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“No, dear one, not even a little. But I am old enough and wise enough to know that fate and magic are just the needle and the thread that stitches us all together. If Rictus appeared before me, I would punish him severely for daring to touch my daughter and for all the abuses he visited upon humans. But my treasure, his hand was guided by magic, too.”

“Magic is a fucking pervert.”

A laugh like the beating of dove wings rolled easy and free from her and washed me in a warmth that seeped deep into my skin, stitching together the deep gashes in my psyche.

“Yes. It absolutely is. Your father was a perfect example of that.”

“Gross. I know I just met you, but it’s still gross to think about my parents fucking.”

The moment I said it, my tongue slid on a razor, and I wished I could pull it back. It felt like a mistake to be so familiar, to let the thought and ownership of parents seep past my lips. It made it too real. If she pulled back, if she denied it, if it was all a trick, the wound would cleave me in two, and I would fall apart never to be put back together.

Airgetlám, my mother, simply laughed again and squeezed me tightly against her. “Oh, and we fucked a lot, dear one. On every surface. In every form. In every manner. We fucked on the grass as two foxes. We fucked in the air as two lightning bolts forking together to crack across the land. We fuck—”

“Gross!” I said, squirming and batting at her, catching myself with a wince.

“Fine, no more of that. Let me love on you, Sóna. Just for a little longer. I have missed so much. I will tell you all about your father. All about myself. And you will tell me all about you? Let me know my daughter a little?”

Chapter 34

The two of us curled up in blankets next to the open hearth. We spoke long and deep into the hours. We laughed. We cried. I raged, and she held me.

She stitched the hole in my shoulder with molten gold from one of her coins. She stitched my heart together with her easy acceptance of all of me. She pulled me back from the ether piece by piece and set me into my own skin, even though this body had been divorced from the Sóna Mac Raith I knew so completely. Ever since I stood before that mirror in the Market and saw what I had become, I didn’t recognize myself, and the more I floated away from the recognition of my flesh, the more I floated from the person I had crafted wound by wound. I felt more myself now, in this strange body with these strange features, than I had felt in a long time. I felt reborn.

I had never trusted anyone to tell them the whole of me, to have the unbridled and unabridged access to the truth of who I was, but the more she told me of herself, the more I opened my pages for her. She told me of the House of Magic and her time there as its Lady. She told me of Árus Contráth and the Court of Dusk’s great halls built of glittering gold and shimmering glass.

I told her of every foster parent I could remember. She wept and raged at the injustices I had lived and survived through. I wept for the life that I could have had as a child with two parents who loved me dearly.

I did not weep for the loss of my childhood as a Fae.

“You don’t adorn your ears?” she asked as we sipped tea.

It was our eighth pot, and I was starting to become curious about how she survived down here.

“Should I?”

She set her small earthen teacup down and watched me over dark-golden lashes. The cerulean of her eyes bore into me, and I imagined what it would have felt like as a teenager, lying to this woman, who was so keenly aware of even the slightest bit of avoidance. Only when it was clear that I was not going to give did she finally bend.

“It is a time-honored tradition, dear one. On the day you first touch magic and feel it pulse and respond to you, you would be gifted with your first cuff. Your father and I had already commissioned yours. We knew you would be an early bloomer. Oh, they were stunning. Woven silver and gold threads adorned with chips of night sky amethysts. Dark as midnight but flashed deepest purple in the sun. Tell me, Sóna, what color was your hair before Rictus altered you?”

I squirmed with the happy imagining. A mental image of the beautiful Fae next to a man who had black hair and flashing purple eyes gifting me with a sapphire box containing the cuffs specially crafted for me to place on the tips of my ears. It was uncomfortable to think of all the maybes. Of all the small potential ways my life would have been wholly different. What would it have been like to have a home? A family? A culture?

“It was dark red,” I grumbled. “And it’s all the same, really. I haven’t used a single bit of magic anyway. So, it’s not like I’ve earned them yet.”

She watched me stare into my tea as if the answers to cosmic questions that I dared not ask lay at the bottom of the murky drink.

“None at all?” She tilted her head and watched me as I shook my head. “Have you tried?”

“It’s not exactly like they have classes on how to cast fireballs in Human. So, no, I haven’t tried.”

A gentle finger tipped my chin up, and her eyes darted between mine. I felt her regard slip past my gaze. I felt it like silk moving through a river stream, gentle and graceful. It swam through my mind and past some barrier that existed between me and some other part of myself I didn’t quite understand. It encircled something deep within me that existed only in the ethereal and conceptual understanding of myself. It was not an uncomfortable feeling but one so wholly intimate and personal that I didn’t quite know how to react to it.

“You have within you a vast ocean of potential, my daughter.” The sheet of silk slid and glided within me. “An ocean that could drown you or bear you into legend. It is your choice. Accept yourself for who you are or don’t.”

“And who am I?”

The bitterness of that question twisted on my tongue.

It was a question I was so familiar with. It was a question I had been asking myself since I was old enough to think it. I had thought that the moment I met my family, found them and learned about them, I would understand the answer to it. But I was no closer here in this dank, open-air dungeon, sitting across from the woman who had given me life, than I was in the reception of the social services office, waiting for the next in a long line of disappointments.