THIRTEEN

EVERYTHING FROZE. IT FELT like my heart stopped working properly, each beat thudding through my body like a hammer blow. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t do anything but stare at this woman—this utterly human woman, with her golden hair and her eyes like blue heather growing in the Scottish hills, with her frizzy braid and the freckles across the bridge of her nose—who was claiming the impossible.

“Janet” is a common name. It has been for centuries, falling in and out of fashion but never disappearing. And humans change their names all the time. They don’t share the fae reluctance to have a name someone else has already used. There were plenty of explanations that didn’t have to mean anything.

None of them explained why she was claiming to be my grandmother, or why she said the name “Janet” like she knew what it meant. This wasn’t possible. It didn’t make sense.

“I thought I recognized you,” said May. Her voice was shrill, even filtered through my hammer heartbeat and overwhelming confusion. “I told myself it wasn’t possible, that it was just that you look sort of like Toby—which is creepy, by the way, and says bad things about your relationship with Cliff—and I was seeing things that weren’t there, but I wasn’t. I recognized you. I saw you in Oberon’s hall the season before he disappeared. You were dressed like one of his handmaids, and no one questioned your right to be there, or explained why the father of us all would want some random mortal woman in his knowe.”

“You demand to know what I am, but what are you?” said Miranda—Janet—sounding dismayed.

“Like we said before, I’m her sister. I’m also her Fetch,” said May. She glanced at me. “I thought I was seeing things, Toby, I swear. I would have told you if I’d realized there was actually something strange about her.”

I believed her. I still couldn’t take my eyes off Janet, my mortal lover’s mortal wife, standing there with raised hands and a strangely hopeful glimmer in her eyes, like this conversation somehow meant that we could come to an accord.

“Fetch?” demanded Janet, the hopeful glimmer dying, replaced by horror. She turned her attention on me. “Do you know what that means? She’s a death omen, she’s—”

“My sister,” I said flatly. “She’s been more family to me than any of the people I’m actually related to. Don’t worry about her. She’s none of your concern.”

“If she’s riding with you while you search for Gillian, she’s entirely my concern! A Fetch is a harbinger of doom! You’ll die, and you’ll leave that sweet child stranded in some hell she had no part in making!”

“You don’t even know the fae took her!” I countered—even though I was fairly sure, by this point, that no one else could have done it. The smell of rowan. The house with the chicken legs. There were just too many impossible elements. “With as much poison as you packed into her dorm room, all we’d need to do to find a fae kidnapper is look for the person in the coma with the backpack full of Benadryl! May is not. Your. Concern. She is my family. She’s the only real family I have, since you swept in and stole my daughter.”

Janet’s face fell. Root and branch, why was that name bothering me so much? “It was a mean trick, coming in while you were gone and taking Gillian for my own; I’ll own that.” Her voice took on a pleading note. “But please, try to understand. No one knew where you were. I thought you’d taken your mother’s example and run away rather than facing your responsibilities. Anyone with eyes could see the girl was mostly human. She was never going to be offered that spiteful bargain your people call a ‘choice.’ I thought you’d thrown her away. I was trying to do right by the blood of my blood, and you were gone so long, I truly came to love her as if she were my own child, and not my great-granddaughter. Then you came back, and I . . .” She spread her hands. “I couldn’t handle losing another child to Faerie. I told myself it was the right thing to do. That she deserved a mother who could stay, who wouldn’t be led astray by a society she would never belong to.”

I stared at her. “That sounded almost like an apology.”

“Because it was.” She looked me squarely in the eyes. “I am not sorry to have been her mother, but I am sorry I didn’t make room for you. I’m so sorry.”

“What the hell is happening?” My lips were numb, but my voice was working fine. That was good. I suddenly had a lot to say. “You can’t be my grandmother! You can’t know any of this! You’re a human! You—”

“I was Oberon’s lover,” said Janet. Time seemed to stop again. “There’s a long story as to how that happened, and I’ll be happy to tell it to you. Later. This isn’t the time. He loved me, and we had a daughter, and we named her ‘Amandine,’ because he knew I missed the almond trees that grew in my father’s orchards. He knew how much I missed my father, and Oberon was always kind, when the world gave him room to be. That’s what I hold to most, so long after. That he was kind, even when it wasn’t necessary. But then he had to go away, and he decided it wasn’t safe for me to be associated with our daughter, not with my history. He had her placed in a blind fosterage. By the time I found where he’d put her, it was too late.”

