Page 44 of A Divided Duty

“Wow,” I said. “I never heard anyone say Hirsent was still alive.”

“But did you hear them say that she had died?”

I had to shake my head at that. “No. No one ever seemed to know much of anything about her, and I thought I’d be able to live a normal life, with no Firstborn in it at all, so I didn’t go asking a lot of unnecessary questions. This was before I knew about Mom, obviously.”

“Obviously,” he agreed.

“But most people don’t need to worry about opening the door and finding a Firstborn child of the Three on their porch. It’s not supposed to be a risk anymore.”

“No. But alas, it seems we must live in unsupposed times.”

I eyed him. “Is that a word?”

“As once William, so now shall I.”

I rolled my eyes, and kept on walking.

The trees didn’t thin so much as they abruptly stopped, leaving us standing at the wood’s edge looking out upon a vast clearing filled with buildings like the giant wooden blocks of a child. They were scattered wildly around the area, with no rational spacing or placement to speak of. Most were low to the ground, with thatched roofs: the stables. A few were taller, solid stone from foundation to eaves, and those were the living spaces for the bipedal members of the court. At the center of it all was a broken stone courtyard, surrounded by the shattered walls of some larger hall, standing in irregular ranks, where a vast bonfire burned. I paused to survey the space, looking for signs of a struggle—or possibly an ambush; this was Blind Michael’s territory, after all, and while the man was gone, the magic still remained.

Nothing moved or caught my eye, and so I started walking again, heading for the fire.

“Are you so sure she’ll see us?” asked Tybalt, hurrying to keep up with me.

“She knows we’re here,” I said, with a conviction I didn’t fully feel. “She’ll either be here waiting, or she’ll have sent word for whoever’s tending the fire to help us with whatever it is we need. Trust me.”

“I do hate it when you say such confident things,” he said. “It always reminds me of how quickly things can go entirely wrong.”

“I love you too,” I said. “I’m glad you have such faith in me.”

He didn’t say anything, but if he’d been feline enough to flatten his ears, I had the distinct impression that he would have done precisely that.

We started to hear signs of life as we drew nearer to the bonfire: armor rattling, feet running, and voices raised in conversation, not loud enough that I could make out what they were saying, but loud enough that it was clear we were walking into a group of at least twenty people, maybe more. I’ve never been entirely clear on how many people were left in Blind Michael’s lands after he died. Acacia was there, I knew, and the Riders, along with all the children who’d been too far transformed to be returned to their homes. That could have meant almost anything, from under a dozen to almost a hundred. When I’d been there under Titania’s spell, the impression I’d gotten was closer to the latter figure, but that had been inflated by all the people Titania had hurled there in order to make her cobbled-together world work. I really didn’t know what we were looking at.

Then we reached the wall and I had to make a choice. Rather than trying to sneak or skulk, I stood up straight, holding my candle firmly in front of me, and walked around the corner to where the occupants of the bonfire would be able to see me.

At the same time, I saw them. There were about two dozen, equally divided between hulking figures in armor and smaller, lither shapes whose outlines didn’t follow any of the forms I would have expected from being a part of greater Faerie. Daoine Sidhe with gills and Tuatha de Dannan with leathery bat wings stood alongside fae with the spaded hands of moles and the bristling spines of echidnas, all of them turning slowly to look at us.

Silence fell, broken only by the sound of the fire crackling in the center of the clearing. Then one of the armored figures stood, clanking all the way, and turned to walk off through a gap in the wall. Still, no one said a word. Acacia wasn’t there: the tall chair where she would have been was empty. The chair that once belonged to Blind Michael had been removed. When it was Acacia’s time to sit by her fire, she would sit there alone.

Tybalt reached over and took my hand, not speaking, and I held on as tightly as I could without cutting off his circulation.

“Hi,” I said brightly to the gathering. “I’m Toby, this is Tybalt, and we’re here to see Acacia. Is she in?”

“We know you,” said one of the unarmored figures. “You killed our Lord. Twice.”

Oh. That was probably not good. “The first time was in self-defense,” I said. “The second time wasn’t real. I’m sorry, but that was an illusion.”

“We are so very grateful to you,” the figure continued, and bowed. All around the bonfire, the others did the same, folding forward one by one in a show of respect and supplication. I blinked, eyes going wide as I tried to take this in.

“Oooo-kay,” I said. “But is Acacia in?”

The armored figure that had left before returned through the same gap, returning to their seat before bowing along with all the others. I shot Tybalt a bewildered look. He shrugged, seeming as baffled as I felt.

Then a new figure appeared in the gap in the wall, and concern fled.

She was tall, slender the way a willow is slender—unyielding and strong, designed to stand up against any storm. Her skin was a pale daffodil yellow, and her brown-and-yellow hair hung like roots around her shoulders, twisting and knotting of its own accord. She was wearing a long dress of green and yellow tatters, and her wings—broad, soft-looking moth’s wings—hung half-mantled behind her, like she was still deciding whether she should stay or fly away. She stared at me, apparently shocked by my appearance. I stared back, equally confused by hers. She looked … smoothed out, almost, perfected in a way that made no sense. She was already Firstborn. She didn’t need to be flawless.

Even the scar on her face was gone, replaced by an expanse of smooth skin that I had never seen without an illusion in the way.