Page 40 of Be the Serpent

His announcement fell into the room like a lead balloon, all of us staring at him in silent, open-mouthed shock—except for the Luidaeg, who left her face pressed against his shoulder, shuddering now, clearly terrified. That was somehow the worst thing yet, in a day that had started with a small victory before transforming into an endless parade of worse and worse events. A girl was dead. My best friend’s family was broken. Raysel was awake and not yet safely tucked away in my house, where her parents couldn’t get to her without going through a whole detachment of angry onlookers.

Killing a Firstborn takes iron and silver. Was it even possible to kill one of the Three? I was suddenly itching to find out.

“You need to explain yourself, right now, in small words,” I said, voice tight. “I may have brought you home, but that doesn’t mean I can’t find a way to put you back where I found you.”

Oberon, while clearly still upset, actually looked amused. “Are you threatening me, granddaughter?”

“Not sure about that one way or the other just yet,” I said. “I kinda want to be, but my husband here would like to stay married to me for a little longer before I go and get myself smashed by something infinitely larger than myself.”

“Quite,” said Tybalt, in a strangled voice.

“So if you explain fast, I won’t have to start something I can’t finish, and you won’t have to explain to your eldest daughter why you killed me after she said she was going to be the one to do it.”

Simon and Quentin both turned to look at the Luidaeg. Neither of them had been there on that long-ago night where I’d met the sea witch properly for the first time, and she’d announced that when I died, it was going to be at her hand. From the looks on their faces, that was probably a good thing. I guess most people aren’t that cavalier about the idea of being murdered by their friends.

As for Tybalt, he just looked resigned. That was fair. I made him agree to kill me once, when Oleander’s poisons had been well on the way to convincing me that I was going to become a danger to everyone I cared about. And then I’d gone and married him. To him, it made a lot more sense that someone might threaten my life and then become a much bigger part of it.

Oberon sighed and sat down. There hadn’t been a chair there a moment before, but as soon as his knees began to bend, a throne of twisted roots and bending branches sprouted from the floor, as old and weathered as if it had been there since the knowe was first opened. Some of the branches put forth small flowering twigs as he settled, and shelf fungus sprouted from the base of the throne.

Arden blinked but didn’t object. Some people have a sense of self-preservation.

I am not “some people.” I folded my arms and glared, waiting.

Oberon sighed again, more heavily. “Impatient,” he said, looking at me. “Something else you share with your grandmother. My sweet Jenny never once met a mountain she didn’t think needed to be climbed, and immediately. She never waited for anything in her life.”

I was getting a little tired of being compared to Janet Carter, the woman who intentionally alienated me from my own daughter. Oh, right, and broke Maeve’s Ride, somehow—through a mechanism I was hoping Oberon was about to explain—shattering the balance between our Queens, and throwing Faerie into disarray in the process.

“She’s not the only person I’m descended from,” I said, sharply.

“No, I have some blame to bear in your composition as well,” he agreed. “You are definitely of my lines. I’ve always been a father to heroes.” And he looked, oddly enough, at the Luidaeg, who looked uncomfortable in response.

“I don’t think musing about the family is what October was hoping for,” she said. “You said this was your fault, Dad. It’s time you start talking.”

Oberon grimaced, still watching her. “You used to have more deference when you spoke to me.”

“You used to have the right to demand it,” she said.

“I see.” He turned back to me. “Faerie was once more than it is now, and less at the same time. My wives and I were born of the same source, like buckets drawn from the same well, but we were no true kin to one another. They claimed each other as sisters more out of the hope that a familial relationship would make it easier for them to share our world without destroying one another than out of any recognizable kinship, for there were no models for us to draw upon. We became, we began, and when we came together, a world was born. The deepest realms of Faerie spread out beneath our feet, establishing their firmaments in the great nothingness around us, and we walked paths that had not existed until we had need of them, on and on into the void, until we found this place, this ‘Earth’ of mortal lives and mortal meaning. Something we had not created. It gave us something to model ourselves after, for we had not once thought beyond the moment.”

