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“Miss?” the child’s voice called up to me, and I turned to look down at her. A young child with dark, perfectly round eyes that filled up a full third of her face stared up at me with her lower lip quivering. Her hair was the color of midnight mists, her skin a beautiful sable shade with dark-grey spots like someone had sat down and painted an abstract masterpiece on her. “Do . . . do you not like kids?”
“Caoimhe! What did we tell you about bothering the nice lady and her friends?” A woman appeared by the well, stepping free of a shadow into moonlight. She was just as beautiful as her daughter, but instead of sable, her skin was the color of campfire smoke, with angry storm blotches. She shared the same perfectly round black eyes, though.
She scooped the little girl up and rested her on her hip. “Please excuse her, miss. She’s just curious. We don’t get many strangers who are welcomed to stay the night.”
My eyes drifted between the two, the easy maternal bounce and sway of the child on her hip.
“I . . . What? . . . Where did y—” I looked away from them back into the village just behind the facade of the rundown settlement.
“Ah . . . I see. Jackdaw didn’t tell you.” She turned her face to the little girl. “Naughty little pup. Did you wake the nice lady and lure her out to play with her, even though sister Jackdaw has said to leave sleeping strangers lie?”
The little girl curled her mother’s dark hair around her finger, suddenly shy at the gentle reproach. “She shimmers like the sun, mama. I just wanted to see if she’d give me a lock of her hair.”
The woman smiled indulgently and exhaled as if she was gathering patience before she turned back to me. “I told her the story of Lady Airgetlám two months ago, and she hasn’t forgotten it. She’s asked every child of magic with golden hair for a lock of their hair, ever since.”
A razor of sentimentality and sorrow wrapped around the velvet of a love I never got to explore twisted through me, and I gave Caoimhe a small smile. She had no way of knowing that her child’s game would wound me and remind me of the mother I lost. “Is that so?”
Caoimhe nodded her head and buried it into her mother’s shoulder, muttering something. She was given a delicate nudge to speak up and use her voice before she turned to me. “You’re pretty like she is. Mama says she has eyes the same color as yours. Hair the same color as yours. And mama said she dances when she walks like she’s gliding, just like you.”
I wanted to throw up. I wanted to scream. I wanted to peel my imposter skin off and burn it in the little fire in my cabin. I was nothing like the beauty that was my mother, and if I was, it was only because some foul little gremlin decided to make me that way. Instead, I just gave her a pained smile, remembering that children were innocent in all this and digging deep for my manners. “Thank you, Caoimhe. I’d give you every hair on my head if I thought it would bring you the same luck as a single strand from Lady Airgetlám’s head would. Unfortunately, my lady, I have been cursed and all my luck stolen away.”
Scandal rippled across the child’s face as her already round eyes went owl-like and her mouth turned into an O. “Don’t worry, miss! I’ll find it for you! Promise!”
She pulled away from her mother, slipping down and running off deeper into the village. Presumably to find my stolen luck. Good luck, kid. Haven’t seen it in over twenty years.
“Thank you,” whispered her mother. “She’s . . . precocious. Sweet and precocious. Thank you for holding back on your courtly nature.”
I frowned and met the woman’s gaze. She was fighting off judgment, but her gratitude was sincere. “Uh, I’m not entirely sure why you think I’m a courtier, but I’m not.”
She frowned. “But you and your companion have human daora?”
“Those three are our friends. They are free to come and go as they please. They could punch me square in the face, and the only thing I could do would be to either scrap with them or apologize. They’re not daora. Not anymore.”
“Goldie’s a little bit different, Aoife.” Jackdaw’s steady voice rang out behind me, and she stepped free of her cottage, sliding her arms into a black brocade men’s frock coat with what was once gold trim.
“You use true names so freely?” I asked as Jackdaw joined us.
“No, just not many here are titled Fae. Aoife, here is a selkie, though. Even if she were to give you her true name, her kin is governed by different rules than Fae.” Her gaze slid over me, as if to check whether I had weapons or posed the selkie any danger. “Different rules govern all children of magic. From the Far Darrig, to the dragons, to the selkie, to the marrow and everything between.”
“Where did . . . where did this all come from? It wasn’t here when I went to bed.”
Aoife snickered behind her hand. “It was. It’s been here for at least a hundred and fifty years. Moonlit illusion is all. Can only be broken by a villager speaking to you and the moonlight revealing us.”
“But Jackdaw already talked to me?”
“I don’t count. I don’t belong to this land.” She nodded to Aoife as a means to dismiss her before turning a scowl on me. “I told you to stay in the cabin. You swore you would take nothing that was not offered freely to you.”
“I heard the little girl. I thought . . . I don’t know what I thought. I kept hearing heartbeats and nothing else.” I frowned. “I didn’t take anything from Caoimhe or Aoife.”
“You took knowledge of the village when it was not freely given.”
“That can’t count! I had no idea it was out here, and I didn’t even intend on seeing it.”
“And yet you did. Guess you’ll have to stay now.”
“Uh, lady, if you try to keep me here, that’ll go really badly for you.” My fists itched for the impending fight. I took a deep breath, steadying myself.
Jackdaw glared, and then it evaporated like dew on a summer’s day into a guffaw. “Relax, Goldie, I’m kidding. Though I do wish you hadn’t seen them. That’s a problem we will have to solve later. At least you didn’t pull your friends from their beds to share your sin. Either way, what’s done is done. C’mon, I’ll show you around.”
