Page 81 of Be the Serpent

Stacy’s smile widened. “See? I knew you were still in there. I knew you would understand . . . ” Halfway through the word, her voice twisted and distorted, trying to become something else. Something terrible and unwanted. “Now, Toby, you have to break it now!” she howled.

I couldn’t tell whether it was Stacy or Titania speaking, but I wanted it to be Stacy, so badly that I did as she asked. I closed my eyes and jerked on Oberon’s spell as hard as I could, and felt, rather than heard, the crystalline sound of something delicate and impossible shattering into dust. I took a half-step back to stabilize myself and opened my eyes, panting.

There was a woman on the ground in front of me, down on hands and knees, panting. She wasn’t kneeling; this wasn’t a woman who had ever knelt in her life, and she certainly wasn’t going to start now. But she looked exhausted, and I wasn’t sure she could stand.

Her hair was longer than Stacy’s had been, iridescent white and filled with all the scattered colors of the northern lights. They seemed to shift and glow from within, and maybe they did, maybe they were; maybe the Daoine Sidhe came by their ridiculous rainbow of hair colors completely honestly. Her ears, where they protruded from between tangled locks of hair, were long and sharply pointed, almost a parody of the ears I was used to seeing on her descendants.

I took a shaky step toward her. “Stacy?”

Her head snapped up, and she glared at me with such ferocious hatred that I stepped back again immediately, dread sweeping over me. I hadn’t really been expecting her face to be the same, not really, but there was understanding the way things were likely to go, and then there was being forced to confront it directly. This was a woman I had never seen before, except in the red-haze depths of Oberon’s memory. She was beautiful, or would have been, if her features hadn’t been distorted by the power of her hate.

“Titania,” I breathed.

“At last,” she said, and pushed herself to her feet—or tried to, anyway. She couldn’t seem to find the strength. Maybe that would be encouraging later. She had limitations, even when they weren’t being enforced by Oberon.

Where her hands shifted on the grass, tiny white flowers I had never seen before sprang up, their petals wide and their perfume scenting the air. It was magical, but it wasn’t magic, not the way the smell of roses that surrounded her was. Even after smelling them, I didn’t know what they were.

“I don’t know why you unbound me, little castoff, but I do know that it was a mistake,” she said. She seemed to be growing stronger by the second, an impression that was only enhanced when her next attempt to stand brought her to her feet. She looked down at the clothing she had inherited from Stacy, the bloodstained sweatshirt and the well-worn jeans, and she wrinkled her nose. “Oh, this is unacceptable.”

She snapped her fingers, and she was dressed in an old-fashioned gown a few shades darker than her hair, but dancing with all the same colors. It glowed from within, as did she, and she was more beautiful than any other woman in Faerie could ever dream of being. I was vermin, mortal, less than her in every possible way; I didn’t deserve to look at her. I didn’t even deserve to stand in her presence.

That was a feeling I knew all too well. It was the feeling I used to get from Evening and from the false Queen of the Mists, back when I’d been more human and less sure of myself. I squared my shoulders and forced myself to look her dead in the eye. Any time now, Oberon, I thought. The last thing I wanted from this day’s work was to be responsible for unleashing Titania on an unprepared world.

“You should never have interfered,” she said, and took a step toward me, more flowers springing up in her wake. The sounds of battle had passed, replaced by the sound of someone wailing like their heart was broken. And maybe someone’s heart was broken; maybe the fight had gone in Titania’s favor. I was too far away, and too preoccupied with not getting turned into a willow tree or something equally annoying to know.

What would even happen if I were turned into a willow right now? Magic could account for a lot of things, but it didn’t know everything, and I was all too aware of my own distant origins. Janet hadn’t even been able to stand being in the proximity of so much transformation magic. That was where my bloodline’s greatest weakness originated. The risk was too great for me to take. Even the thought of it made me want to turn and run for the hills.

It was way too late for that.