“Too late for what?” I whispered, horrified. It was like listening to my own story turned on its head. The missing parent, the child removed and raised by someone else . . .

“Too late for me.” Janet tipped her chin up. I saw my mother in that gesture, stubbornness and pride mixed up together until they became indistinguishable. I saw my mother, and August, and Gillian, and myself.

That was the moment when I started to believe her.

“Amandine didn’t need a mother. She certainly didn’t need a human mother, and the implications that carried. She didn’t need a family at all, apart from the fosterage her father had arranged. She had no place for me, and I’m not foolish enough to go against one of Oberon’s Firstborn, even when that Firstborn is my own daughter. Maeve’s curse aside, she would have crushed me.”

“Maeve’s . . . ?” Once again, I was starting to feel like I needed a flowchart to keep up with everything. I realized I was still holding my knife in front of me. Grudgingly, I lowered it. Somehow, I didn’t think stabbing her was going to do me any good. It might make me feel better, but it wouldn’t help.

“Oh. Did I leave that part out?” Smile turning wry, Janet tucked her hair behind one ear and said, “Until she returns, until she releases me, I don’t age, and I don’t die. At least not of anything I’ve been able to discover thus far, and believe me, I’ve discovered a lot of things. Plague, blood loss, poison—I recover. Until Maeve lets me go, here I am, preserved like a body in a bog.”

“Most people would go for the ‘mosquito in amber’ metaphor these days,” said May.

Janet shrugged. “Most people haven’t been through a hundred years of speech therapy to stop sounding like they belong in a part of Scotland that barely even exists anymore.” She paused and cleared her throat. Her next words were draped in a brogue so thick it should have sounded like a parody. Instead, it sounded like the world finally coming clear. “They forbade us maidens all who wore gold in our hair to come nor go near Caughterha; said young Tam Lin was there. More fool me, who never once learned how to listen.”

The floor seemed to drop out from under my feet. “You’re Janet,” I whispered.

Janet looked relieved. “Yes,” she said, brogue vanishing back into her carefully-schooled California accent. “I am.”

I didn’t say anything. It didn’t feel like there was anything left that I could say.

“Wait.” May held up her hands. We both turned to her. “You’re really Amandine’s mother?”

“Yes,” said Janet. Then she frowned. “You swear you’re not here because October is marked for death?”

“She was, once, but she got better,” said May. She glanced at me. “I mean, she still runs into danger like it’s her damn job, but it’s not because she has some predestined fate waiting in the wings to eat her.”

“That’s because it is my damn job,” I said. “I’m pretty good at surviving, though. May’s been living with me for years. Since just before I took down Blind Michael.”

Janet blanched, becoming so pale she looked like she was on the verge of passing out. There couldn’t have been any blood left in her head. “Blind Michael?” she repeated. “The horror of the hills, and you stopped him?”

“I had to,” I said simply. “He hurt my family.”

Janet blinked. Then, bitterly, she laughed. “As have I, is that what you say next?”

“You know, for someone who’s presumably been shopping on Amazon and yelling at the cable company for the last decade or so, you sure do talk like a romance novel,” said May.

“My apologies.” Janet shoved her braid back, grimacing. “It’s a bit automatic when speaking to the fae. Even when Oberon was here to protect me from his own people, I was human. I always have been: there’s no changing that. I learned the best way not to get hexed or hurt was to be as polite as possible.”

“You weren’t polite when you shoved your way into my home and accused me of kidnapping, or when you covered my daughter in something that would literally poison me,” I said. My frustration was starting to get the better of me. I stopped, forcing myself to take a deep breath.

Janet was the source of the sachets. The sachets were one of the only clues we had. Therefore, Janet needed to answer some goddamn questions.

“When did you start dipping my child in herbal toxins?” I asked.

“After she was stolen by your world for the first time,” she replied. “She came back changed. I assume that was your work?”

I nodded, the words catching in my throat until I swallowed them and said, “I offered her the Choice. It was the only way to save her life.”

