Page 75 of Be the Serpent

“Okay,” I said, softly. “Tybalt, I need you to go and find Arden. You’ll be the fastest.”

He narrowed his eyes. “Asking me to leave again? Why, so you can rush in when you know my better judgment would bid you no?”

“No, although that’s a pretty good idea,” I said. “I promise I’ll stay right here, with Sylvester, unless something happens that’s bad enough that you being here wouldn’t have made any difference.”

“That isn’t as reassuring as you think it is, little fish,” said Tybalt dourly. He leaned in, brushed my hair back from my face with one hand, then turned and sprinted for the nearest shadow, diving into it and away.

Sylvester reached for the door. I shot him a sharp look.

“What do you think you’re doing?”

“Going into the receiving room.”

“Did you not hear me promise Tybalt I was going to stay right here? That means the hallway, not the room on the other side of that door.” I frowned. “Don’t you smell the roses?”

“October. I rule Shadowed Hills. I am so accustomed to the smell of roses that they no longer register save in their absence.”

Great. “Okay, well, are they absent now?”

He sniffed the air, then paused, an odd look crossing his face. “No. No, they’re not. Why . . . ?”

“Because she’s here,” I said, looking around the hall with its carvings of death and doom leering from the walls. “She’s in the knowe. Don’t say her name.”

“Given that we swear by her, that’s a tall request.”

“We swear by a lot of things. Take one of the other options for a change.” I let my hands rest on the hilts of my knives, not drawing them just yet, but reassuring myself that they were there, that they hadn’t crumbled into dust or turned to spiders and scuttled away. Who knew what Titania was capable of? “She’s here, and Tybalt is finding out exactly where I need to be for my part in this plan.”

“Which is?”

“I’m going to set her free.”

Sylvester blinked at me. “Come again?”

“She’s been missing all this time because Oberon enchanted her to forget herself.” And buried her in an identity that would be compelled to become a family-destroyer every forty years, if she hadn’t achieved some nebulous degree of “better person” that no one understood apart from Oberon himself. “Every time she starts to remember—every time something triggers her to start remembering—she destroys anything that might point to who she is and disappears again.”

“And this time she was . . . Stacy?” Sylvester frowned, brow wrinkling as he tried to puzzle through this impossibility. “Our Stacy?”

“You mean Stacy whose story never made sense if you really looked at it?” I had accepted it when we were children, because I’d been a traumatized little girl who had just discovered her mother was a fairy princess and been ripped away from the world she’d known forever. And then, by the time we were old enough to question the impossibilities of her background, it had felt somehow rude, like there’d been a period of time when we could ask those questions, and it had slipped away while we were playing hide-and-seek in the dusty old parlors of Shadowed Hills.

Sylvester’s frown deepened. “Her grandparents were courtiers of mine when she came to live with them. I remember they were unkind to the girl. They seemed puzzled by her, like they couldn’t understand how she could be theirs. But she looked like them, and when they asked for her blood to be compared to their own, the magic agreed that there was a relationship. They took charge of her. Someone had to.”

“But they never liked changelings. There was no way either one of them would have had a changeling child. And Stacy never told me whether they were her mother’s parents or her father’s, just that they were her grandparents and they’d take care of her.”

“They left as soon as she was old enough to take care of herself,” said Sylvester. “Her grandfather approached me privately and told me they wouldn’t be the first, if I kept allowing changelings to run wild through the knowe. He understood that you made it more difficult for me to keep the changelings out of sight, but said that higher-ranking nobles than I had been able to keep their indiscretions concealed, and I should have no issue hiding my brother’s.”

It was the first time he had even come close to acknowledging my complicated relationship with Simon. I gave him a sidelong look, trying to stay mostly focused on the doors as the most probable source of any danger. “And what did you say?”

“That whatever my relationship was to you, it was none of his business, and he should manage his own family without attempting to attend to mine.” Sylvester’s mouth did something complicated, and he shook his head, looking away. “Tybalt was right. What he said at your wedding, he was right. I failed you.”

“Is this really the time?”

“Is there likely to be a better one? My own wife demands that I keep you, my knight, from my halls, where you should be more welcome than you are anywhere else in the world. My daughter and only child has chosen your home over mine, and for her sake, I’ll keep my distance until I’m called for. It’s not as if we can meet for apologies and cake in some human eatery, and a meeting in Muir Woods under normal circumstances would as good as state that I have lost control of my own household and must sneak about to make amends with people who should be able to depend on me.”

That was exactly what was going on. I didn’t say anything.

Sylvester sighed. “Luna is . . . She’s trying. The skin she wore went all the way down to her bones. I don’t think she understood, when she put it on, just how much it would transform her. She did it out of desperation.”

“Hoshibara was still alive,” I said quietly.