“Do you still remember being Stacy?”

Titania frowned, looking briefly bemused by the question.

“I was never her,” she said. “She was never real. She was a part I was playing, however involuntarily, and now that I’m free, she’s gone.”

“But do you remember?”

Her frown deepened. “Of course I remember every awful, insipid moment that I spent living her dreary, insipid little life. It was the blinking of an eye compared to the rest of my existence, but I was present for every grueling moment.”

“How can you remember Stacy’s life and not feel anything about the things that mattered to her?” The world was still a web of bright lines, other people’s spells stacked layer upon layer, all the way back to the foundation of the knowe itself. It was like looking at a piece of double-exposed film, only it was the entire world, and that somehow made it both more and less disorienting at the same time. I could dismiss the echoes at any time, I knew, by just closing my eyes and relaxing the part of my mind that had to stay tensed in order for me to see them. But I could never see this much, or this far, on my own. Oberon’s blood was still in me, still boosting my abilities. That didn’t mean it was going to last forever. Right now, it was keeping the effect going at a much higher level than should have been possible.

If I wanted to see the moment when Oberon re-bound Titania—if I wanted to know that I was safe—I needed to keep looking at the world in this distorted, disorienting way. And I needed to keep looking at her. Much as it hurt to know that she was wearing my friend’s remade body like some sort of sweater, much as it burned my eyes to look directly at her, I needed to keep on going. So I did. I’ve done worse when it was necessary to keep my people safe.

In the trees behind her, I could see the figure I’d been assuming was Oberon—the black cutout in the world—start to turn away. The figure next to him, who danced with ripples of white, blue, and green, grabbed his arm, stopping him where he stood. If I judged purely by their posture, the two of them were arguing. Then the color-streaked figure pointed at me, or at Titania, and gestured fiercely, and her identity was confirmed.

The Luidaeg. Oberon wanted, once again, to turn and walk away from his commitments, and she wasn’t allowing it to happen. In that moment, I could have kissed her. Happily, and on the mouth, and damn the consequences, whatever those were going to be. And there were going to be consequences. There were always consequences.

Oberon raised his hands. The Luidaeg let go of his arm, and the night exploded into brilliance. It was like I was staring directly into the center of a fireworks show, and not a small one, either. One of those really big ones that they have at amusement parks, the ones that keep going and going long after the smell of cordite has swallowed everything else in the world and you’re sure every roof in fifteen miles must be on fire. My eyes burned looking at it. Closing them didn’t help, either, since this was magical light.

Despite the pain, I still didn’t dare release the effect, and that was why I saw the moment Titania realized what was happening, realized that she was being bound again, and raised her own hands to fight back.

Before that moment, I would have said the light cascading from Oberon was colorless, the burning white that sleeps at the center of a flame. The contrast with Titania’s light put it into sharp relief. She was spraying pink and white across the sky, and he was meeting it with green and impossibly incandescent black. Where their magic met, it clashed, the leading edge of each spell ripping into the other like a pack of wild hounds. Oberon howled. Titania screamed.

I gasped and took a step backward, convinced to my core that this wasn’t something I was supposed to see, or have seen, or understand in any way. This was only the most superficial reading of the scene in front of me, the part my mind was capable of comprehending. The reality of it was much bigger, and even more terrible.

Oberon had the advantage, on several levels. I could see that. He’d been able to start his working while her guard was lowered, and while they had both been cut off from themselves for a long, long time, she’d only just remembered. His brief head start was turning the tide.

Titania screamed again, and collapsed, still herself, face-down in the grass. The light continued to cascade from Oberon for a few seconds more before it stopped, and he slumped, the Luidaeg holding him upright. I blinked away the lingering afterimages and released my hold on Oberon’s borrowed strength at the same time. The world rushed back, exactly as it had always been, save for the stranger who was the mother of . . . not all of us, but so very many, lying motionless on the ground.