I existed.”
“They must have known. Shadowed Hills was protected from Blind Michael’s Hunt, and that means they knew to avoid it.”
“They knew something there didn’t want them, and that whatever it was pushed back in a way they felt needed respecting. But I was wrapped in Kitsune skin, and they didn’t know me for their own.”
“I’m not the one who poisoned you, or who stole children from my best friend,” I said. “I never did anything to intentionally hurt you.”
She sighed. “I know,” she said.
Tybalt, who had been so quiet that I’d almost forgotten he was there, moved up behind me and set a hand upon my shoulder.
“On Blind Michael’s last Ride, he took the heir of my court,” he said, voice low.
“If you must blame anyone for what befell you, blame him. He crossed a line when he touched a Prince of Cats.”
We were getting away from the point. “You asked for help setting up a room for Raysel’s use. Was there anything special about it? Did you tell the gardeners you needed night-blooming roses, or ask the kitchen staff for all her favorite dishes?”
“No. I just had her room prepared. I grabbed her, dosed her with a sedative I’d requested from Jin—I told her it was to help me sleep—and pulled her onto the Rose Road.
No one should have been able to follow us from there.
I brought her to my mother, intending to ask for help and take Raysel back to Shadowed Hills while the Queen’s court was still in session.
No one would have been able to track us, because we’d have cut through the skerry.
It should have worked. It would have worked, if you didn’t miss your daughter so badly that you were willing to steal another woman’s child. ”
“I know you’re hurting, and you’re still recovering from your injuries, and that is why I’m not going to shake you right now,” I said pleasantly.
“I never stole anything. I offered Rayseline safety when she couldn’t find it at home, and I have done everything in my power to keep that promise.
Now, I’m going to find her, wherever she is, and I’m going to make sure she’s safe wherever she wants to be.
I’m sorry you got hurt. I hope you’ll take the time you have here to consider what you could have done differently.
I hope you can find your way home again. ”
I stood, turning away from her, but looked back at her, briefly. “Goodbye, Luna. I’m sorry this had to happen.”
She didn’t say anything, only narrowed her eyes and watched as Tybalt and I walked out of the room, back to the gap in the wall and the empty stretch of earth between the trees and the building. I exhaled, sagging where I stood.
“That was difficult for you,” said Tybalt.
“You think?” I looked up at him. “I used to wish she was my mother, not Amandine, so I could feel like someone loved me when I went to bed in the morning. I used to want to make her happy more than almost anything. And now she hates me, and when I have to be around her, all I want is to get away as quickly as I can. How could anything involving her ever be easy?”
“What shall we do now? We can’t leave until Acacia wakes.”
“I don’t really know,” I said. “I guess we could talk to some of the locals? They might know what the Riders who took Raysel have been up to, or even where they would take her if they were planning to seize her, and not just acting on impulse and opportunity.”
“That seems to be the complicating factor,” said Tybalt. “You’ve determined that some of the people in Shadowed Hills may have had reason to suspect what Luna intended. How does that translate to the skerry? There’s no overlap between the occupants, save for possibly Luna herself.”
“And while, yeah, Luna would absolutely abduct her own daughter, I don’t think she’d let herself be mortally wounded in the process if she was the mastermind of this whole situation,” I said grimly. “Which reminds me.”
“Of what?”
“Back when I faced Blind Michael for the first time, Acacia was trying to get Luna’s attention.
She sent a rose with me to Shadowed Hills.
When Luna took it, she lost her Kitsune skin for a moment, and her Blodynbryd nature reasserted itself in a way I’d never seen before.
When her Kitsune guise returned, she said she’d earned the right to bleed, and that bleeding wasn’t in her mother’s nature. ”
“And?”
“And Acacia bled. She bled like anyone would if you hacked them up that badly. I rode her blood, Tybalt. It was definitely her. If it’s not in her nature to bleed, how was that possible?”
“Luna may have been speaking from a childhood understanding of her mother, and not from an adult position of true knowledge?”
“Maybe. But it still seems off to me, like there’s something I’m missing.”
“There is always something to be missed this early in the process of solving a mystery,” he said. “If there weren’t, it wouldn’t be much of a mystery, now would it?”
“I guess not.” We were walking back toward the central bonfire, passing through the scrubby wood on our way.
I looked around. Many of the trees were twisted and contorted like people caught in the middle of fleeing for their lives, which they probably had been once upon a time.
I couldn’t tell which, if any of them, was actually Acacia. We kept walking.
The trees gave way ahead of us and we stepped out into the clear space around the buildings.
I shivered involuntarily. This was the more-familiar-to-me stretch of Blind Michael’s lands, the place where I’d been kept when I was his prisoner.
The stables were the darkest point in the jumbled shadows of the area.
I looked toward them but didn’t approach. Tybalt followed my gaze.
“Should we be going over there?” he asked, politely.
“No,” I said. “I don’t know how much magic is still inside those walls, and I don’t want to find out the hard way.
That was where he threw his captives when he wanted them to transform into his Riders, or their steeds.
He turned the human children into horses, you see.
It made them easier to control, when they could literally be broken to harness.
” It sounded so simple when I said it like that, so straightforward and easy to understand.
But it hadn’t been simple while it was happening, had it?
The screams of the children he’d taken still echoed in my nightmares, and here, it felt like those nightmares were waiting just below the surface of my thoughts, lurking and eager to drag me down.
Human children had become horses, fae children had become Riders.
For both, it had been a long and painful process, first their bodies and then their minds warping under the weight of his magic, twisting inward on themselves until they became something entirely new.
I’d been saved from that fate, ironically enough, by Michael himself; he’d decided I would make a fine replacement for Acacia and kept me in his private quarters where he could control what happened to me.
His magic had never had the chance to twist my bones.
I could be grateful for that, even as I felt guilty that I’d been spared while the others he’d taken hadn’t been.
I hadn’t truly been a child when I’d handed myself into his possession, and I’d gotten away when the real children hadn’t.
Sometimes things that are true can be truly terrible.
Tybalt looked at the stables, visibly stricken, and I winced.
His court had lost plenty of children over the years, and before Raj, none of them had been recovered.
For the longest time, Blind Michael had been the fae equivalent of childhood disease: once he caught you, there was nothing to be done.
Pureblood kids didn’t die of smallpox, they vanished of Blind Michael, and the two were equally indiscriminate, equally inescapable.
We’d been able to break the cycle, but if he hadn’t thought to ask me to save Raj, he might never have seen his heir and nephew again.
If I’d refused him, Raj would have been as lost as the rest.