Page 74 of Sleep No More

I knew it had been a dream. I knew that. But it had been built from memories buried in my blood, and even if they were currently inaccessible to me, they were real. I couldn’t deny that. I didn’t want the world to change. I didn’t want my life to have been a lie.

And sometimes what I want doesn’t matter. Sometimes what matters is what’s right, and what was right was the world where these people knew and loved me, where they were waiting for me to join them. Where they’d be waiting forever if I didn’t stop pushing them all away as hard as I could for the crime of knowing a different version of reality.

Cautiously, I took my hand away from my chest and breathed slowly in, steadying myself. The panic that woke me seemed to have faded, and my head wasn’t throbbing anymore. That was swell. If Titania was willing to delay her Ride long enough for me to take a long nap between unbindings, maybe this would work out after all.

“Glad to see you’re feeling better,” said a voice from the corner of my room. I stiffened again, turning toward it. “I was worried when you sat up like that.”

“Luidaeg?” I asked, finally identifying the voice. “What are you doing in here?”

“Cayci and Raysel had a lot of catching up to do, and the people you came with needed to sleep, so I moved in here with Anthony after I bled my sister. He’s still out.”

Something about the way she said that made me look to the other side of the bed. There, motionless and barely visible in the gloom that filled the chamber, was the sleeping form of Anthony Brown.

“Why this kid?” I asked. He looked innocent, sweet, and very, very young. I’d have been stunned if he was twenty mortal years old.

“Oh, because he’s her son,” said the Luidaeg easily.

I managed not to recoil. Firstborn? I’d been sleeping next to one of the Firstborn? You’d think being raised by one would make them less impressive, but if anything, it had the opposite effect. I know exactly what my mother is capable of when she gets upset about something. The amount of power she can put into a temper tantrum . . . being defenseless around the Firstborn is a good way to wind up dead, or with a skeleton made entirely of earthworms, or worse. And there’s always, always worse.

“In the real version of Faerie, Maeve’s Ride broke just like it did here, but Titania wasn’t as good about keeping her mouth shut afterward,” said the Luidaeg. “She bragged about being responsible for her sister’s downfall. Bragged, like it was something to be proud of. Oberon heard her, and he realized, finally, that maybe having a Queen who was bound and determined to erase one-third of Faerie from existence was a bad thing. So he bound her. Overwrote her mind with someone entirely new, hooked the spell into her own magic so it would be self-renewing, and sent her out into the rest of Faerie to learn compassion and humility. That spell looked a lot like a smaller version of this one. Hell, maybe it’s where she got the idea.”

She paused, and I heard footsteps approaching the bed. I forced myself not to shy away. “Regardless, that spell made her live out life after life among her own descendants, pretending at being small and harmless without knowing that she was pretending. And the most recent of those lives was a woman named Stacy Brown, who was your best friend since childhood. You loved that woman, and she loved you, and you were honorary auntie to her children. Until the spell started to break down, and Titania started showing through.”

None of this meant anything to me, but the way she spoke, slow and implacable, filled me with a crawling horror.

“She killed one of the children, a little girl named Jessica, and a whole lot of very nasty stuff happened, and in the end, you undid Oberon’s spell and let Stacy go, because she’d never really been there, and it was the only way to stop Titania. Oberon bound her again, and in his binding, he forbade her to harm the children of her last incarnation. He’d seen how much they meant to you. He felt . . . sorry, as much as he’s capable of that emotion, for having caused you pain by letting them be hurt. So she can’t directly harm Anthony, or his siblings, but they also can’t exist in the world as she’s remade it, and that meant she had to get creative. So she’s using them to patch the holes, to fill in the characters she decided were necessary but whose actors have already stopped their dancing. I’d be impressed, if I weren’t so busy hating her.”

“I don’t understand how this isn’t causing harm,” I said. “I get how she’s justifying it to herself, but that doesn’t make it true. She’s causing harm.”

The end of the bed dipped as the Luidaeg sat. I focused on my breathing, not letting it get unsteady or too fast. Not just in a room with two Firstborn. In a bed with two Firstborn.

