Page 66 of Be the Serpent

“We’re all children compared to you!” she protested. “The Luidaeg is a child compared to you!”

“Guilty,” said the Luidaeg, who had the audacity to sound faintly amused, like she had always wanted to watch a college student verbally smack down her father.

“And I’ve been here, living in this version of Faerie, while you’ve been off playing human and escaping your responsibilities,” said Cassandra. “You stepped out on us because you didn’t want to be alone, and you left us all alone! Our whole culture is the island from The Lord of the Flies right now, thanks to you! So if you don’t like it, tough. You should have been here. My siblings and I, we’re Seers, yeah. All four of us. All five of us, yesterday. And as a Seer, I’m telling you Faerie needs us, and it doesn’t need her.”

“You said the future treats the Three like environmental hazards?” I said. Cassandra looked at me and nodded. “Okay, that’s easy enough to follow. But Cassie . . . if you can’t see them clearly because they’re too big for that, what happens if we take one of them away? What happens if you kill the sun?”

She paused, a complicated expression crossing her face. “Okay, so maybe we can’t kill Titania,” she said. “But Faerie can’t afford to lose us right now, either.” She lifted her chin, turning back to Oberon as imperiously as any queen. “You’ll have to find another way.”

He sighed, heavily. “An unbalanced Faerie is a nightmare the likes of which you have never dared to dream. There is a reason I was willing to raise a hand against my own queen, when she should have been able to feel completely secure in my bower.”

“So we can’t kill her, we’re not letting her have the kids, and we can’t allow her to unbalance Faerie,” I said. “Is there anyone else who could unbind her? Get her pinned down and let you enchant her again while she’s still disoriented?”

“You could,” said the Luidaeg.

I turned to stare at her, and for a long, terribly moment, no one said anything at all.

“Look at the little hero, Dad, and tell me what her line was built to do,” said the Luidaeg.

Oberon turned to stare at me, and I abruptly found that I couldn’t move. Couldn’t even blink. All I could do was stand there and struggle to bear up under the sheer weight of his regard. It wasn’t easy, despite the fact that it literally wasn’t possible for me to do anything else. I wanted to collapse into a boneless pile, and instead, I could barely breathe.

“Don’t break her,” chided the Luidaeg.

Oberon frowned. “The blood is there—a living hope chest, to replace what has been broken. An instinctive understanding of the balances and interactions between the different strains, necessary for the doing of what she’s made to do. Sensitivity to magic. More than I would have thought advisable.”

“Because it isn’t,” said the Luidaeg. “When she was younger, I used to worry she’d walk into an illusion and have a stroke where she stood. It’s too much for one line to carry, but it’s hers, and she has to contend with it. Look deeper.”

It felt like telling him not to break me and then to look deeper in the same breath was a contradiction, but I couldn’t say anything. I was just trying to survive the weight of Oberon’s eyes.

“No more illusions than the least of us, so no flowers, and little connection to the water—all she has is the blood,” said Oberon. He had the audacity to sound surprised about that, as if somehow I should have picked up magic from the Queens, even though they had no part in my family tree. “But the blood she has is more than sufficient to break the world. Is this . . . Can she truly unravel another’s workings as the blood implies?”

The Luidaeg looked almost smug. “She can,” she said. “I’ve seen her do it. She’s like a raccoon, with their clever little raccoon hands. They can’t assemble machines on their own, but let someone else do it for them, and they have the dexterity to operate what they can access.”

Oberon turned to look at her, and I could suddenly move again. I took a step back, not retreating, but putting myself closer to Arden, in case a retreat became suddenly advisable. “How?”

“She finds the rough spots in the spell, digs her hands in, and pulls it apart,” said the Luidaeg. “I’ve seen her tackle things that should have been infinitely too big for her to handle. Hell, she reversed a full Actaeon. On herself.”

Oberon blinked, looking at me with what I wanted very much to read as a new respect. “I remember you from then,” he said. “I knew you had been enchanted, I knew you had been reported missing, and I knew you could never tell me the truth of whatever had happened to you.”

I looked at him sharply. “You knew you were Oberon?”

“No. But Thornton’s memory is here, when I desire it. If you were to take me walking in your mortal world, you might find me to be better adapted to the age than many of the nobles who’ve been here all along. I simply have to . . . desire it, enough to pull it from the depths of thought. He was never me, but I was always him.”

“Wait,” I said. “Say that again.”

“I was always him?”

“No, the piece before it.”

Oberon looked puzzled for a moment, then nodded. “Ah. I see. You worry for your friend’s memory. I will speak for her. Whatever my lady has done, your friend was not present when she did it.”

“Good.” I honestly wasn’t sure whether this was better or worse than Stacy having been in any way complicit in Jessica’s death. Better for her family, certainly. But maybe worse for me.

I was going to have to stop her, and now I knew that she was as innocent as I’d hoped she was. Would I really be able to do this? And did I really have a choice? Stacy would have chosen her children over herself, a thousand times over. Could I choose any differently now?

“So that’s the answer,” said the Luidaeg. “You find her, or you lure her in, October unbinds her, and then you re-bind her before she can react.”

“I would like to object to this plan on the grounds that it sounds like you would be asking my only available hero to put herself in mortal danger for the sake of detaining a literal goddess,” said Arden.