Page 41 of Be the Serpent

“Of course.” He turned back to me. “The creation of myself and my ladies was not without consequence. The force which made us was lessened in the making, wounded, in a way, and it bled into the void without healing. We found we could stop the bleeding for a time, if we fed it lives.”

“Lives?” I asked, blankly.

“As with the night-haunts, if it was given lives, it could endure. Their strength would feed and heal it, for a time. We couldn’t go ourselves—it would reject us when we tried—and it seemed cruel to serve up our own children as payment for something they had no part in. So we turned to the mortal world.”

“The Rides,” I said, a piece of incomprehensible history falling into place. They had been a part of fae tradition when the King and Queens were still with us, one every seven years, alternating between Maeve and Titania. A grand procession from the Summerlands into deeper Faerie, always carrying one human with them, always returning without that human in their company.

The last Ride, Maeve’s Ride, had been broken by my grandmother, Janet Carter, and kicked off the entire chain of events that led us here, to this room, with our long-absent King explaining our own past to us.

Pieces of this felt like things we should never have forgotten, things we should have been repeating between us over and over, enshrining them in memory. And then I remembered that while the fae aren’t human, and purebloods can hold grudges on a geologic scale, they’re still people. We’re all still people. Asking them to remember things that made them look bad was asking them to behave in an unrealistic way. When you live for centuries, you have plenty of time to rewrite the past and make yourself look good.

“The Rides,” Oberon agreed. “My Ladies agreed to alternate caring for and preparing their sacrifices. They took mortals who wouldn’t be missed or mourned, and they had fourteen years to ready them for the end that was ahead. Fourteen years against a mortal lifetime was an eternity. We found the best results when they went willingly, and so my Ladies cared for them as true members of their Courts, cosseted and waited upon, and then, they would Ride to lands no human eyes were meant to see, and they would give their offerings unto the wound, and Faerie would endure for another seven years, strong and healthy and no longer dying by inches. But when my Jenny found herself attached to the latest human tithe and broke the Ride, Maeve was forced to go in his place. We had no other willing offering prepared. Titania had her sacrifice, but the girl was as yet only half-ready for her duties.”

“Wait,” I said. “I thought you couldn’t go. I thought you said the injury would reject you.”

“Yes, as a tree rejects a nail when hammered into the trunk. We could stop the bleeding for a time, but we would inevitably be pushed out again, no healing performed, no strength given up.”

“And was ‘for a time’ more than seven years?”

His silence was more than answer enough.

“So what you’re saying is that you set up a system of human sacrifice to cure a problem you created, whether intentionally or not, and then when someone stepped in to stop it, everything got fucked up?” I folded my arms, glaring at him. “Just so we’re on the same page here.”

“We intended no harm.”

“But you did it, Daddy,” said the Luidaeg. “Intent is fairy gold. It makes you feel like you’ve paid in the moment, but it turns to dust and leaves when the sun comes up and everyone sees what you’ve done. You did harm.”

Oberon looked away from her. “Maeve went into the wound,” he said. “The sacrifice was no longer willing, and no replacement could be found. The woman who had broken the Ride came to me demanding redress, and I was charmed by her boldness. Enough so that I listened to her, enough that I took her as my companion for a time. And through it all, Titania grew more bold, and more angry at the fact that she finally had everything she could have wanted—her sister gone, all Faerie hers for the taking—and still she wasn’t happy. She had believed, truly, that in Maeve’s absence, she would finally be content. She would be Queen of All Faerie, and none would be her equal, and she would be happy. But she wasn’t, and the balance, which had already been disrupted by her sister’s absence, was thrown ever more off by her temper. She raged, and she set her children more fiercely than ever against Maeve’s, thinking that perhaps the peace she sought would be found in the extinction of her sister’s memory.”

He fell quiet, and the Luidaeg sighed.

“They were killing us like we were nothing,” she said. “We had claws as sharp and spells as swift, but we lacked the hatred, and we lacked the intent, and again and again they pursued us, however far or fast we ran. We couldn’t hate them enough to hold them at bay. We went to our father, begging him to intercede, begging him to do anything before we were wiped out. And then he was gone, and so was she, and while the attacks didn’t stop—the children of Titania had learned their lessons too well to stop immediately—they did pull back to what they’d been before our mother disappeared.”

“She would have destroyed Faerie in her quest to be the only Queen remembered or beloved,” said Oberon. “She was already destroying her children. She knew nothing of what it meant to love the ones who depended on her for their own health and happiness. She knew nothing of parenthood.”

Honestly, at this point, I wasn’t sure he did, either. But I held my tongue, waiting for him to finish this towering, terrible story.

“So I cast her out.” It was such a simple explanation for one of our greatest mysteries, one of the events on which the last five hundred years and more of our world revolved. I stared at him, saying nothing. It felt like there was nothing to say.

“I couldn’t leave her to walk free, being who she was, being what she was, or no part of Faerie would be safe. She and Maeve had always balanced one another, and with one Queen gone, there was no balance at all. I couldn’t keep her fully in check on my own, not with all of Faerie pressing me to solve their problems, and my own children seeking aid. The only way was by removing her from the field entirely. Her power has always been in the flowers, in her illusions. Water and blood both stood beyond her. I seized them both and bent them around her like a cage, and when she was well caught, I bound her.”

“What did you do?” I asked, ashes and horror on my tongue.

Oberon, King of All Faerie, father of us all, looked at me levelly, and he was as great a monster as any of his descendants. “I made her less than she had been,” he said. “I wrapped her in veils of blood and water until she could no longer stand, and then I cast her into the Faerie she had helped to create. I ordered her to leave no trace, to be neither seen nor found, until such time as she learned to be a part of Faerie without destroying it, or until her sister came home and I released her from her punishment. I set her into Faerie as a part of Faerie, and because the binding was built from water, it was self-sustaining, capable of endless renewal. Whenever she came close to being caught, she would remember herself long enough to rise and leave that life behind, then settle into another, like a flower that seeds itself from garden to garden, forever.”

I stared at him. We all did. “So you’re saying you turned Titania into someone else and threw her to the wolves of Faerie, enchanted to never be caught out for what she was?”

“Yes.”

“And you made her undetectable? You made her look like she was just any fae?”

“No. Had I done that, she would have been a figure to be feared. She would have found a way to claim a crown as her own, as she always had before, and she would have been your sole and only Queen, even until the present day. I suppressed her memory of who she had been, who she truly was, and I disguised her as the least among you, that she could learn to survive the world we had created for our children. I hid her well, but there would always be times when she knew who she was, when she could choose to stop destroying Faerie and to be a willing part of it instead. That was the punishment, more than any other part of it. The knowing that she could break this cycle, if only she could figure out exactly how.”

I turned to Tybalt. His eyes were wide and his cheeks were pale; if he’d had whiskers in his human form, they would have been pressed flat to his cheeks. I looked back to Oberon.

“Why did you order her to leave nothing behind?” I asked.

Oberon shrugged. “She was always the most determined of us to leave Faerie shaped in her own image, to be remembered and beloved. I gave her an existence where she could do none of those things. She had to remain small, and hidden, always.”