Page 58 of A Divided Duty

“She’s not the only one who was left behind when we broke the Ride,” I said. “It’s why Acacia stayed here, at least officially.” Unofficially, Acacia had lived outside of mortal time for so long that I wasn’t sure there was a world for her outside the skerry. She was immortal—we didn’t need to worry about time catching up to her and aging her into dust in an instant—but even the immortal can wind up so out of touch that they can’t catch up unless they truly want to. And Acacia had already shown that she didn’t want to.

Tybalt frowned, looking uncomfortable. “All the children we were unable to recover? All the lost ones? They’re here?”

“Not all of them,” said Eutychia. “Riders die. It’s always a risk to being allowed to join the Ride: they go out into the mortal world to hunt for the children most suited to becoming one of their number, and sometimes, parents catch them in the act. Sometimes, they try to defend their children, and sometimes, they succeed.”

“You said all that like it was still happening,” I said. “It doesn’t happen anymore, right?”

“Right,” she said. “Our Lord is gone, and his Lady doesn’t open the doors for us. No one joins the Ride any longer, and the Riders who already are no longer risk themselves such as to die in the deliverance of their duties. It might be better if they did.”

I didn’t want to think too much about that, didn’t want to wonder how many of them had become like Rayseline, their own blood turning inimical to their survival. I was going to have to, now that I knew it was an issue: that’s what heroism means, sometimes. It means going back to fix as many of your mistakes as you possibly can, even when you’d rather be doing anything else. It means trying to save people. No matter how hard it gets, I have to try.

“Eutychia,” I said, carefully feeling out the syllables of her unfamiliar name. “Do you know what’s going on right now? With your Lady, and with her family?”

“When the spell came that changed the world, it restored a facsimile of our Lord to his throne,” said Eutychia. “You unmade Him.”

“You saw that?”

She nodded, a silent accusation.

I managed not to squirm. “That was my nephew, Anthony, under an illusion. Not because he wanted to be—he’d been enchanted by the person who wove the whole spell, who needed someone to play the role of Blind Michael for her fantasy world to play out correctly. She wanted to use your skerry as a sort of prison for the people her world said couldn’t possibly exist, and so she threw them all in here, and made Anthony over to be their jailer.”

Last time I’d checked, he was still having horribly bad dreams about the whole situation, going to sleep and finding himself in a stranger’s body with no way back to his own, forced to go through the motions of being a tyrant who stole and distorted children for his own petty amusements. Honestly, I expected him to be the next person trying to get a spot on Dr. Voss’s calendar, after everything he’d been through in the last year. First it was “Your sister’s dead,” then “Your mom’s not real,” and finally, “You’ve been transformed into the monster who tortured both your little brother and your dead sister.”

That’s the sort of thing that leaves a mark.

“We thought he was really our Lord,” said Eutychia. “We thought He had never left us, and we were so happy, because—for the Riders, there would be another Ride, and for the rest of us, every Ride took us one step closer to joining on our own, to being fully remade in His image. Riders don’t dream. They don’t wonder, and they don’t remember.”

“Remember what?” asked Tybalt.

“Their families. What it was to have two hooves, and not two talons and two paws. The daylight, or the human world, or any of the other things we can’t have here.” She looked at him and shrugged. “When you take the last Ride, the magic remakes the last of who you are, and your loyalty is sealed, and you don’t have any regrets anymore. You don’t want for anything, because there’s nothing in the world worth wanting. Not when you have your horse and your purpose and you know that you could Ride forever. All of us who didn’t become Riders before He died, we … we don’t get that. We never get to be sure, and we never get to stop regretting what we lost. We didn’t remember a world where He’d been gone, but we knew the Rides had stopped, for a time, and we were so glad that they were going to resume. We were so glad we were going to be finished.”

She looked down at her hands, and I almost missed it when she added, softly, “I thought I was going to be complete.”

How much damage did Blind Michael really do, and how long was that damage going to keep echoing down the years, leaving broken families in its wake? It didn’t seem fair that he should still be hurting people when he was dead and gone.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

Eutychia’s head snapped up. “No need, no need,” she said, with violently artificial cheer. “There’s nothing to be done for us now. But for a while we thought we had our Lord again, and his Lady sat beside him, and there was a new figure in the court—his youngest daughter, the sweetest rose of his garden. Luna. She had whatever she wanted from the both of them, and when they couldn’t please her, they still did their best to win her favor. She was a spoiled, spiteful little thing, but she lacked the attention span for true cruelty. There was always something new distracting her, and we all knew to keep out of her way.”

“Okay,” I said slowly.

“Then, everything changed. My memory tells me there was a Ride, but if there was, it was the only Ride I’ve ever known where none of the children in waiting were called upon to take the saddle: we were left to our solitude and our slow changes, and nothing was different, and nothing was the same. The stables were full, filled with children who had yet to be transformed, who weren’t ready to join us in the Hall. And there was a girl running around, telling everyone who’d listen that she was Luna’s daughter, but that wasn’t possible. Luna had lived here for her whole life, and we all knew her. She wasn’t a mother. She was centuries old, and she was barely an adult. But the girl insisted, and she ran and hid whenever we tried to stop her.” Her expression turned briefly mulish. “She refused to play by the proper rules of the game that we all live by, and that’s the next best thing to cheating if you ask me. Then you came, and unmade our Lord, and she went away with you. We were planning a Ride to go and get her back—to get you both back—when the world snapped, and we remembered how wrong all of this really was.”

“I’m sorry Anthony wasn’t really Blind Michael back from the dead, and I’m not sorry at all, because I killed that monster for a good reason,” I said.

Eutychia nodded. “I know,” she said. “Most of the time, I don’t really want Him back. None of us really do. I always knew that when I went on the last Ride, what came out the other end wouldn’t be me anymore, not in any way that mattered. Anyway. I appreciate you listening, and I hope you can find my parents.”

She stood, shaking her wings until her feathers were smooth. “Have a good visit,” she said. Then she turned, and walked back to where she’d been, leaving us behind.

TWELVE

“I THINK I’M GOING TO be sick,” I said, turning to Tybalt. He was already rising, turning away from me. He was always pale—being nocturnal will do that for a person—but now he was almost waxen, looking genuinely unwell.

“Tybalt?” I asked.

“You’re not alone,” he said. Then he folded inward on himself and, cat-form, ran for the nearest stretch of trees.

I followed, not fully sure what was going on, but absolutely sure that I didn’t want to let him out of my sight.