Chapter 1
One
Selkirkshire, Scotland
Imbolc, seventy-five years before
My mother always wept that I was not her child. This wounded me far less than knowing she was right.
She lost her wits when I was but thirteen years old.
We had just delivered the child of Peggy the Cottar, though ’twas born out of wedlock and Peggy had not the coin to pay.
Her family never did. Eamon, Mairi’s husband, frowned upon such acts of charity and upon his wife’s cunning woman skills; at least, after he’d spent time with our parish priest, he did. But Mairi had never paid that any mind.
“Peggy should have come to me long before now,” she confided in me as we walked home together. “The moment she first knew her courses were late. I could have helped her better then.”
There was no sick person Mairi Grieve would not help. I deeply admired her for that.
“Anyway, Eamon was wrong,” she continued. “Peggy paid us, didn’t she?” And she gestured at the ailing chicken I now carried in my arms.
“Some fee,” I muttered. The bird was like to die any moment now; its feathers were molting and bedraggled; it sat a half-starved bundle in my arms. “We shall have to nurse this one back to health, too.” And by “we” I likely meant “I.” As the youngest of the household, my job it was to look after the chicks.
Mairi laughed and tugged upon one of my plaits.
“’Tis good practice for you, my cuckoo!” She always did call me that, the little stranger who had been reared in her nest, like a cuckoo’s egg.
Back then, she meant it with affection; had never said it with any malice, only a bit of wistfulness coloring her tone.
“Ye were a good help to me today, lass. I was glad to have ye by my side.”
Not so glad as if I were the true Bess, your daughter. I pressed my lips together that the words would not come out.
I did not know why the true Bess Grieve had been taken by the faeries, and I left in her place.
The Grieve household was riddled with fae, from the shadows who danced upon the walls to the Cait Sith who curled up before the fire and chased away the occasional mouse.
I could sense these fae as none of the household’s mortal members did, but never would they speak to me.
Only the brownie Morven acknowledged me, when I stayed up late to watch her scouring the pans and sweeping out the hearth.
“Blood will out,” was the explanation she gave. “I can smell the mortal in ye, lass. I warrant yer blood is tainted, and ye were too sickly to remain in the Faery realm. Consider yerself lucky ye found a home here.”
I did consider myself lucky, in some ways.
Eamon was not a warm person, but he was prosperous enough to feed and house me and my siblings—nay, Bess’s, really—a noisy and ungrateful throng.
Mairi’s work as a healer was not needed to supplement the household income, nor did Eamon welcome it as his status in the village rose, but she was generous in her healing and teaching and far kinder to me than I deserved.
Despite this kindness, inside my head the refrain echoed: Not True Bess.
Not wholly fae. You are Mairi Grieve’s cuckoo, and that is all you will ever be.
On days like this one, when the warm sun beat down upon our heads, and we brought new life into the world, when Mairi Grieve herself had said I was a good help to her, it almost felt like enough.
The chicken pecked me, and I tried to get my arms more comfortably around it, when out of the corner of my eye, I saw something pass beside Mairi’s face. Long fingers stroking her cheek. I breathed in the scent of musk and loam and green things gone to rot.
The world seemed to go still, a heaviness filling the air. Wicked laughter hovered around me, turning to birdsong when I listened close.
Then Mairi stumbled, fell to her knees upon the dirt path, dropping her basket of simples and herbs.
“Goodwife Mairi!” I cried out, addressing her as my mistress since calling her “Mother” would have been a lie. The chicken leapt out of my arms. I let it wander free as I dropped down beside her, my kirtle dragging in the dust.
Mairi’s face drooped on the right side; her eyes were staring and wild. She murmured words I could not understand, interrupted with the occasional word I could. “The queen . . . the babe!” she cried out. “Where is the babe? Where is my little Bess, my child?”
She is right here, I longed to say, but the words caught in my throat.
We of Faery cannot lie.
“Raise your arms,” I said instead, as I had heard Mairi herself command her apoplectic patients. “Can ye show me a smile?”
Mairi’s left arm rose to her shoulders; the right hung limp and weak. She bared her teeth, but her lip hung down on one side, and she drooled. The shadowy goblins that danced across our walls appeared comely in comparison. Oh, Mairi.
She was stricken. Faery-struck, they call it, though neither Mairi nor I much liked the term. And yet—
And yet there had been that peculiar green scent. Heavy. Intoxicating. The overly long fingers that touched the side of her face . . . then vanished. I shook these memories away, as I could not understand what they meant.
Instead, with great care, like she was naught but dust and skeleton leaves, I helped Mairi to her feet, let her lean upon me as I walked her home to bed.
And not once did she leave it for the next five years.