Oh, I was so going to die.

“You know, the Toby I know spent some time as a fish because my sister wanted her out of the way, and the man she’d sent to do the removing couldn’t go through with it,” she said, mildly. “Instead of killing her like he was supposed to, he transformed and left her, and that was the most merciful thing he could have done under the circumstances, and she hated him for it for a really long time. How dare he take her away from her family for fourteen years. How dare he change her without her consent. But he was thinking in centuries, and she was thinking in days. Titania doesn’t even think in centuries. She thinks in millennia. In her mind, I’m sure, this is a form of mercy. She did no harm.”

“I don’t agree,” I said stiffly.

“If it helps, neither do I. But this isn’t what you want to ask me.”

“How do you know?”

“I’m good at listening to the questions people aren’t actually asking. Go ahead, girl. Ask me what you really want to know.”

“You talk about the other me like you . . . like you know her. I mean really know her. Can you tell me about her?”

“Ah. That’s what I was expecting.” The Luidaeg exhaled, chuckling. “I can even give you this one for free, because it hurts as much as it heals, and that means no payment is required. Yeah. I know October. I met her when she was just a kid, when Amy—her mother—was hiding her in the human world, pulling the fae out of her veins one drop at a time. I met her, and I saw what her mother was doing to her, and I told Sylvester Torquill what was happening that same day. Sometimes I’ve wondered what would have happened if I’d been able to find his brother and put the burden of October’s future on his shoulders. Simon was in service to my sister by that point, tangled tight in poisoned thorns and half-lost to himself, but he still loved his wife, and he was October’s father in the eyes of Faerie. I might have saved them both if I’d asked him to do his duty by the child. But I didn’t, and so that wasn’t the life we lived.

“The Changeling’s Choice isn’t a thing in this Faerie, because it’s been made already for all the changeling children, but where I come from, when a changeling is born, and gets old enough that their magic starts to show, their fae parent offers them a choice. Are you human, or are you fae? And if they choose fae, they’re whisked away to the Summerlands, never to see their human parents again.”

“What if they choose human?” I asked cautiously. Surely that didn’t happen. Surely no one would look at the choice between magic and mortality and choose the slow, lumbering, mortal way.

“They die,” said the Luidaeg bluntly.

I couldn’t see her face, and so it didn’t do me any good to stare at her. I did it anyway, aghast at her calm reply. “How is that a kinder world?” I blurted.

“Did I say our world was kinder? Because I don’t think I did,” said the Luidaeg. “It’s not. It’s horrible and it’s cruel and it’s wrong, and when Amy was born with the power in her hands to make that choice a real one, I thought it would end. I thought we’d be able to have our changeling children and take them home forever, or free them to the world they preferred. It’s still a one-way choice, and that’s still wrong, but it’s better than the grave. And then Amy refused to take up the calling her magic demanded, and August was gone and you had no idea what you were, and the changelings kept dying, and Faerie didn’t heal. Our problems go a lot deeper than one bloodline’s power to resolve, kiddo. But no, the Changeling’s Choice isn’t kind. It’s just the way we can reconcile love with the need to keep Faerie safe and hidden. Can you tell me how stealing children away from their parents in the night, leaving those parents no way to grieve or move on, and forcing those children to become servants for people more powerful than them is kinder than the way we do things? I think both systems are horrible.”

She leaned over then, touching my hand, very lightly. “My October has been trying to make things better, as best as she can. She wants changelings to be able to live their lives according to their own terms, and she wants the Choice to be a choice. She’s a hero. I know you’re scared. I know you’re afraid of losing everything you think you have right now, and I won’t pretend that you’re wrong to feel that way. When you get your memory back, you’re going to learn a lot of things that will probably horrify you after spending time in Titania’s sanitized wonderland. But my October’s a hero. She’s saved our world more than once. Hell, she’s saved me. She’s still inside you, whether you remember her or not, and she’s going to come out when we need her. I believe in her, and you are her, so I believe in you.”