I did not know how long I remained there, in the corpse of my old life. The sun cast its pattern across the room too many times to count. Eventually, I
heard footsteps. I did not move as they approached. These were lighter even than Meajqa’s, as if they belonged to someone who had been trained their entire life to leave as little a mark upon the world as possible.
The footsteps came closer until I heard them behind me. And then I felt someone lower themselves onto the edge of my bed. Felt a gentle, delicate touch on my shoulder.
Orscheid, I thought. A dream, I thought. “My poor love.”
I rolled over to see my mother’s beautiful face looking down at me.
I was not expecting this. It was enough to jerk me from my dreamlike fog.
“You are not real,” I blurted out. She gave me a sad smile. “I am.”
She looked so different. She was still lovely, yes, but she had aged, streaks of barely-there silver in her hair, faint pinches at the corners of her features. And her eyes… no longer did they look straight through me, as if to a dreamworld a thousand miles beyond. They were clearer, sharper—and now, filled with sadness.
For the first time in what felt like forever, I sat up. “Why are you here? How did you find me?”
“Meajqa is worried about you.”
I lurched away from her outstretched hand.
I still could not wrap my mind around the fact that she was here. I could not reconcile this woman with the mad, meek creature from my memories.
“When he told me you lived… I…” Her eyes lifted and drifted around the room, as if chasing ghosts. “I would not wish it upon even my greatest enemies. To outlive your children.” Her gaze fell back to me, tenderness flooding it. “I cannot describe what seeing you makes me feel. My poor, lost daughter.”
This time, I let her touch me. Her hands were warm and soft, as I remembered them. Some primal piece of me craved my mother’s love. Even all those years ago, her affection had been barely a memory, lost with the decline of her withering mind.
“You have always had such a tender heart, my love. Even when you were just a child, I feared what the world might do with it.”
I let my eyelids flutter closed, let myself sag against her touch. I was so tired. Everything hurt.
I wanted nothing more than I wanted to feel safe. And here, beneath my mother’s caress, I was an innocent child again. There was nothing she could not protect me from. The world had not yet hurt me. Five hundred years had yet to sink their teeth into my soul.
I tried to breathe, and the inhale became a jagged sob.
“Oh, my love.” How easily I accepted her embrace. I fell against her. “I have failed you,” she murmured into my hair. “I am so sorry. I have failed you, Aefe.”
You have. You failed me.
“Orscheid,” I choked out.
“I think of her every day. Every second. And you—” Her voice broke, and I realized she was crying too, though while my tears were ugly and graceless, hers were silent and delicate.
Then, through the haze of my sadness, reality slipped in. I pulled away from my mother’s arms. Relief so quickly changed to fury.
“Meajqa sent you. Why?”
“Because he thought you needed me.” My heart hardened. “I do not need you.”
“Everyone needs someone.” She reached for me, but I avoided her touch.
“No. Once I did. When I was a child, and I needed my mother to protect me. That was when I needed you.” Grief and anger ran together like bloody
paint. “Orscheid needed you. She fought for me and died for it. But you did not.”
Pain wrenched across my mother’s face. “You never need to forgive me. He drugged me for decades, and my mind was weakened. He took more from me than I ever gave. But the only thing I’ll ever regret is allowing him to do it to my daughters, too.”
“And yet you are still here while Orscheid is dead. While I died.”
My mother was still on the precipice of tears. Again, she reached for me, and again I pulled away.
“Come home with me,” she said. “Let us talk somewhere warmer and safer than this.”
“I don’t want to go anywhere with you,” I snapped. “There is nothing for us to talk about.”
I turned back to the wall.
Leave. Go away. It is easier without you here.
But she didn’t move.
“I am very afraid of what I see happening, my love,” she said quietly. “How long has it been since you left this place?”
I did not answer, both because I didn’t want to and because I didn’t know.
“Caduan is preparing to make an irreversible move, Aefe.”
I disliked anyone speaking of Caduan in such a disapproving tone. I turned abruptly. “He is eradicating the humans, just as he always said he would. Good. They deserve it.”
“It is a mistake.”
