Page 83 of A Divided Duty

“Who is ‘them,’ Eion? Raysel isn’t ‘them.’ She wasn’t alive yet when your brother was taken. Chelsea here is Raysel’s girlfriend. She’s not ‘them.’ She wasn’t alive either, and she’s never hurt anyone. Sylvester isn’t ‘them.’ Maybe he shouldn’t have been willing to keep Luna’s secrets the way he did—that’s a conversation for smarter people than either one of us. Luna had a right to ask for privacy, and you had a right to know what happened to your brother. I don’t know how you untie a knot like that. I just know that Raysel doesn’t deserve to suffer for the sins of her parents. You need to tell me where they took her.”

“I don’t know,” said Eion. “The Rider who approached me said she knew what happened to my brother. She said she could help me find him again if only I’d help her find the daughter of her master’s youngest child. It seemed so straightforward in the beginning. I was just helping a family reunite. And then I realized who she meant, and that it was the Duke’s daughter everyone gossiped about after court, the one who was scared of her own shadow. I felt bad by then. But it was too late. They already expected to be told where she was going to be. They knew about Ashla and Gable. They made it clear that they were going to have a child. I couldn’t let it be one of mine. I couldn’t.”

“So you’d condemn another family to the hole you can’t fill in your own heart?” I asked, disgusted. “Where did they take her?”

“Toby—”

“Don’t say my name. Don’t try to plead with me for forgiveness. If you’re going to get that, it’s going to be coming after I have Raysel back, and not before. She’s my responsibility. She’s part of my household. I’m the one who bleeds if I lose her, not her mother.”

Chelsea was silent, but she was vibrating beside me, crackling with the need to move, to act, to do something. If Eion named a place she’d seen before, she was going to be there before I could tell her not to go anywhere.

Instead, he sighed, shoulders sagging. “I didn’t mean for anyone to get hurt. Not really. I thought I was doing the right thing, right up until I didn’t think that anymore, and by then, it was too late.”

“Where did they take her?”

“The Rider I spoke with said that they would get her away from her mother when they came to the skerry, and that from there, they’d sound the horn and carry her back into their territory. There’s a place they call ‘the Children’s Hall,’ where new captives are kept until they change enough to Ride. They’re going to put her there, and keep her until she’s ready.”

Chelsea stiffened. I turned just in time to see a tear run down her cheek, and grabbed for the back of her shirt as she began to lunge at Eion.

She was faster than I was, or maybe I wasn’t really trying. She slammed into him, shoulder impacting with the center of his chest and knocking him back against the wall. “How could you?” she shouted. “Do you know how scared she is of what her grandfather’s magic does? Do you know how scared she is of her own family? And now you’ve made things even worse! She really is going to be scared of her own shadow after this!”

I finally got hold of her shoulders, hauling her away from Eion, who looked at me with sheer terror in his eyes. I shook my head.

“You’d better explain to your family why you’re going to have to move along again,” I said. “I don’t think Queen Windermere is going to want you sticking around here after you committed an act of treason against one of her vassals.”

Eion stared at me, stricken. “She wouldn’t punish my family for my actions, would she?”

“That depends on whether you consider her sending you away and leaving them to survive without you a punishment,” I said. “If you would, then yes, she’d punish them. If you wouldn’t, then no, she wouldn’t, unless they insisted they had to stay with you no matter what. If that’s the case, yeah, she might well banish your whole family.”

I was exaggerating. She’d banish his wife and sister, but she wouldn’t banish the children. She would never chase children out of their home, no matter what their parents had done. After what had happened to her and Nolan, that was something she genuinely wasn’t capable of doing. But that didn’t mean Eion’s choice was going to be any easier for him to make.

I turned to Chelsea. “Please go back to Cassandra’s quarters and tell her I’ve confirmed the identity of the second traitor. She needs to dispatch a guard to Eion’s quarters to take him into custody as quickly as possible. You and I have places we need to be.”

For the first time since all of this had started, she brightened. “Are we going to go get Raysel back?”

“You’re going to go get Cassie,” I said firmly.

She nodded, sketched a circle in the air, and was gone, leaving me alone with Eion. He looked me dead in the eyes and dropped to his knees, beginning to babble.

“Please, please, Guaidre was only six years old when the Riders took him in the morning’s brutal light. He never had a chance to live, never had a chance to learn what it was to be a member of our world. I went to bed a brother and woke to be told that I had never been one, that I likely would never be again, and all because that monster was allowed to run free when there were ways to stop him. You stopped him. A changeling stopped him, and the pureblood heroes of yore did nothing, they married his daughters and sat in their walled towers doing nothing. Something had to be done! They had to understand how to suffer as we had suffered, as I had suffered, because how could this be allowed to stand? How could my brother, who had harmed no one, stop his dancing while the damned duke had everything he could ever have asked for, when he was a monster in his own way, sheltered in his halls of oak and ash?”

I winced. This was more fallout from Titania’s spell: I could hear it in the agonies ringing through Eion’s voice. He would never have blamed Sylvester so directly before being thrown into Titania’s twisted mirror of our feudal system, presenting its worst attributes as if they were its best and biggest. A world where his family were treated like chattel must have clawed some of his deepest traumas up from the depths of his mind, making them suddenly immediate and important once again.

A lot of changelings and people with changelings in their immediate families were probably struggling with sudden negative feelings toward the nobility. We were almost lucky that Eion had lashed out at Sylvester and not, say, Arden or one of the other local monarchs. None of them were innocent of the atrocities inherent in the system, but all of them were a lot more likely to strike back first and ask questions later than they were to say “Oh he just had his feelings hurt by Titania, better let him go home and get some more hugs.”

If he’d somehow managed to lash out at Dianda, we’d be looking at a blast radius, not a potential banishment.

The smell of Chelsea’s magic announced her return, and I turned around to see her stepping out of a portal in the middle of the room, closely followed by a now-clothed Cassandra and Walther. Both of them looked substantially more composed and less distracted than they’d been before; Walther had acquired a short sword somewhere, belted at his hip like he was accustomed to carrying it. And maybe he was. He’d been part of the royal family of Silences before he was effectively exiled. I had no idea what that meant in terms of his training.

“Chelsea said you needed us?” said Cassie.

“You know Eion,” I said, gesturing to the groveling Hamadryad. “He has some things he needs to tell you. I hope you’ll listen with an open mind, and let him explain what he’s done. Then you should probably take him into custody. I’m sure Queen Windermere will want to talk to him when she wakes up this evening.”

“Where are you going?” asked Walther.

“To get my husband,” I said. “I know where Raysel is now, and I need to bring her home. You two can handle this from here.”

I turned fully to Chelsea. “All right,” I said. “Tybalt’s at the house with Miranda. Can you get me there? I promise, this is the last jump.”