Page 3 of Sleep No More

“Intention doesn’t always match reality,” I said. Then I glanced behind him, to the two changeling girls clinging to the trembling woman.

They looked at me as if I were the most terrifying thing they had ever seen, worse, even, than the noble who would have handed them off to a liege known for killing changeling children. I wanted to wither under those eyes. I wanted to protest that no, no, I was not a monster; I was simply a girl who knew her place, who was content where she was, who understood her limitations.

And yet here I was, safe and comfortable and cared for, while the best they could hope for was a clean patch of ground amidst the briars, deep enough for them to sink their roots into for a day before they resumed their quest for a place where they could be sure of their futures.

I would have hardened my heart, had I only known how. I did not, and so I grabbed another parcel, this one of sweetened fruitcake, intended for my own supper, and thrust it at the man. He took it, apparently automatically.

“Open roads and kind fires, and all the winds to guide you,” I said, and shut the door before I could be drawn any deeper into looping, confounding conversation. Turning my back to it, I leaned against the wood, and waited.

No further knocking came.

Excellent. More tired than I should have been after such a brief encounter, I wiped my brow with one hand and made for the sitting room. Sure, a moment’s rest meant taking my eyes off the road, but I would hear the knocking whether or not I could see who was coming up the path, and so long as I stayed here to greet them, I would be fulfilling my duties.

My name, as I have now stated twice, is October. That is all. I have no right to Father’s name, for all that the law deems me his daughter, and my mother never told me the name of the man who sired me, the mortal she entreated to her bed for a night of unspeakable ecstasy. I am born of two worlds, balanced between them as precisely and perilously as anything has ever been. There is more of the fae in me than mortality, as if that mattered: each of the Firstborn has something they can do better than any of the others. My mother’s trick is in changing the balance of someone’s blood.

Rumor says there were once devices that could be set to the same end, but they were too difficult to control; they rendered our social customs unstable and unsustainable, for any changeling child could get their hands upon one such and remake themselves in Titania’s image without intervention or consent. Better to keep such power where it would be used responsibly and correctly. Better to keep it in my mother’s hands.

Mother is forever in demand among the Courts, called upon to make a changeling child a little less fae, so as to render them able to better stand the sting of iron, or a little less mortal, to not offend a sensitive noble’s eyes. Her services are but one of the many reasons changelings are better off within the Court system rather than hiding in hovels with parents who should have known better than to bear them without.

Because of what I am, I will never marry, never have a household or children of my own. But Faerie must have servants to function smoothly, and so changelings are required. Each noble house and each among the Firstborn is asked to do their duty, to provide a pair of hands to press into the service of greater Faerie. Mother put off that unpleasant necessity for as long as she possibly could, until pressures that were not mine to know compelled her to slip into the mortal world long enough to return with me, a babe in arms, my blood already adjusted to the levels she required.

October, she called me, in honor of an aunt I never knew, who died long ago in a human war, but whose daughter, January, still dwelt in her father’s halls in Briarholme. It was a cruel and bitter gift to give to me, who would never be September Torquill’s equal, and a perpetual reminder that my place was behind my sister. As August came first in the calendar, so would August come first in our lives.

Should my sister choose to start a household of her own, she could ask me to come with her and stand in service—would, in fact, be expected to do so. A pureblood could no more offer insult to a changeling than a cat could look at a king, but if she left and chose not to take me, it would be assumed that I had somehow offered insult to her, and I could be made to pay the price.

There are few shades of punishment where changelings are concerned. We are weak to many things that trouble not the fae, but strong against iron, which would be the preferred means of disciplining an unruly commoner who somehow offended a noble. If August left without me, my death would be the likely outcome.

I slumped into one of the uncomfortable couches Mother insisted were appropriate for the sitting room, allowing my eyes to close. The Hamadryads had not been the first such group of travelers to come along our road this Moving Day; most of the people I’d seen had been in clusters that I took for families, almost all of them sheltering a changeling child or two, and none of the changelings older than sixteen. All running for Golden Shore.