I hurled my scoff at her like a weapon. “Spoken like a stranger. You have no idea what they did to me. I endured five hundred years of torture at their hands.”
“Then tell me of it,” she pleaded. “Tell me, my love, what they did to you. Let me help you bear that weight.”
My fingernails bit into my palm hard enough to draw blood.
I couldn’t. I couldn’t tell her. The idea of trying to condense all that pain into words… it was too big, too much. If I let those words free, I couldn’t control what other ones might come with it.
There was the torture, yes. The room of white and white and white. But there was also the matter of what I became. What I did, as Reshaye. The
unwelcome image of a marble floor and the bodies of five children struck me, and I pushed it away, just as I always had.
“Humans and Fey are capable of living together peacefully,” she said, gently. “You are evidence of that. Do you remember that?”
I remembered a dark-haired man, so long ago, meeting me in the moonlight in Niraja.
“I went back to him, Aefe. Your father—your true father. He was half human. We lived together, after the wars subsided. Me, him. His brother, Ezra, who too had lost everything.” Tears pricked her eyes. “He loved you so deeply. Even if he never had the chance to know you.”
I remembered learning a truth I was not ready to hear. And I remembered the father who had raised me trying to kill me for it.
“This body is new,” I said. “Lineage does not matter.”
“It is still a part of you, no matter what made your flesh. You can’t run from your past. You can’t run from your blood. Those are things you cannot kill, no matter how many hearts stop beating.”
“Caduan is fighting for me,” I snarled. “Fighting for all of us. Like you
should have.”
“It will make nothing better, my love. He could destroy everything, and it will make nothing better. I dreamed of revenge, too, in my moments of lucidity. But watching my wretched husband die meant nothing to me when I watched my daughter die beside him. The worst day of my life. And this
—this will be the worst day of so many lives.”
And why did those lives matter more than my life? Than Meajqa’s life? Than the lives of all the Fey who were tortured and kidnapped and murdered by the humans, and that would undoubtedly be in the future?
But then, in the back of my mind, I thought of Ishqa’s blood spraying over my face and the shape of his lifeless body falling over the balcony. I thought of how I had felt in the moments after.
Empty.
I pushed the thought away. “Get out. You have come here to manipulate and use me. I feel nothing for you anymore.”
Not true, a voice whispered. You can not lie to me.
My mother’s heartbreak stabbed deeper than I wished it would. She rose and stepped back.
“Meajqa told me the truth of Caduan’s… condition. Or at least enough that I could understand what he did not say.”
Every muscle in my body went taut, as if bracing for impact against the words. It did nothing. They hurt just the same.
“Your father’s human blood diminished his lifespan. By the time I made it back to him, he had only a few short decades remaining. And yet, those fleeting years were no less precious for it.” A tear rolled down her cheek. “Do not fear death, my daughter. We all walk with one foot in each world. There is beauty in impermanence. And what sad lives we would live, if we never loved anything we would lose.”
My vision was blurry, my chest aching. My mother gently took my wrist in her hands and revealed the smooth, tan skin of my forearm. Once it had been covered in stories from a life I now barely remembered.
“You have a chance to make another story, Aefe. Make it one of creation, of life. Not destruction. I want better for you than to burn alive in your own rage.”
You’ll find another thing to burn, Nura’s voice whispered. It’s all you know how to do.
“Get out.” I yanked my arm away. “GET OUT!”
My magic reverberated through the walls, making it shake. Vines crawled over every inch of stone, barely avoiding my mother’s feet.
And there it was. Fear. My own mother now feared me. Good.
She went to the door, and paused.
“I love you, Aefe. I love you imperfectly, but completely.”
For centuries, all I wanted was to hear that someone loved me and to feel that they meant it. I did not know what to make of the fact that I knew, somewhere deep and uncomfortable, that my mother meant it.
I turned to the wall and listened to her leave.
How dare she tell me what to do? How dare she tear me open like this, rip open scabbed-over wounds in my heart? How dare she speak of Caduan that way, as if he was a malignant force to be controlled?
The fury finally cut through the blanket of despair that had pressed me to the bed these last few weeks. I simmered in it for hours. And then, at last, I stood.