I wanted to ask about a dozen questions. I didn’t want to ask anything at all. What he was saying made it sound like the Three were gods, created from nothing and creating in their turn, and I just didn’t want to take that sort of step toward escalation. Super-powerful immortal beings, sure. Actual divinities? Nope, I’m good.

“We saw that the human families had children, and so we made children for ourselves,” he said. “Some in the biological manner the humans were so very fond of, others through other means. We shaped them not, decided their fates not at all, but allowed Faerie itself—allowed the nebulous light of our birthing—to decide what most it needed, and so they were born to every form imaginable, as different from one another as snowflakes. They served us as we served Faerie, and all was peaceful, for a time. But while my ladies could make their children either with my aid or with the raw materials of the mortal world, they could not increase Faerie with each other. They could not coexist much of the time. Their hatred grew between them like a rose, bright and blooming and drawing blood with every opportunity it found. In time, they couldn’t be near one another without falling to a rage. Maeve, who was always the calmest of us, asked only to be left alone when she was not with me, to be allowed to fill the fens and wilds of this bright world with her descendants, and to hear Faerie ring with their laughter. She was the first to take her children back into the worlds that had been birthed on our long walk, to show them the art of building skerries and realms out of the nothing, and to see them settled where she thought them safe. They built kingdoms without our presence, and without the looming threat of their cousins close to hand. Titania, on the other hand, loved her sister, but it was the love of a root for a bone, of a fox for a bird. She thirsted to devour everything Maeve was, to take it into herself and for her own, and to never see Faerie shared between them again. When I came to her, for we had long since decided that I would share the mortal year between them, she asked over and over again if I would stay, if I would eschew her sister’s arms for her own, which smelled so much sweeter, which kept the same shape from hour to hour, from day to day. And when I refused, she set her children to destroying Maeve’s. They began with the more bestial among them, the ones whose other parent could be in some way traced back to the mortal world and not to my bower, and they killed with bright abandon.”

Oberon sighed, heavily. “It took far too long for me to realize I needed to intervene. Children were an endless gift. We could always make more of them. But children became adults, ourselves cast again in miniature, and they were frustrated and angry that their gifts were so much less than our own. They could create continents, raise kingdoms, but we had birthed worlds. They could craft deeper realms for themselves out of the firmament we had already laid down, but they couldn’t create out of nothing. They grew jealous. If they wanted to fight among themselves, it seemed unwise for me to stop them.”

“What my father isn’t saying, as he recounts the way he tried to become father of the year, is that not all of us wanted to fight,” snapped the Luidaeg. “Titania’s kids came into our homes and cut us down. They hunted us like animals, and when they couldn’t kill us themselves, they turned the world against us. We fled into deeper Faerie because they were the ones who taught the humans to take up iron and silver. We learned to hide because they wouldn’t let us be found. Faerie gives her newest residents the shapes she needs them to have, and the shapes they’ll need to stay alive. It wasn’t until Titania’s descendants began waging war against us that we started to see forms like the Bridge Trolls, and the Ysengrimus, and the Gean-Cannah. Faerie readied us for war, because the war was already happening.”

As she spoke, Oberon looked more and more depressed. I couldn’t quite make myself feel bad for him. So much of what we’d been through sounded like it came from him being a shitty parent.

And we were getting off the point that we had come here to discuss. “What the hell does any of this have to do with the woman who killed Jessica?” I demanded.

“I’m sorry,” said Oberon. “It’s difficult for me to say. I thought I was acting in good faith, for the good of all Faerie. I may have been wrong.”

“May have been?” asked the Luidaeg. “May have been? Are you kidding me right now, with your ‘may have been’?”

He looked at her sorrowfully, agony in his eyes. “I saw no other way.”

“Because you never wanted to,” she snapped. “You were so overpowered compared to everyone around you that when you ran up against a problem you couldn’t resolve with the wave of your hand, you checked out. Get to the damn point, Dad. Everyone else has a time limit.”