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“We’re still trying to figure that out, Cricket. But it should be over. He hasn’t been back to you for a while. And the Bandrui told him if he spills more blood in the temple, she will string him up from Faolán’s statue by his balls.”

Zaps of memory of the conversation I had overheard sizzled across my brain. Those were terms I had heard before.

“Faolán is a god?”

Violet shuddered to a halt and dropped the rag she had been squeezing out. “How’d you know that, Cricket? You haven’t been around long enough to know of their gods yet. Hadn’t had a chance to tell you before this all happened.”

“I . . . I think I overheard it. And more.”

“Yes, Faolán is the patron god of the Bláth an Earraigh, the Spring court. And as its king, that bastard is dedicated to Faolán. There’s nine of them. Well. Was.”

“Mabh’s son is dead. Who is Mabh?”

I felt her lean back on her stool, heard it rock on uneven legs under her slight weight. “Let a girl’s brain air out some, and she suddenly comes back with all sorts of dangerous questions.”

I huffed a laugh.

“Mabh is the former matriarch of the Fae. The former Goddess of Magic. Then it was her son, Mordin, or Túathal to the penitent. Mordin’s been dead for over two hundred years. That’s what kicked off the War of Thorns. He was the patron god of the House of Magic. Each house has their own patron god. I’ll introduce you to them when you can manage your legs again.”

“What is Canny eater Drew . . .”

“Canai eter Duthracht. It was the House of Magic. It means ‘Song Between Desires.’” She picked up the rag and was hesitantly dabbing at my head again. “That’s enough questions now, Cricket. It’s dangerous for someone as pretty as you are to think this hard.”

“I’m not pretty.”

“Little girl, even beaten and bruised, you are the prettiest thing in this temple and certainly the prettiest thing in Sceach Gheal an Bith.”

“That’s not me. That’s what Rictus made me.”

“Aren’t we all what the people around us have made us? I’m a bitter old woman in the body of a five-year-old girl’s doll. I don’t even remember what I looked like before they did this to me. So, this is as much who I am as the other ever was. More so, I’d imagine. Truth be told, I’ve been a doll for two hundred and fifty-eight years. I was the other woman for forty-one. By any measure, I would be a doll more than a human woman with children, a husband, and a grandbaby on the way. I don’t even remember their names. But I remember the names of every little Fae girl who has ever played with me. Every single one.”

“We cannot own what they made us. We are who we make ourselves. And one day, that will be true again.”

“From your lips to the gods’ ears, young one.”

Chapter 14

It took another month for me to be able to walk. Too much of that time spent in and out of unnatural sleep. The Bandrui would come to my side every now and again and bid me drink a healing draught. She never told me what was in it but was always very sure to tell me that it would make me sleep, explaining she needed to perform some surgery. I hadn’t gotten the full accounting of all my injuries. No one seemed willing to tell me the whole list. All I got was bits and pieces here and there, softened with a cube of sugar, telling me what was healed more than what was still damaged.

I would sleep for a day or two, waking to either shuddering, screaming nightmares that left my chest hollow of breath or with a soul-deep aching that made me want to claw at the fleeing dreams and drag them back to me. I never remembered exactly what I had been dreaming, only bits and pieces. But there was always a single image that hung in my mind, the night sky dusted with a radiant collar of diamond stars being chased by the new dawn. It sat in my soul and got cozy there.

My jailer had taken to stitching me into the woolen blanket to keep me stationary, but today, I was not content to allow a few hastily woven pieces of thread restrain me. I needed to move. I wanted to move. It was an insistent itch that crawled over my skin and pushed me from the blanket around me.

I slithered out like an exceptionally awkward caterpillar and pushed it away from me. The fact that it plopped when it slid over the edge of the stone platform that I had been forced to convalesce in sent a full body ick shiver through me. Blankets were meant to gracefully pool at the foot of a bed, not plop loudly on stones.

I was unsurprised I was still naked under the blanket. What was the point of clothing when you were stitched into your bedding in the back storeroom of a temple whose only true visitors occupied the great chamber? I hadn’t been able to move outside of this room since I came here, but Violet had been kind enough to describe to me where I was. The not knowing of it all made me uneasy and, according to her, a bitch of a ward to deal with.

I had grown to like Violet, as she came as often as she was able to and kept me company. We had talked long into the nights when the Bandrui was either sleeping, conveniently ignoring the conspiratorially hushed whispers in her storage room, or otherwise occupied. Violet was like me, world-weary and cautious about everyone. The difference between us was that I kept hold of my caution as my only defense.

Violet, on the other hand, had been in one place long enough to have found ways to protect herself. Life was not easy for a woman her age in the body she had been crafted into. Unlike me, whose alterations had been, for the most part, skin deep, Violet’s were much deeper. She had told me it took them two months to finish crafting her. She estimated that she was three to four times larger when she had been kidnapped into Magh Meall. Everything about her human anatomy had been altered. She wasn’t exactly sure how they had managed it, as there were few like her, but she had no need to eat or sleep. She didn’t sweat, didn’t cry, couldn’t spit. She had lamented over long about how she missed a good morning shit and had us both cackling.

But today, I was all alone in the dark supply room. The bare rafters above me, where Emerald would hide, were empty. The corner that Green Man liked to lurk in was empty save for the cozy shadows that curled up in its depths. Now was as good a time as any, where there were no prying eyes and no judgmental, empathetic sighs to coddle me.

I was going to test out my legs. Many of the Bandrui’s surgeries had been to improve them, as they had been damaged the most. She estimated that they would be good enough, and I would be able to walk again.

The first kiss of cold stone on too-tender feet had me hissing with discomfort and then delight as the sensation filled my senses. You would never truly understand how disconcerting it was for your feet to forget how to feet. The sensation of weight pressed against them felt wholly new, confusing and thrilling all at once. I idly wondered if this is what babies felt when they first started walking. The strange awareness of every single bit and grain of dirt on the floor. The sensation of stone. The chill and the feel of your body heat leeching out of you. It was all so sharp, and I had the unmistakable feeling like I’d never noticed any of it before.

I scooted, inch by inch, pressing more and more weight onto the wobbly lumps that had once been fully functioning feet. My old feet knew how to feet. They knew how to hold up my graceless body.