Page 5 of Be the Serpent

Thanks, Mom. What a wonderful legacy you tried to leave me.

“Not quite,” said Arden. “We’re waiting for one more witness, and then we can get started.”

I blinked, looking around the room. Gillian was with the Roane, half-concealed behind Elizabeth Norton, looking anxious about the whole situation. I couldn’t blame her. She wasn’t expected to testify today, but we were talking about waking up a woman who’d almost killed her, and maybe my greatest failing as a mother is that that sentence isn’t “the woman who’d almost killed her.” Being my kid is hazardous sometimes. It’s not fair. Dean was with Dianda. I looked back to Arden.

“Who?” I blurted.

The door opened behind me. I turned.

The Luidaeg, immortal, terrible, terrifying sea witch, was stepping into the room. As usual when she didn’t feel like being fancy, she was working hard to make sure I couldn’t be the most informally dressed person in the room, barefoot in denim overalls, with no socks or shirt in evidence. Her dark, curly hair was pulled into pigtails, one over each shoulder, and secured with electrical tape. Everything about her was perfectly human. Even her ears were rounded, normally a decent indicator of whether or not someone has any fae blood in them.

She looked toward the rest of us and smirked. “I was aiming to be late,” she said. “Did I manage it?”

“By several minutes, yes,” said Arden. “Congratulations. We have all waited on your pleasure.”

The Luidaeg smiled, showing teeth as serrated as a shark’s. Even when she looked completely human in every other regard, she rarely bothered with her teeth. “Good.” She turned back to the door, which she was still holding open with one hand, and even at a distance, I could see her face soften. “Don’t worry. If anyone’s in trouble here, it’s me, and Queenie wouldn’t dare to discipline me, even if she had the authority.”

The same spell that made my voice fill the room was working on hers. Unlike me, she didn’t seem to mind. No one else said a word. When the sea witch wants to be a little bit of a jerk, it’s best to just sit back and let her.

I don’t remember her being this active when I was younger. Yeah, I spent a lot of time and energy avoiding most of Faerie, but she was the story fae parents told their children to frighten them into behaving. It’s hard to be fundamentally terrified of a woman who wears overalls without a bra because she doesn’t like underwires, eats ice cream straight from the carton, and most of all is so devastatingly lonely that when I started coming around and treating her like a person, instead of like a terrifying force of nature, she encouraged me to keep doing it. So she must not have been around enough for the scary to wear off until after I got back from the pond.

She plays chess with Quentin. Sometimes he even beats her, and rather than transforming him into something unpleasant in punishment, she seems pleased by the fact that he’s not only improving, he’s not afraid of her. Given that he’ll run the continent someday, this is either a good thing or proof that I’ve completely destroyed his sense of self-preservation.

A smaller figure stepped into the room, anxiously smoothing her white eyelet lace sundress with her hands before reaching for the Luidaeg. The Luidaeg took the girl’s hand in her own and started toward me, leaving the door to swing shut behind her.

Only not quite, as an orange hand caught it, and Poppy slipped into the room. In turn, the Luidaeg’s Aes Sidhe apprentice held the door for a nondescript man with antlers sprouting from his brow. Oberon, King of All Faerie, was here.

And almost no one seemed to notice him, their eyes locked on the Luidaeg as she led Karen Brown across the floor toward us. Given how hard he was working to fly under the radar of all the people who would very much liked to have known that he was back, I had to wonder whether he’d have allowed the door to slam in his face if Poppy hadn’t been there to catch it.

I wonder a lot of things where Oberon’s concerned. He left us centuries ago, after a failed Ride—disrupted by my grandmother—resulted in the loss of one of his wives. Maybe if it had happened immediately, I’d understand a little better, but it didn’t. He had time to plan his exit, lock the doors to deeper Faerie, and start a relationship with my grandmother, although he was gone before my mother was born. Titania vanished at the same time, and the dominant theory has always been that Oberon did something to her, forced her to go away in order to maintain the balance in Faerie. No one really knows for sure.

