Page 31 of Be the Serpent

Eyes wide, Arden shook her head.

“No, I didn’t think so. So yeah, I can’t perceive Faerie at all right now. Neither can Quentin.”

“Neither can I,” said Simon. “It vanished somewhere between guiding October up the hill and stepping into the clearing. You all look perfectly human to me right now, which is more mundane than what would be seen by an actual human.”

“More concerning, too,” I said. “Do you have anyone in your household who makes steady use of Faerie ointment? It might help to counter whatever’s happening to us.”

“I can see just fine,” said Stacy. “I really don’t understand what’s going on. You said Mitch and the kids were here? Is something wrong?”

Arden’s eyes widened as she turned to stare at me again. I gave a quick shake of my head, hoping her time in retail had left her with enough common sense not to say something silly like “You mean you don’t know?” or—worse—“Sorry, your daughter’s dead.”

To my immense relief, Arden said, “Mitch and the children are inside the knowe, but if October and the rest of you have somehow been infected with a condition that’s preventing you from seeing properly, I can’t let any of you inside until we know what’s actually going on.”

If it wouldn’t have been treason and I hadn’t been married, I could have kissed her.

The air in front of the big tree shimmered, briefly distorted like a special effect out of a bad science fiction movie, and another woman joined us in the clearing. This one looked like a human teenager in denim coveralls and stompy black boots, dark, curly hair pulled into pigtails and secured with strips of electric tape. She glared at the lot of us before demanding, “Well? Were you planning to come inside any time soon, or is it just going to be a day where I have to babysit and you people hang out leaving me to take care of everything? Again?”

“Luidaeg.” I sighed heavily, in relief. “We have a problem.”

“And what’s that?”

“We can’t see Faerie.”

She blinked. Unlike Arden, she didn’t look odd at all as a human. She actually looked more like herself this way than she did in most fae guises. The majority of fae have ears that are pointed to one degree or another—one of the few things the movies get right. The Luidaeg doesn’t, or if she does, she’s always hidden them well enough that no one knows. Most of the time, she goes around looking human from tip to toe, completely veiled in mortality. It’s a gift that seems unique to her, even among the Firstborn. Oberon was able to hide as a human man for decades, but when he did that, he didn’t know who he was. Now, he could dim himself to the point of becoming unnoticeable. Not quite the same thing. Still impressive, just . . . not the same.

“At all?”

“Nope.” I shook my head. “I can feel my magic respond when I call it, and I can smell spells the way I normally do, but they’re sort of . . . removed. Like I have a bad cold or something.” Except that an actual cold wouldn’t stop me from smelling magical signatures. Magic isn’t smelled in the nose, exactly. Faerie is weird and we just go with it.

“Really.” She moved closer, eyes narrowed as she peered at us. Stepping back again, she snapped her fingers. “Queenie.”

“Please try to show some basic respect in the presence of my staff,” said Arden, moving to stand next to the Luidaeg. “I know it’s not easy for you, but I have to live with these people when you’re not here.”

“Do I look as if I give a shit? I know you’ve let your little chatelaine’s boy-toy set up an alchemy lab off the kitchens. He’s a smart fellow, he’ll have the basics on hand. Go get me half a dozen eggs and a bottle of foxglove extract.”

“Those aren’t mine,” said Arden. She took a step back when the Luidaeg turned to look at her with narrowed eyes. “Except for the part where they’re in my knowe and I’m the Queen here and so I can make a case for anything he’s left here being mine by right of I’m the Queen and also I can buy him replacements if he gets really snotty about it, be right back.” She took another step back and was gone, disappearing like someone had made an edit to the film we were all living through.

This was getting old, and rapidly so. “You know, I’ve been human enough to need fairy ointment and it was never this bad,” I complained.

“Well, it wouldn’t have been, would it?” asked the Luidaeg. “That was just mortality. It’s not the human world’s fault that it’s not the same as ours. People frequently can’t see things that don’t concern them. We could be standing at the intersection of twenty different flavors of reality and only seeing the two where we have any business being.”

Well, that was an unsettling thought. I blinked. “Okay, so?”

“So normally, humans can see our world, because cutting it out completely breaks theirs a little bit. It’s better for them to see people with pointy ears and funny eyes who can do things they can’t than it is to see things just happening for no reason. This isn’t that. This is what we used to call a Llangefni screen, back when they actually happened, which they don’t anymore.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Except that if one of them is happening, they clearly do. What’s a Lang-have-knee screen supposed to do?”

“That may be the worst Welsh pronunciation I’ve ever heard,” said the Luidaeg. “It’s a Llangefni screen. A form of illusion used mostly on women who’d been serving as midwives or wetnurses to fae children.”

“Ah.” Not all pureblood women lactate. Again, some of them are trees, or rocks, or birds, once you start really looking at them on a biological level. But all fae children nurse. It’s not the smartest thing biology has ever done to us. And some women’s milk just never comes in. That happens to humans, too. Wetnurses used to be a lot more common, back when it was easier to abduct a human woman and make her look after your babies. “But didn’t we want them to see the fae?”

“Up until a point, yeah. That’s why fairy ointment was developed. Unfortunately, for it to be stable, fairy ointment has to be really stable. The stuff could last for years. And we had some issues with human women falling in love with the fae world, to the point where they didn’t want to go home when their terms of service were done.”

“Okay . . . ” Fae households stable and wealthy enough to not only seek but support human wetnurses would probably have seemed like a massive improvement over the mortal world in the same time period. I’m not a historian, but Faerie has always been better about things like “sufficient food,” “clean water,” and “heat.” Plus from what I understand, the human wetnurses were generally treated very well. Better than changelings in the same time period, at the very least, and my standards may be low, but that’s good enough for me.

“Others were happy to go home but wanted to be able to come back to Faerie on their own, which meant being able to see the doors. So they stole pots of ointment on their way out the door, and they hid them until they wanted to come back. We couldn’t have that.” The Luidaeg shook her head. “The wetnurses were one of the only times I can think of where Faerie has gone to the human world for resources without being awful and predatory about it. Oh, some people could be—they’d use compulsion spells to woo away women with babes of their own, and leave their families frantically trying to find a way to nurse a child whose mother had disappeared—but for the most part, no one wants their precious, long-awaited baby being cared for by someone too spell-mazed to make decisions for themselves. It was better to woo and bribe and convince. It shouldn’t have been a shock when some of them didn’t want to go back, and yet somehow, it was. So the Llangefni screen was developed. It’s a complicated illusion. Instead of returning the nursemaids to the normal version of the human world, where they could potentially have used their knowledge of Faerie and any ointment they’d managed to steal to work their way back inside, they’d be cut off completely.”

I must have looked appalled, because she snorted and said, “This was the kind way to cut them loose. Before the Llangefni screen was perfected and taught, people were killing them or putting their eyes out, and I feel like both of those choices are a little worse than saying ‘Sorry, you don’t work here anymore, we’d like you to stop trying to crawl in through a window.’ ”