Page 51 of Be the Serpent

I still felt vaguely as if I had abandoned an alcoholic at an open bar. I paused only long enough to nod again to Arden, then ducked outside.

The balcony was low stone, gray and so clean it was almost gleaming. No small feat, given that it had been more than halfway swallowed by a vast blackberry bush, its strangely thornless creepers twining around the posts and balusters and, from there, working their way up the wall. Not content with stealing their thorns away, Faerie—or at least Arden’s gardeners—had coaxed the bush to put out fat purple fruit and vast white flowers at the same time, scenting the air with a perfume reminiscent of her magic, while also distinctly other.

It was late afternoon in the mortal world at this point, but time runs differently in the Summerlands, and from the looks of the sky, it was sometime in the early evening, twilit and kind. Oberon and Simon were standing at the balcony’s far end, their hands resting on the rail between patches of creeper, their eyes turned toward the rest of the garden.

I hurried toward them. “Sir,” I said, when I was close enough not to come off as yelling at someone I really, really didn’t want to offend. “I need you to help me find your wife.”

Oberon turned his head, pendulous and slow, looking for the first time as if the weight of his antlers mattered to him. Simon didn’t move, but continued to stare out over the gardens, not outwardly reacting to my presence.

“Will you harm her?” asked Oberon.

I looked him in the eye, remembering what the Luidaeg had said to me, and took a deep breath. “I might,” I admitted. Tybalt breathed sharply in at the admission, breath hissing between his teeth. “I don’t know. I can’t see the future.”

“Some of my children could,” he said. “None of them saw this.”

“It seems like a lot of things got missed when they were trying to figure out the future,” I said, as delicately as I could. “Lot of death, lot of suffering, whole big parade of suck. But a lot of good stuff has happened, too, and I guess this is the future we were supposed to have, or we wouldn’t have received it.”

“I wish I could see things as you do.”

“I’m sure it helps that I haven’t been around long enough to get jaded,” I said. “Some days it already feels like the weight of the obligations I’ve collected along the way will squash me flat. I can’t imagine having centuries more to carry. It must be so exhausting. But please. She’ll hurt the children if I don’t find her.”

“Then what do you need me for? I can tell you at a glance what your bloodline is built for. Finding a person, especially a person who’s been casting illusions recently, should be nothing to you. The smell of them will be a beacon to you.”

So Oberon could see the way we were designed? That just made me crankier about the fact that he’d gone off and left us all to our own devices. The least he could have done was stick around until Mom was old enough to train, so he could have made sure she didn’t screw everything up the way she had.

It did at least explain something about how all the other Firstborn had been able to master their own magic, and guide their children toward doing the same. It wasn’t like they’d had access to a big book of tips and tricks for guiding a new type of fae toward self-actualization.

“Every time I breathe her magic, it shuts mine down,” I said.

“Ah.” He looked away, back toward the gardens. “It doesn’t, really, you understand. Mine could. I could snap my fingers and tell your magic never to listen to you again, and it would be so. But her gifts are more subtle, and more terrible for being so. She plays and preys upon the humanity in you. It leaves a stain, even if removed in its entirety.”

I wanted to scream and shake him and order him to get to the point. Now that I was moving again, it felt like things that had always been urgent had reached a sudden immediacy that demanded action. I also wanted to grovel and back away. He was a god. A literal god when compared to someone like me, who wasn’t even Firstborn. He could wipe me from the world if he wanted to. My particular combination of healing and hardheadedness makes me effectively impossible to kill via normal means; this was someone who, if he really set his mind to it, could easily find a way. I kept my mouth shut.

“Your magic remains even when you brush up against her own,” he continued. “To truly bind it is an act more intentional. She can set your magic to devouring itself, if she wishes. A ward is a kind of binding, and it makes sense that her children would remember her for those, rather than for any of the . . . less pleasant gifts she carries.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t want her to do that,” I said sharply. “I want to live. That means I need a way to stop her.”

“Ah.” Oberon looked at me levelly. “Do you understand what you ask me for, granddaughter?”

“Nope,” I said, brightly. Tybalt put his hand over his face, but didn’t turn away. If I was going to condemn myself, he was going to watch.

For his part, Oberon looked entirely nonplussed. “What?”

“Just what I said: nope. I’m asking you to help me stop a woman who is basically a god from doing whatever the hell she wants, and I’m asking because I know you can, and I have no idea what fulfilling that request looks like. Maybe you give me a gun. Maybe you turn me into a boulder. Dealer’s choice, really.”

“I would prefer the dealer not choose anything inanimate,” said Tybalt. “Please, sire. I prefer my lady to keep breathing.”

“You really don’t know, do you?” Oberon looked at me for a long moment before he sighed. “Annie told me Jenny failed to prepare our daughter, and that our daughter failed in turn to prepare her own children. I thought surely she must be exaggerating out of her dislike for the line that cost her the presence of her mother.”

“Nope,” I said, again. “The Luidaeg is pretty fond of me, or as fond as she is of anyone who doesn’t live in the ocean. She tolerates me, if nothing else. She doesn’t tend to exaggerate where I’m concerned.” The way he’d worded that made me wonder, somewhat, whether Titania had managed to keep the weight of the chains she’d placed on his eldest daughter a secret between her and the Luidaeg—and why the Luidaeg had allowed that secrecy to stand.

Faerie is built on a foundation of falsehoods and hidden truths, and we’d be healthier if we started talking to each other, but sometimes it feels like we don’t want to do that because once we start, we can never shut up.

“I do not want to do this,” said Oberon. “I love her. For all that she’s a terror to you, she was a treasure once to me. I don’t want to help you harm her in any way.”

“I knew Tybalt loved me when I asked him to kill me before I could hurt the people I loved, and he agreed,” I said, as gently as I could. “It took a while for me to admit to myself that I’d asked out of love, and he’d answered the same way, but I knew. If she used to be better than this . . . She’s hurting people, sire. She’s destroying the world she helped to create. I have to stop her.”

“Very well, then,” he said gravely, and reached up, gripping the forward prong of his left antler in one hand. It was sharper than it looked; blood seeped out between his fingers as he tightened his grip, smelling of bright wildness and all the forest green. Blood shouldn’t have been able to smell like that. It wasn’t even his magic. It was him, as if all he was—all he could ever be—was magic itself, raw and rare and ravenous.