Janet sighed. “I thought . . . when that happened, I thought that was you ceding her to me. You pulled Faerie from her blood. I thought you were saying I was her true mother, and it was my responsibility to keep her safe. So I kept her safe. I started making teas for her to drink and scents for her to wear, anything that would keep Faerie just that little bit at bay. And it worked! For so long, it worked.”

“Except for the part where anyone fae who touched her got sick, which meant they could figure out something was up with her,” I countered. “Best case would have been her getting reported to the local nobility as a human who knew about the fae—and I say ‘best’ because that would have been run up the chain of command to the queen, and I might have heard about it before she wound up turned into an apple tree or something. This wasn’t subtle.”

“She attends Berkeley,” said Janet. “There is no local nobility.”

May and I both stared at her. Finally, carefully, I asked, “How do you know that?”

“Before he left, Oberon promised me that wherever I chose to settle would have no one watching over it, no ruler tied to the land more directly than whatever king or queen claimed it as part of their domain.” Her lips twitched, like she was trying not to smile. “He wasn’t quite ready to make a queen of me. Said it might send the wrong message, given everything that had happened, and given I’m immortal solely because his absent wife decreed I should be. A pity. I would have been fetching in a crown.”

It took me a moment to find my voice again. “The people who stole Gillian used her clothing—her bloody clothing—to lay a false trail into a courtyard that shouldn’t have been there, full of things that shouldn’t exist. No one had used magic there since it was created, and apparently, all the local royalty know about it but don’t tell anyone, because there’s an agreement that predates any of them. Is that . . . ?”

“Not aging is a problem in the human world, and I don’t have your hand with illusions: once cosmetics stop doing the job, I’ll have to fake my own death and disappear for a decade or so,” said Janet. There was genuine regret in her tone. “I settled here to be close to my daughter, and later, to you. Oberon himself granted me that land. No one should have been there.”

“Someone was. Someone wanted whoever went looking for Gillian—meaning me—to find the place, which means someone not only knew about the courtyard, they knew about you. They wanted me to . . . find . . .” I stopped. “We have to get you out of here.”

“What?” asked May.

“What?” asked Janet.

“I’ve been acting on the assumption that whoever kidnapped Gillian was trying to get to me. Maybe I’m looking at things the wrong way. Maybe they’re trying to get to you.” I shook my head. “We have to get you out of here.”

Janet stared at me, eyes wide. “You can’t be serious.”

“Someone violated your space, which was apparently granted to you by Oberon himself. Someone stole a human child most people would assume was your daughter and yours alone.” The false Queen knew Gillian was mine. The false Queen was aiming for us both. I couldn’t say that until I was sure, and not until I had Janet out of harm’s way. “They’re trying to hurt you, either by setting us against each other, or by ignoring my part in things entirely. You can’t stay here. You’re in danger.”

“I can’t be killed,” said Janet.

“Cliff can,” I said.

She went still.

“You think I put him in danger by loving him and being fae? I was a changeling, I was barely more than a child, I had no power and no position and nothing to lose. You? You’re a legend and a monster and an impossibility. You need to come with me, or you’re going to get him killed.” I shook my head. “Leave a note. Say you’re looking for Gillian. Say whatever you want. But I’m not leaving you here.”

“Dear God,” breathed Janet. My earlier assumptions about how pale she could get were clearly not good enough, as even more blood drained from her face. “I . . . how long do you think this will take?”

“However long it has to,” I said. “May, you stay here and help Janet get whatever she needs. I’m going to go and tell the boys what’s going on.”

“Wait!” Janet took a step back, visibly alarmed, and stopped only when her hips hit the counter. “Who are ‘the boys’? You’re not going to tell them who I am, are you?”

“Lady, I don’t think you have any right to ask me to keep secrets after what you’ve done to my family, but I’m not going to put that same family in danger by broadcasting your identity all over the Mists.” I made no effort to keep the weariness out of my voice. I was exhausted. A few cinnamon rolls weren’t enough to counteract the amount of blood I’d lost, and I was going to need real food soon. “At the same time, yeah, I’m telling my squire and my fiancé. We don’t keep secrets in our house.” Not anymore. Not with the way every secret we’d tried to keep had ended up playing out.

Some things aren’t worth risking. My family—the one I had made for myself, the one I was going to fight for until the end of the world—was on that list.

