Page 56 of A Divided Duty

“Luna may have been speaking from a childhood understanding of her mother, and not from an adult position of true knowledge?”

“Maybe. But it still seems off to me, like there’s something I’m missing.”

“There is always something to be missed this early in the process of solving a mystery,” he said. “If there weren’t, it wouldn’t be much of a mystery, now would it?”

“I guess not.” We were walking back toward the central bonfire, passing through the scrubby wood on our way. I looked around. Many of the trees were twisted and contorted like people caught in the middle of fleeing for their lives, which they probably had been once upon a time. I couldn’t tell which, if any of them, was actually Acacia. We kept walking.

The trees gave way ahead of us and we stepped out into the clear space around the buildings. I shivered involuntarily. This was the more-familiar-to-me stretch of Blind Michael’s lands, the place where I’d been kept when I was his prisoner. The stables were the darkest point in the jumbled shadows of the area. I looked toward them but didn’t approach. Tybalt followed my gaze.

“Should we be going over there?” he asked, politely.

“No,” I said. “I don’t know how much magic is still inside those walls, and I don’t want to find out the hard way. That was where he threw his captives when he wanted them to transform into his Riders, or their steeds. He turned the human children into horses, you see. It made them easier to control, when they could literally be broken to harness.” It sounded so simple when I said it like that, so straightforward and easy to understand.

But it hadn’t been simple while it was happening, had it? The screams of the children he’d taken still echoed in my nightmares, and here, it felt like those nightmares were waiting just below the surface of my thoughts, lurking and eager to drag me down. Human children had become horses, fae children had become Riders. For both, it had been a long and painful process, first their bodies and then their minds warping under the weight of his magic, twisting inward on themselves until they became something entirely new.

I’d been saved from that fate, ironically enough, by Michael himself; he’d decided I would make a fine replacement for Acacia and kept me in his private quarters where he could control what happened to me. His magic had never had the chance to twist my bones. I could be grateful for that, even as I felt guilty that I’d been spared while the others he’d taken hadn’t been. I hadn’t truly been a child when I’d handed myself into his possession, and I’d gotten away when the real children hadn’t.

Sometimes things that are true can be truly terrible.

Tybalt looked at the stables, visibly stricken, and I winced. His court had lost plenty of children over the years, and before Raj, none of them had been recovered. For the longest time, Blind Michael had been the fae equivalent of childhood disease: once he caught you, there was nothing to be done. Pureblood kids didn’t die of smallpox, they vanished of Blind Michael, and the two were equally indiscriminate, equally inescapable. We’d been able to break the cycle, but if he hadn’t thought to ask me to save Raj, he might never have seen his heir and nephew again. If I’d refused him, Raj would have been as lost as the rest.

We both knew that had never been a true risk. Even if Tybalt and I had been genuine enemies, rather than just occasionally estranged friends, I could never have let a child stay behind because I was mad at their adults. But he’d come to me then with no idea whether I’d help him, and he’d had no way of helping the children who came before Raj.

That had to be a heavy weight to carry. I turned toward the broken wall around the bonfire, trusting him to follow as I started in that direction. The bonfire was the center of the social structure within the skerry. Any Riders or children who’d been too warped to go home but not warped enough to join the Hunt would gather there, with or without Acacia to attend them, and they might be able to tell us more.

Tybalt caught up to me quickly, walking by my side as I skirted around the broken masonry to the edge of the bonfire circle. As I had more than half-expected, the circle was full, Riders in armor sitting alongside gawky teens and preteens whose bodies blended together the attributes of half a dozen descendant lines.

Raysel would have been perfectly normal if she’d been born and grown up here. Being a mixture of mammalian and vegetable descendant lines would have fit right in with her father’s patchwork people. I paused, considering this. My magic could remove a descendant line from someone’s heritage, could make someone like Raysel, who was two contradictory things, into just one thing. But it couldn’t put those descendant lines back again after I’d removed them.

I hadn’t exactly been in a position to question Michael about how his magic worked while I’d been his prisoner, or after, when I was busy killing him. But something about it had clearly allowed him to insert descendant lines into people. He’d transformed them, and if the changes had been temporary, Acacia wouldn’t have chosen to stay here and take care of them.

So his transformations didn’t wear off. They were forever.

Tybalt nudged me, elbow lightly pressing against my ribs. I turned to look at him.

“Where did you go, little fish?” he asked. “Your thoughts have carried you far away from me. Come back, and explain where they’ve taken you.”

“Just trying to figure out how the magic in this place works,” I said. “Michael was able to achieve some things I would have said were impossible, and I don’t see how. Most Firstborn have magic that makes sense, at least to a degree. It’s … unified. Acacia talks to trees, she commands trees, she turns people into trees. Amphitrite commands the waters, she controls the weather over water, and she sculpts the waves. Michael … he could create worlds. He could see through the eyes of birds. He could call a Hunt. How does transforming children into his own personal army match up with any of that?”

“It doesn’t,” said Tybalt. “Could someone else have helped him?”

I blinked, very slowly. “Oh sweet Maeve, I didn’t even think of that. Of course. It makes so much more sense once you stop and ask yourself who else could have had a part in all of this.”

And I knew exactly who I needed to ask if I was going to understand the spells Michael had used to create his army—and whether those spells were still active on and around his stables.

The crowd around the bonfire had noticed us by that point, and they were beginning to steal glances in our direction, clearly taking our measure. One of them, a Satyr girl with the hindquarters of a small Griffin instead of the normal back end of a goat, leaned to the side, murmuring something to someone I couldn’t see. I frowned. She looked familiar, like someone I’d seen before in a crowd …

Then she turned to look fully at me, and my breath caught. Of course she seemed familiar. She and I had been captives together, in the holding pen they called the Children’s Hall. That was where Michael had thrown his victims while he was deciding whether they would be Riders or ridden, and where they’d remained until he judged them ready to come and join his Hunt forever. He’d dropped me there as soon as I arrived in his custody, and left me to be tormented by the children who were waiting to Hunt.

The Satyr hadn’t been part of the group that had taken the most joy in tormenting me, but she’d been one of the most transformed, while still remaining visibly a member of her original descendant line. I wasn’t clear how she was supposed to join the Hunt, since she could never have mounted a horse, no matter how spectacular it was, but that issue had never come up: by the time she would have been ready, the Hunts in their original form had been over, ended by the death of their master.

Her eyes still on me, she took a tentative step forward, clawed front feet gouging chunks out of the stony ground. She didn’t move like there was anything unusual about her lower body; she’d had more than enough time to get used to the changes in her original frame. If anything, she was graceful compared to the way she’d been when I first saw her; her wings unfurled slightly as she walked, providing a counterbalance to the overall size of her body. Everything about the top half of her was normal for a Satyr, if enlarged as I would have expected in a Centaur, keeping her in proportion with her lower body, skin a tawny brown and ears pointed and noticeably longer than the human norm, halfway between a human and a horse. Her horns were wrapped in red velvet ribbon, like a present waiting to be unwrapped.

Her nails were more like claws than a normal Satyr’s would have been, but that little tweak honestly just added some balance to the rest of her, making her look less like something that had been made and more like something that had been born.

I forced a smile and waved her over. Tybalt leaned closer to me again.

“Who is that?” he asked, sotto voce.