Page 8 of Be the Serpent

“We don’t have to send anyone to Shadowed Hills,” said Luna, gathering a bit of her wounded dignity about her, like she thought it might change things somehow. She turned to the group that had accompanied her, and they parted, spreading out in what I’m sure was meant to be some sort of grand reveal. It was a reveal, at least to me. Grand, however, is very much up to the onlooker.

Instead, I had one question: “How did you get a glass coffin all the way to Muir Woods?”

Luna turned back to me as Sylvester’s knights carried her sleeping daughter toward us. “Magic, of course.”

“Sure of yourself this time, weren’t you, rosebud?” asked the Luidaeg, tone utterly mild.

“I had no intention of being denied again,” said Luna. “Had you attempted to refuse my daughter’s awakening, I would have raised an objection.”

The Luidaeg lifted an eyebrow. “And how do you think that would have gone?”

“Thankfully, we’re not going to find out,” I said brightly. “Because we’re going to wake her up, and no one’s going to go out of their way to upset the sea witch right now, right? I, for one, don’t want to see what happens when you summon an entire ocean into a receiving room.”

I’d be fine, probably. One of my wedding gifts was a guarantee from Amphitrite, Firstborn of the Merrow, that neither I nor Tybalt nor any children I might have would ever suffer death by water. Amphitrite being Firstborn, and non-malicious Firstborn at that, I was pretty sure that protection would extend to Quentin and Raj, as my “sons.” And May is literally impossible to kill. That didn’t mean I wanted to find out for sure, or that other people couldn’t be hurt if the Luidaeg lost her temper.

“Do you really think I’d do something like that?” asked the Luidaeg.

“Yes,” I said—in harmony with Dean, Gillian, and Quentin, who had moved closer when the formal structure of the moment started breaking down.

Rather than looking upset with our lack of faith, the Luidaeg smiled and took her hand off Karen’s shoulder, gesturing for her to join me. Karen yawned broadly and wandered to my side, slumping lightly over to lean against me. At seventeen, there was considerably more of her to lean than there used to be, and she looked tired every time I saw her. I’d expressed my concern about it to the Luidaeg several times, since she seemed to be serving unofficially as the woman’s apprentice; sea witch or no, I wasn’t going to have her exhausting my honorary niece.

It had taken until my third attempt for the Luidaeg to answer with anything more than vagueness and handwaving. But that time, she had looked at me, calm as the sea before the storm, and said, “She’s an oneiromancer whether I train her or not, October. She’ll probably be asleep twenty-two hours a day by the time she stops growing. She’ll wake up to eat and relieve herself, then go right back to sleep. By the time she’s a hundred, even that won’t be true waking, just sleepwalking from one moment to the next. That happens whether I teach her to control her power or not. That happens whether I let her be a normal girl as long as she can or not. But this is my only window for teaching her how to control what she is. She’s tired because her magic makes her tired. I’m not letting her rest because she’s going to have centuries where that’s all she can do. Got a problem with it? Take it up with Faerie.”

That had been enough for me, because the Luidaeg can’t lie: if she said she was doing what she could to help Karen while it was still possible, she meant it. So I just put my arm around the girl, helping to prop her up, and let her lean against me as her older sister descended the dais, Walther’s cure in hand, and moved toward the group.

“I’ll call for a healer, then,” said Arden, trying to maintain some illusion of control over the situation.

“No need, Your Highness,” said Luna, and curtseyed deeply to our mutual Queen. “We brought our own.”

“Er, hi,” said Jin, stepping through the crowd. She stopped at a polite distance to curtsey but never took her eyes off the Queen. “Um, wow. I had somehow managed not to be in a room with you up until this point, Your Highness. And . . . you look so much like your father. I’m sorry.”

I blinked. Jin had been here for the convocation where the elf-shot treatment was approved for use by the collected monarchs of our neighboring Kingdoms, but looking back, I couldn’t remember a time when she and Arden had been in the same room. I could remember times when I’d been yelling for Jin, trying to get her to come and solve a problem, and been unable to find her. Had it been because she was avoiding our Queen?

Arden blinked. “Come again?”

“Oh, oak and ash, I’m sorry. My name is Jin. I served in the Court of your grandparents when it was new. I, um, may have encouraged your father to court your mother when he didn’t think it was possible. You knew me when you were a child. I looked very different then.”

