Page 53 of Night and Silence

I stared at her. “That sounded almost like an apology.”

“Because it was.” She looked me squarely in the eyes. “I am not sorry to have been her mother, but I am sorry I didn’t make room for you. I’m so sorry.”

“What the hell is happening?” My lips were numb, but my voice was working fine. That was good. I suddenly had a lot to say. “You can’t be my grandmother! You can’t know any of this! You’re a human! You—”

“I was Oberon’s lover,” said Janet. Time seemed to stop again. “There’s a long story as to how that happened, and I’ll be happy to tell it to you. Later. This isn’t the time. He loved me, and we had a daughter, and we named her ‘Amandine,’ because he knew I missed the almond trees that grew in my father’s orchards. He knew how much I missed my father, and Oberon was always kind, when the world gave him room to be. That’s what I hold to most, so long after. That he was kind, even when it wasn’t necessary. But then he had to go away, and he decided it wasn’t safe for me to be associated with our daughter, not with my history. He had her placed in a blind fosterage. By the time I found where he’d put her, it was too late.”

“Too late for what?” I whispered, horrified. It was like listening to my own story turned on its head. The missing parent, the child removed and raised by someone else . . .

“Too late for me.” Janet tipped her chin up. I saw my mother in that gesture, stubbornness and pride mixed up together until they became indistinguishable. I saw my mother, and August, and Gillian, and myself.

That was the moment when I started to believe her.

“Amandine didn’t need a mother. She certainly didn’t need a human mother, and the implications that carried. She didn’t need a family at all, apart from the fosterage her father had arranged. She had no place for me, and I’m not foolish enough to go against one of Oberon’s Firstborn, even when that Firstborn is my own daughter. Maeve’s curse aside, she would have crushed me.”

“Maeve’s . . . ?” Once again, I was starting to feel like I needed a flowchart to keep up with everything. I realized I was still holding my knife in front of me. Grudgingly, I lowered it. Somehow, I didn’t think stabbing her was going to do me any good. It might make me feel better, but it wouldn’t help.

“Oh. Did I leave that part out?” Smile turning wry, Janet tucked her hair behind one ear and said, “Until she returns, until she releases me, I don’t age, and I don’t die. At least not of anything I’ve been able to discover thus far, and believe me, I’ve discovered a lot of things. Plague, blood loss, poison—I recover. Until Maeve lets me go, here I am, preserved like a body in a bog.”

“Most people would go for the ‘mosquito in amber’ metaphor these days,” said May.

Janet shrugged. “Most people haven’t been through a hundred years of speech therapy to stop sounding like they belong in a part of Scotland that barely even exists anymore.” She paused and cleared her throat. Her next words were draped in a brogue so thick it should have sounded like a parody. Instead, it sounded like the world finally coming clear. “They forbade us maidens all who wore gold in our hair to come nor go near Caughterha; said young Tam Lin was there. More fool me, who never once learned how to listen.”

The floor seemed to drop out from under my feet. “You’re Janet,” I whispered.

Janet looked relieved. “Yes,” she said, brogue vanishing back into her carefully-schooled California accent. “I am.”

I didn’t say anything. It didn’t feel like there was anything left that I could say.

“Wait.” May held up her hands. We both turned to her. “You’re really Amandine’s mother?”

“Yes,” said Janet. Then she frowned. “You swear you’re not here because October is marked for death?”

“She was, once, but she got better,” said May. She glanced at me. “I mean, she still runs into danger like it’s her damn job, but it’s not because she has some predestined fate waiting in the wings to eat her.”

“That’s because it is my damn job,” I said. “I’m pretty good at surviving, though. May’s been living with me for years. Since just before I took down Blind Michael.”

Janet blanched, becoming so pale she looked like she was on the verge of passing out. There couldn’t have been any blood left in her head. “Blind Michael?” she repeated. “The horror of the hills, and you stopped him?”

“I had to,” I said simply. “He hurt my family.”

Janet blinked. Then, bitterly, she laughed. “As have I, is that what you say next?”

“You know, for someone who’s presumably been shopping on Amazon and yelling at the cable company for the last decade or so, you sure do talk like a romance novel,” said May.

“My apologies.” Janet shoved her braid back, grimacing. “It’s a bit automatic when speaking to the fae. Even when Oberon was here to protect me from his own people, I was human. I always have been: there’s no changing that. I learned the best way not to get hexed or hurt was to be as polite as possible.”

“You weren’t polite when you shoved your way into my home and accused me of kidnapping, or when you covered my daughter in something that would literally poison me,” I said. My frustration was starting to get the better of me. I stopped, forcing myself to take a deep breath.

Janet was the source of the sachets. The sachets were one of the only clues we had. Therefore, Janet needed to answer some goddamn questions.

“When did you start dipping my child in herbal toxins?” I asked.

“After she was stolen by your world for the first time,” she replied. “She came back changed. I assume that was your work?”

I nodded, the words catching in my throat until I swallowed them and said, “I offered her the Choice. It was the only way to save her life.”

Janet sighed. “I thought . . . when that happened, I thought that was you ceding her to me. You pulled Faerie from her blood. I thought you were saying I was her true mother, and it was my responsibility to keep her safe. So I kept her safe. I started making teas for her to drink and scents for her to wear, anything that would keep Faerie just that little bit at bay. And it worked! For so long, it worked.”