For a people with the capacity to live forever, the fae sure are bad at keeping track of our own history. It turns out the conscious mind can only hold on to so much memory at one time—more than that and everything starts getting jumbled up and curdling, turning into a useless soup of facts and fancies. So even the oldest purebloods tend to view anything that happened more than a few hundred years ago as something out of myth and legend. They remember the things that mattered to them personally. The rest just . . . drops away.

The Luidaeg stopped next to me, hand still wrapped tight around Karen’s. Calmly, she looked at Arden and said, “I am Antigone of Albany, known in this modern time as the Luidaeg, mother of the Roane, binder of the Selkies. They fall beneath my power and my protection. I have agreed to waive my right to demand the Torquill girl’s life in recompense for my charge’s death. Her existence was possible only because my own brother felt the need to prey upon children, forcing her mother into an impossible decision. The Blodynbryd are vegetable in nature. It should have been no more possible for her to have a child with one among the Daoine Sidhe than it is for a human to grow wings and fly away without magical aid. Much of what Rayseline did was no fault of her own.”

The room seemed to hold its breath.

“When last this matter was raised, I stood before you and said I would not see the girl awakened until the time was right. I was and am aware of the pain this caused her parents. I was and am also aware that both her parents are going to live forever, and she’s only been asleep for four years, while my boy will be dead for the rest of time. Even if I have no intention to demand justice for Connor O’Dell’s loss, a little more time drowned in dreams seems like a more than reasonable price to pay.”

On the far side of the room, Sylvester covered his mouth and looked away, while Luna glared at the Luidaeg like rage alone would be enough to destroy her. It wouldn’t. You need silver and iron wielded together to kill one of the Firstborn, and I hate that I’ve lived the sort of life where I have to know that.

“But that was a different time,” said the Luidaeg, and glanced at Karen, who was watching Arden with a fixed, unblinking gaze, not acknowledging her sister at all. Cassandra was doing much the same. The two of them get along just fine, but Karen is a known oneiromancer, a kind of Seer that hasn’t been seen in Faerie in centuries. Seers of any kind are almost impossibly rare, which is what makes it so odd that two of the five Brown children have demonstrated divinatory talents. Cassandra is an aeromancer, reading the future in the movement of air. Not many people know that. Putting a little distance between herself and her oracular sibling when they have to appear in public together helps her keep her secret.

As to why she’d need to, most of the Seers in Faerie are gone, wiped out years ago. Only the Roane and the Kitsune were able to survive, and the Roane only survived in part. No one’s ever confirmed exactly why everyone who can see the future would be targeted, but I’m willing to bet Eira Rosynhwyr had something to do with all of it, not just with the destruction of the Roane. She doesn’t like things she can’t control.

“I would see everyone directly harmed by her actions. I would hear them consent to this,” said the Luidaeg. “As Connor’s Firstborn, I still retain that right.”

“Of course,” said Arden, with surprising grace for a Faerie Queen being ordered around in her own knowe. Then again, no one was going to lose respect for her because she backed down in front of the sea witch. Being Firstborn doesn’t come with a title, but it comes with power. Lots and lots and lots of power. Some, like my mother, are still new or reclusive enough that no one knows enough to be afraid. Others, like the Luidaeg, have cut a large swath across our history, and we know damn well that they can wreck us if we get in their way.

The Luidaeg stepped back, and Arden gestured to both sides of the crowd. One by one, the people who were directly impacted by Raysel’s actions came forward, first Dean, then Gillian, and finally Luna. The Luidaeg cocked her head, looking critically at Luna.

“Didn’t realize I was also calling for the parents,” she said. “You want to rethink this, rosebud?”

“No,” said Luna. “The first sign that my daughter had lost her way in the dark was her attempt to poison me, her own mother, at the bidding of your sister.”

Even she wasn’t willing to say Eira’s name. It didn’t matter that the woman was sleeping in a sealed skerry, almost impossible to access without walking the Rose Road and petitioning the missing Queens—which implied that Maeve, at least, had to be answering and give a damn what happened to us—before you could reach Eira’s bier. She was still Firstborn. She still might hear us.

The Luidaeg nodded, very slowly. “So we’re going to say all of Rayseline’s actions should have bearing on this decision, not only those undertaken on the day when she was elf-shot?”