That, at least, wouldn’t be a surprise to anyone. Jin is Ellyllon, and Ellyllon molt every few years, shedding their faces and forms and exchanging them for something new. Judging by the way her skin had started to pale in the last year, she was approaching the point of her next molt, and we’d all have to learn her face over again. For her, that’s just normal. That’s the way the world is supposed to work.

Arden, however, stared. She’d been outside of Faerie for long enough that sometimes things that seem ordinary to the rest of us are revelations to her. “Jin?” she asked. “Really? You mean you survived the earthquake?”

From her tone, what came next could be either tears or a declaration of treason. We got the first. Eyes bright, she waved a hand and vanished from her throne, reappearing next to Jin and wrapping her arms around the other woman as she sobbed into her shoulder. Jin embraced her back, and the two of them clung to each other.

More fun things about a world where people habitually live for centuries: there’s a whole lot of buried history just waiting to blow up in your face. I turned to Luna, who was staring at the pair, open-mouthed. “Your healer is unavailable,” I said. “I’ve administered this tincture before. May I . . . ?”

Luna desperately looked like she wanted to tell me no. The impulse visibly warred with her desire to have Raysel awake as soon as possible. Finally, grudgingly, she said, “Yes.”

Taking the bottle from Cassandra’s hand, I moved into the crowd around the coffin. It was made up of familiar faces, only about half of whom were willing to meet my eyes. I swallowed the urge to rage at them for their cowardice. We were knights of the same hall, they and I, and would be unless and until Sylvester released me from his service. We had sworn fealty to the same hand, pledged our loyalty to the same command. How dare they act as if I had no business walking among them? Just because I was currently banned from the space that should have been my safety, that always had been before?

It wasn’t right and it wasn’t fair and Sylvester was violating at least a dozen rules of hospitality by refusing to let me come home. Tybalt could probably have named them all, detailing all the ways in which my liege was failing me. He wasn’t Sylvester’s biggest fan and never had been, even when we’d been on better terms. And that wasn’t why we were here, because there was no degree of rudeness or neglect that could have been enough to justify punishing Raysel for her father’s actions.

Etienne was closest to the coffin. He did meet my eyes, giving a small nod before he opened the lid, which swung as easily as if it were made of nothing but dust and moonbeams. Raysel was exposed to the open air for the first time since being removed from her parents’ knowe.

Most people, when elf-shot, wake up looking exactly the way they did when they went to sleep. Elf-shot puts adult purebloods into something that’s closer to a state of suspended animation than actual slumber, since for them, the end of childhood means the cessation of physical changes. They live, they get shot, they sleep for a century, and they wake up with nothing more to show for it than dusty skin and maybe a sore back. I don’t know what would happen if someone elf-shot a pureblood child. I’ve never heard of it happening intentionally, and we have a treatment now. So what would happen now, today, is we would wake the kid up, and then I would kick the crap out of anyone who thought it was a good idea to elf-shoot them in the first place.

It wasn’t going to be like that for Raysel. When she’d gone to sleep, she’d been perfectly balanced between Blodynbryd and Daoine Sidhe, and that had been a large part of the problem. As I said before, the fae aren’t human. We’re something else entirely, but sometimes we can have children with human beings—or with each other, when our biology is closely enough aligned to make it work. Not every kind of fae is compatible with every other kind. As a Blodynbryd, Luna wasn’t truly a mammal, more a rosebush that had grown to echo a woman’s form and function. She wouldn’t have been able to have a child with Sylvester, who was Daoine Sidhe, and as mammalian as they come, except that she had stolen the skin of a dying Kitsune girl in her father’s forest. Magic being what it is, the change had been more than just skin-deep.

Even Luna hadn’t been able to transform herself enough to become completely mammalian, but she’d become close enough to have a daughter with Sylvester, and Raysel had been born delicate, primed to shatter under the kind of abuse her uncle subjected her to, because her body had been at war with itself. Purebloods have lots of stories about something they call “changeling madness,” where the minds of changelings tear themselves apart because they can’t handle the strain of being mortal and immortal at the same time. Maybe that happens and maybe it doesn’t: I’ve seen plenty of changelings with issues, but given that we’re treated as a disposable underclass by our own society, constantly marginalized and shoved aside, I think that’s less biology and more generational trauma. No. I think those stories come more from edge cases like Raysel’s, children who should have been impossible, inevitably falling to pieces as time puts more and more of a strain on seams that should never have formed in the first place.