Page 48 of A Divided Duty

“You’ve no more blood to spare,” said Tybalt sharply.

“But do we have the time to spend waiting for Acacia to recover?”

“I wouldn’t have your blood if you offered it; I refuse to be further in your debt,” said Acacia. She followed my gaze to my hand. “That’s not a Babylon candle,” she said.

“No,” I agreed. “She invoked a place called Westmoreland when she was making them for us.”

“That was her sister’s place, once,” said Acacia. “Pretty Jinny Greenteeth, youngest and sweetest of the fen-born. She bore the Grindylow in her day, and faded long ago. She was never as thirsty for vengeance as most of her kith and kind; she only wanted to be left to herself, to tend her waters and see her children grow. If Antigone was invoking Jinny for your travels, it makes sense that she’d lay less of a time commitment on you than she might otherwise have done.”

“She sent us by the Thorn Road,” I said.

Acacia took a closer look at the candle, eyes wide and fascinated despite the extent of her injuries. “I’ve never seen that path, although I know it connects to my husband’s lands,” she said. “It’s not open to me.”

“Some things need to stay closed,” I said, trying to sound sympathetic, like I was concerned that there might be a door into her home that she didn’t have a way to monitor. In truth, I didn’t really care. Her callousness toward Luna’s very real injuries and Raysel’s absence was difficult to wrap my head around; I’d always taken her for more compassionate than that.

But then, she had chosen her own life over the lives of countless children snatched by her husband from both the fae and human worlds: she had allowed them to suffer, distort, and die all to preserve herself, just so she could keep living a life that was barely worthy of the title. When he died, she had chosen to stay behind and care for the remaining survivors, but had that been kindness, or just acceptance of the fact that she was no longer in any way suited to live outside this skerry? The world was large and complicated. Here, things were small and simple.

She had been her daughter’s mother all along. I had just been refusing to allow myself to see it.

“We need to find Raysel.” I turned to Tybalt. “She’s still our responsibility, and whatever Luna was trying to do, it’s failed. She’s not going to keep our ward away from us.”

“No,” he agreed, gravely. “We made a promise, and we will keep it.”

“I know you’re not a bloodhound, but…”

“With no blood trail to follow, we’ll need to use whatever possible tools we have at our disposal,” he agreed grimly, and folded inward on himself in a rush of musk and pennyroyal, becoming a tabby cat once more. He looked up at me and meowed, then lowered his head and began stalking back toward the building, sniffing the ground the whole way.

“If you’ve no further need of me, I’ve told you all I know,” said Acacia. “I’m no good to Luna while this injured. I’ll go to the wood now, and rest.”

“Wait,” I said, throwing up a hand. She stopped obediently, looking at me with lifted eyebrows.

Feeling awkward and suddenly small, I said, “I’d like some of your blood, please. You may have seen more than you realized.”

“It’s no simple thing, to ask one among the First to bleed for you. Especially one who has refused to let you bleed for her.”

“I’m not asking you to bleed for me. You’re already bleeding. I’m just asking you to turn a little bit of that blood loss into bringing your granddaughter home. If you need to make it about debts and repayment to feel comfortable with this, I did just donate a considerable amount of blood to your daughter, who might well have died without it.”

Acacia’s eyebrows lowered, and then, to my deep surprise, she laughed. “Oh, you have been bargaining with my sister for all these years! She’d teach a mountain how to split a hair in the pursuit of what it desires, and no mistaking that. Yes, it’s true, you could easily argue that you’ve the right to call upon the debts I owe you, and anyone who has a heart would listen. Here.”

She thrust her arm at me, blood still leaking sluggishly from an assortment of gashes that would have killed almost anyone else they’d been inflicted upon, and cocked her head, clearly waiting for me to do something.

I stepped closer, taking her wrist in both hands, and turned her arm to give myself a better angle. Then, feeling ghoulish and exposed, I lowered my mouth to the bend in her elbow and took a mouthful, drinking as deeply as I dared. The blood of the Firstborn is strong. It can be overwhelming when you’re not prepared.

I thought I was prepared. I was wrong. Red mist slammed down over me as the memory took hold, and I was falling, I was falling, I was falling down into the crimson dark …

She/I stand at the gateway to my new country, her/my strong husband at her/my side and the wind blowing gently over her/my wings, ruffling the tiny scales that grow there, angled so as to help her/me take to the skies. This will be their/our paradise eternal, and he will forget all about those other children, the ones her/my siblings slew, his little line of Seers who could not be allowed to live, not when Mother had decreed that the future must be allowed to pass unseen. He will forget them in the light of the children they/we will have together, good children, strong children, children with the blood of Titania running bright through their veins, keeping them close to hearth and home.

The heart of this land will be the children, always, and as they/we welcome them, they/we will never die …

I broke out of Acacia’s memory of the founding of the skerry with a gasp, horror clinging to my thoughts as I remembered how sure she’d been that this was going to be a paradise, that nothing was ever going to go wrong or sour between them. She had been looking for a home, the Dryads already grown and their father gone, no longer available to help her have any more children of her own. So much of Faerie depended on legacies and bloodlines. Even living forever couldn’t change that.

Acacia was watching me, and I remembered that she had grown up with Eira lingering nearby, a terrible, frozen shadow. Had she learned the art of directing what a blood-worker would see by focusing her thoughts on the memories she most wanted to share?

“Think about the attack,” I said roughly, and lowered my mouth again.

Her blood this time was hot and rich against my tongue, copper mixed with maple syrup, and it burned as I swallowed. It burned all the way down to the base of me, and the memories came down again, blanketing and blocking out the world.

Luna. Little Luna, her/my youngest rose, grown now like all the others. She doesn’t need her/me the way she/I want her to; she doesn’t listen. Children grown will never listen.