Page 54 of A Divided Duty

I was back at square one. Although I did have a new lead: someone at Shadowed Hills must have realized what Luna was planning to do and moved to snatch Raysel while she’d be relatively undefended.

I needed to go back to Shadowed Hills.

We were racing through the woods, branches snatching at our hair. Tybalt was still running smoothly, not slowed down at all by the strain of carrying me. I rested my head against his chest, closing my eyes, and tried to focus on my next moves.

We were stuck here until Acacia left the woods in the morning, but as soon as that happened, I could ask her to send me back to the Summerlands. As long as I had the candle from the Luidaeg, I could hopefully come back as necessary. But for now, I had somewhere I needed to be.

Tybalt slowed, and I opened my eyes. We were back on the stretch of flat ground outside the building where Acacia and Luna had been attacked. There was no one in sight. Tybalt slowed more, coming to a stop and swinging me down to my feet. I stretched, trying to will my half-frozen legs back to life.

“You all right there, handsome?” I asked.

“I could do that all night,” he said, with calm assurance.

“You know, I believe you, but that doesn’t make me less inclined to ask you how you’re doing,” I said.

“Fair enough,” he replied, and kissed my temple. “We’re here, all is well, and we can speak with Acacia about what we found—or didn’t find.”

“Not until she finishes healing,” I said. “For right now, we’ll have to speak to the next worst thing.”

He quirked an eyebrow.

“Luna,” I said, and started for the building.

Naturally, Tybalt followed.

Together, we squeezed through the gap in the wall and into the bloodied room where Luna had been attacked. The smell was almost overwhelming, and now that I knew the magical signatures of some of the attackers, I could pick them out of the ambient background aroma. None of them had bled, but several had cast spells, and I’d be able to track them if I encountered them again. That was something.

Luna was still there, now slumped in a rough wooden chair with her head lolling against her shoulder. Most of her visible injuries were gone, although she was still heavily bruised. The skin that covered her gashes was almost translucent, seeming to virtually glow in the dimness. She was always white, but this was like rice paper. I would have been afraid to touch her, if she hadn’t opened her eyes and looked at me with the sort of venom that most people would reserve for their greatest enemies.

“You,” she spat.

“Hello, Luna,” I said, moving toward one of the open chairs. Tybalt moved toward the wall, leaning up against it and crossing his arms, lounging indolently. His candle was still as high as it had ever been, burning steady and pale in the darkness.

“Why are you here?” she asked.

“I’m glad to see all that blood I gave you did something for your injuries,” I said. “I was worried you were too far gone. I didn’t want to have to explain to Sylvester why he’d lost his wife and his daughter.”

“Where is Rayseline?” she asked, struggling to sit further upright. “If you’ve hurt her, I’ll—”

“What? Kidnap her again? I didn’t do anything to hurt her,” I said. “You were the one who snatched her when she dared to let herself feel safe for a moment. Do you have any idea how hard it’s been for us to convince her that she can leave the house without being terrified something’s going to happen? She has no idea how to trust the world. She’s scared all the time, and you’ve made it worse. I don’t know yet how much worse it’s going to be, but I can tell you that it’s not going to be pretty.”

Luna actually flinched, and for a moment her expression flickered from rage to distress.

The moment passed, more quickly than I would have thought possible, and she was back to glaring at me. “If she’s frightened, it’s because you’ve done something to scare her. I have never done anything to make her believe the world is a dangerous place.”

“No,” I said, earnestly. “You never did anything to hurt her, not on purpose. All the damage was done by other hands. But then, when she needed space to heal, you couldn’t give that to her. There’s a thing the humans call a crush injury, where someone has been pressed under something so heavy for so long that their body adjusts and forgets how to exist under normal pressure. When you take the weight away, their tissues start to swell, and it can kill them. Raysel has been trying to recover from a psychological crush injury, and you’ve been trying to heal it by crushing her back down.”

“It sounds like you’re accusing me of harming my daughter,” she said, voice gone frosty.

I took a moment to count to three and think about my reply. Because she was harming her daughter; she just couldn’t see the shape of the harm through the veil of her own expectations and unhappiness. She was hurting Raysel by expecting her to be someone she was never going to be, by asking her to be a perfect Blodynbryd daughter of the nobility and not a traumatized Daoine Sidhe who’d grown up essentially at the bottom of a well.

“I don’t think you’re harming her intentionally in any way,” I said finally. “No more than your parents intentionally harmed you by raising you here.”

She sat bolt upright, eyes blazing. “I am nothing like my father!”

“We’re all like our parents in some way, even when we don’t want to be,” I said. I could see flashes of Amandine in myself, in the way I sometimes kept cards closer to my chest than was safe for the people around me, in the way I feared losing them if I did things even slightly wrong. Nature and nurture both play a role in the people we become, and we don’t get to excise the parts we don’t like.

“I didn’t hurt her.”