“I don’t suppose I have a choice here, do I?” asked Janet.

“Not really,” I said.

“Nope,” said May, with malicious cheer. She glanced at me. “Go. I’ll make sure she doesn’t do anything any of us will regret later.”

Leaving the two indestructible women alone seemed like a dandy idea. More importantly, I wanted to be away from Janet, at least for a few minutes—at least long enough to get my head together. This was all too much. My daughter was missing; her stepmother, the woman I had spent so much time envying and despising for taking my place, was my grandmother. It was enough to make my head spin, and I wanted a moment to wrap my mind around it.

I practically bolted for the front door, not allowing myself to look back. That isn’t just a bad idea in Bible stories and Greek myths: it’s what leads to a simple course of action getting complicated or disrupted, and things never getting done. Janet’s revelation was . . .

Janet’s revelation was a problem, and it was going to take me days, if not weeks, to process all the way through it. I needed to talk to the Luidaeg. She could explain what this meant, how it was possible for my mother to be a human’s daughter, whether it had somehow affected me even two generations down the line. And that was fine, that was absolutely great, because where could I go to hide someone who shouldn’t have existed, someone who stood at the center of the story that broke the world?

To the sea witch, of course.

Quentin and Tybalt both turned when I yanked the car door open and dropped myself into the front seat. Human disguises can mimic all the little parts of living, the blushes and the pallors, the changes of mood. The one Tybalt had woven for me wasn’t good enough for any of that. It let me pass for human, and that was about all it could manage.

Tybalt frowned, sniffing the air. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

I frowned. “How did you—?”

“You’re sweating. And you’ve been bleeding again, which is something you can’t afford to be doing right now.” His eyes narrowed. “Where is May? Did that former lover of yours strike you? I would take the greatest pleasure in taking him apart, if he did.”

“No. No, it’s nothing like that. It’s nothing . . .” I laughed unsteadily. “It’s nothing that normal. We’re about to have another passenger.”

“Who?” asked Quentin.

“Miranda. She’s coming with us. And her name isn’t Miranda, it’s Janet. And she’s my grandmother.” The words sounded ridiculous when I put them out there like that. I tried again. “I mean, she’s my mother’s mother. She’s human, and she’s my mother’s mother.”

“That does happen,” said Tybalt, carefully not looking at Quentin.

As far as either of us knew, my squire didn’t know his own mother had been born a changeling, or that her human heritage had been the price of marrying the Crown Prince and eventually ascending to her own place in the nobility. It wasn’t our place to tell him. I shook my head.

“Mom’s Firstborn, and her mother is human. Oberon loved a human.”

“Wait,” said Quentin. “That would make her at least—”

“Five hundred years old,” I said. “I know.”

Quentin shook his head. “That’s not . . . no. That’s just a story. It’s not real. She can’t really be that Janet. Can she?”

“I don’t know.” I paused. “I think so.”

“Root and branch,” breathed Tybalt. “How is this possible?”

“A second ago you were the one reminding me that human ancestors happen,” I said.

“Yes, and a second ago, you were not intimating that Janet of Caughterha was going to be in your car.” He shook his head. “This can’t be so. She spins a story well enough to ensnare you.”

“May remembers seeing her in Oberon’s Court. She’s from Scotland. She fits the description. She knows things she shouldn’t. I don’t want to believe it either, but I think maybe I should. Maybe not believing is a luxury we don’t have time for right now.” I took a deep breath. “She owns that courtyard we found. It’s hers. She’s been here since Gilad’s parents held the throne. Whoever took Gillian may be trying to hurt Janet as much as they’re trying to hurt me.”

“Is that why she’s joining our merry band?” asked Tybalt. “Because you fear for her safety?”

“In part, yeah,” I said. “Also because I fear for Cliff’s. She’s indestructible. He isn’t. And doubly also because I want to question her further, and I don’t want Cliff walking in on us. So we’re taking her to the safest dangerous place I know.”

“Where’s that?” asked Quentin.

I smiled. Tybalt raised his eyebrows.

“I am suddenly grateful that I can’t see the blood,” he said. “Your expression is frightening enough without it.”

“Yeah, well, I’ve learned from the best,” I said. “We’re taking her to the Luidaeg. Let’s see how many questions we get answered now.”