Page 58 of Be the Serpent

FOURTEEN

The confusion only lasted a few more seconds. Then it faded, replaced by a sour expression I had never seen on Stacy’s face. The edges of her irises were crystallizing again, and that helped, at least a little; it was easier to look at her when her eyes were shifting into those of a stranger, and not feel like I was attacking someone who had only ever been good and kind to me.

“You couldn’t let it rest, could you?” she asked. “You couldn’t walk away. I tried to let you walk away. I tried to open a safe passage between you and not doing what you just did, but oh, no, you have to be the hero. You have to be the one who solves the problems. You have to force the people around you to look at the ugly things that they don’t want to see—the things they shouldn’t have to see, because they’re not heroes. Do you know why Faerie has heroes, October?”

“I don’t,” I admitted, staying exactly where I was. Standing up would have been an escalation. Tybalt was rigid beside me, barely seeming to breathe.

“Faerie has heroes so the rest of us won’t have to see how ugly the world really is. You’re supposed to be a shield, not a spyglass.”

“And you’re supposed to be a queen, not a parasite,” I snapped. “Get out of my friend.”

She raised an eyebrow, looking at me. Her expression wasn’t Stacy’s at all, even though the lines and shape of her face still were. “I’m sorry, what did you just say to me? Have you misunderstood the situation as dramatically as all of that? Heroes do the impossible, but they don’t always get what they want, and you’re asking for something that can never happen. Your ‘friend’ isn’t a body I’ve invaded or taken over somehow. She’s mine. She’s me. She’s made of me, and she never existed at all, and nothing you do is going to make her anything more than a shell I wore for when I didn’t have a choice in the matter. I liked being her. You were a part of that, sometimes. More often, you were a burden, one more thing I didn’t want to carry but felt like I had to, because she would have done it. Because you helped to shape her into someone who was too soft to stand up to the world the way she should have. She was built to be weak. All the shells I’ve been allowed to wear were. But all you’re doing right now is putting the rest of your precious Kingdom at risk. I hope you understand that.”

“I don’t,” I said. “I don’t see how coming here to stop you from doing whatever horrible thing you think would be a good way to announce your return is putting anyone in danger.”

“Ah, but you see, my bastard husband says I’m not back to stay, not yet.” She smiled, expression sharp as a shard of glass. The crystallization had almost devoured her irises, making their edges irregular, doing the same for the line where they met her pupils. “He wanted me to learn to be a ‘better person,’ by his definition. I think I’m a perfectly lovely person. Don’t you?”

“Yes,” said Tybalt, in a faintly dreamy voice.

“Okay, that’s a line crossed.” I turned to Tybalt. “Time for you to go.”

“No, I don’t think it is,” he said, eyes still on Stacy. “I think I’d like to stay and hear what she has to say. It seems a fine way to pass the afternoon.”

“You promised me,” I said, warningly.

“Her husband made her promises as well,” he said. “And then he left her, again and again, for another woman’s bower. It seems to me that in the presence of the Lady of the Flowers, all promises should be taken as negotiable ones.”

I didn’t like this. I didn’t like this one bit. I stood, grabbing him by the shoulders and yanking him along with me as I turned him to face me. He blinked, placidly. Titania might have rendered him suggestible, but she hadn’t made him violent. That was a nice change. The last time he’d been mind-controlled into siding against me, he’d ripped my throat out as part of the package.

“Hey, babe,” I said. “Remember when you used to kiss me to mess with me? We’re gonna go for a little bit of that now, so you’ll hopefully be less pissed when I shove you through that window we were talking about outside.”

“What?” he asked, in the same dreamy tone.

I jerked him forward and kissed him, hard, molding my body against his until he started to properly respond. In the end, I didn’t even need to stab him. I just bit his lip while we were locked together, clamping down and holding on as he tried to pull away. It felt like a violation, probably because it was. It was also the fastest way to get him away from a woman who was going to do much worse.

The taste of his blood filled my mouth, bright and bitter and filled with memory. I’d already known he thought this was a bad idea; feeling it from the inside didn’t change that. He could tell Titania was starting to cloud his mind; his thoughts shifted as she worked her way into them, turning against him, turning ashen and cruel. Good. The fact that he knew it was happening meant he was less likely to be angry with me.

There was surprisingly little in the way of deeper memory. It felt like the blood was giving me specifically what I needed, instead of overwhelming me with whatever happened to tumble into my way. That wasn’t the way my magic normally worked, and it was probably going to be one more thing for the list of things to bother me later once I was out of active mortal danger.

I only needed a few drops of blood to reach for his magic, something I’d always been afraid of before, due to a strong dislike of involuntary shapeshifting. Right now, with Oberon’s blood lingering in my system, I felt like there was no magic I couldn’t manage, and so I pulled Tybalt’s into me, and reached for the Shadow Roads, which I could suddenly find with perfect clarity. They were right there, like curtains hanging in the air all around us, and the thought that I had ever missed them before was virtually laughable. I pulled them open and pushed him away at the same time, sending him stumbling into shadow. Then I closed the curtains between us, and he was gone, and I was alone with Titania, still draped in the face of my friend, watching all of this like it was a production orchestrated purely for her amusement.

“I saw the potential in your grandmother when she was presented before me,” she said, almost carelessly. “Human to the core, not a drop of fae blood anywhere within her, but she burned with a fire that humanity would have seen extinguished as soon as anything else. How she yearned, that Carter girl, how she hated. Hated what was expected of her, hated what she was offered, hated what she was denied. She wanted restitution from the world for the crime of forcing her to exist within it as a transitory thing.”

“After she broke Maeve’s Ride?”

“No, silly child, before.” Her smile was contentment personified. “When my best beloved girl brought her before me, cobwebs covering her eyes and fairy wine mazing her senses, so it must have seemed a dream if it was anything, and told me she had found the tool with which she would shatter our chains. She said she’d had the knowing of how from the mouths of our Seers, and seen them slaughtered to cover her tracks, and who cared? They were all of the blood of beasts. No Seer had ever been born of my bloodline. I was proud of that.” For a moment, her smile faltered, and the edges of her irises seemed to smooth, becoming more human. “It seems pride will always be my downfall.”

“Wait, Eira brought Janet to meet you before she broke the Ride?”

“Of course she did. My girl never acted without my approval, not once. Unlike so many of our children, she was never willful, never disobedient, and she knew the only way to be rid of my sister was to pass her into another reality entirely. The Heart would do. It could beat with her cradled inside, and I could have our Oberon, and the whole wide worlds beside him.”

I blinked, very slowly. “Eira brought you my grandmother.”

“Yes. I set the love of Tam Lin, which had been an ember brought on by a moment’s meeting in the woods, into a bonfire that would have devoured her had she not used his flesh to slake the blaze.” Titania smiled with Stacy’s face, and it was a terrible thing to behold. “I broke the Ride. I may never have the credit for it, but without me to give guidance to my daughter, and through her to Janet, my sister would have Ridden as she had done so many times before, and the boy would have been lost, and Faerie would have continued on as it always had, unchanged and unchanging.”

“You’re gloating,” I said, more amazed than horrified.

“I am, I suppose.” She shrugged. “I’ll have to go and kill the rest of the brats soon enough. Harder this time. How dare my bloodline finally start throwing Seers, after I had worked so hard to eliminate them from our midst? How dare it betray me so?”