Something was terribly wrong, if Faerie’s children were so afraid of their own homes, their own places. I frowned to myself, a private expression. Such thoughts were unbefitting. Nothing was wrong. Nothing could be wrong, not in Titania’s Faerie.

We lived in a perfect world, watched over by a perfect queen who saw to it that everything was balanced, everything was fair, everything was exactly as it was meant to be. To think anything else was to fail her. To fail her was to fail Faerie.

I have been a failure too many times. I forced my eyes open and rose.

Time to return to my duties.

TWO

OBERON’S MERCY WAS WITH me: although I stood attentive for the rest of the night, listening, no one else came to knock upon our door before the distant crowing of a cock alerted me to the approach of mortal dawn.

As I said before, Mother refuses to keep livestock, and Alectryon are difficult to come by, but there is an unattended portal to the human world somewhere in the depths of the swamplands, and mortal chickens have shown an odd proficiency for slipping through, and surviving once here. They make a convenient clock, even more than the sun, whose rise and set could become questionable when Mother wasn’t in the tower. She had been called to the Kingdom of Silences to provide her services to the nobility there, as she was often prevailed upon to do. As the most powerful blood-worker Faerie had ever produced, my mother’s gifts allowed her to shift the balance of the blood of any favored—and unfavored—changeling to make them more suited to their station. This, along with her beauty and status as one among the Firstborn, means that all of Faerie reveres her and courts her favor.

What no one outside our family knew, or could ever be allowed to learn, was that her gifts went even further: if she so chose, she could strip the immortality from any fae with even a drop of mortal blood, or turn the weakest changeling fully fae. If anyone suspected her powers extended so far as that, our entire household would be blinded and bound to the Iron Tree to be burned alive. Her magic was allowed, for she was a true daughter of Oberon, and Faerie itself had put the art of blood manipulation into her hands. To transform something mortal into something fae, though . . . that would be a blasphemy such as could never be borne.

That, too, is part of how I know my family will always protect me. When I became old enough to be trusted to hold my tongue, Mother herself told me the truth of what it meant to be Dóchas Sidhe. If she didn’t love me, she would never have trusted me to help them keep the secret that could easily destroy us all.

The cock crew and I slumped, weary from the long night of waiting and yet somehow filled with tension, the fierce, buzzing energy born of too much inaction. Father would be back soon. He had spent the night in his workshop, serving his Lady, but he always tried to return during the day, to wash and see us fed if nothing else. Mother’s absence meant there was no need for me to prepare tonight’s bread; he would do it gladly and with skill, where I would fumble and burn myself, as I always did. I have no talent in the kitchen, never have, and am unlikely to develop any at this late stage.

Father is a wizard with a knife, pruning and plucking the proper herbs with his own hand, then mincing and dicing the leaves to sweet perfection. His bread always rises, and his eggs split as if seamed, never casting specks of shell into the pan. Even August can toast a cheese sandwich without blistering her hands. I, on the other hand, remain all but useless in the art of feeding myself or others, and yet when Mother is in residence, the duty remains my own. Knowing that Father would have matters in hand, I stretched until my back cracked, then started toward the stairs that would take me to my room.

Sleep might be elusive, but I would need to begin my chores by midday if I wanted to keep the tower in a livable state. I needed to at least shut my eyes and think of nothing for an hour or two, if not truly rest.

I was halfway up the stairs when I met my sister coming down. August was dressed in a gown of white velvet. White lace gores ran from her hips down to the hem, keeping the gown modest while reducing the weight of the skirt enough that she could still move. The belled sleeves were matching lace from elbow to wrist. One of Mother’s selections. August would have been far more comfortable in the colors of mud and trampled grass, like the stains she collected almost nightly from the garden.

Perhaps her yearning to run wild in wooded places somehow influenced my magic. I think I could love my cut-grass scent if I knew it had started from my sister.

She spread her arms when she saw me, effectively blocking rest of the stairs. “Where do you think you’re going?” she asked.