“Yes,” she said. “Your sister.”
I lowered my hand, staring at her once again. It felt like the air had just been sucked out of the room, replaced by something hot and stale and difficult to breathe.
“What?” I finally squeaked.
“Your sister. I know you know about her. Your foolish father is bound to have told you, when he was struggling to make his amends.” She sniffed again. “I married him for many reasons. His brains were not among them. Be more careful, should you ever decide to marry. Choose a man who can think for himself, and not be led astray by every dainty dame who comes walking down the lane.”
“My . . . father?” The blows just kept coming.
Amandine waved a hand dismissively. “Your legal father, not the man who sired you. Humans have no claim over any part of Faerie. Simon may not have been in my bed when I got you, but he has the responsibility for you in our world. Given your seeming determination to shed as much of your mortal blood as possible, it won’t be long before he becomes the only father you have.”
The thought made my stomach turn. Simon Torquill is my liege’s twin brother, and the man responsible for my fourteen-year disappearance. Without him, my life would have been very different. Not better, maybe . . . but in some ways, absolutely, because without him, I would never have lost my little girl.
I can like everything else about my new life better than I like the memory of my old one. Not that. Losing Gillian will haunt me until I die—and there’s so little mortality left in me that I’m going to live for a long, long time. Long after my daughter is dust, I’ll still be here, and still mourning for the fact that I never got the chance to be a parent to her. I gave her life. Other people gave her everything else.
Simon is also my mother’s husband. Since Faerie doesn’t acknowledge the validity of marriages between humans and the fae, she wasn’t even cheating on him when she went off to spend a decade in the mortal world. To have a daughter. In the eyes of our law, such as it is, he’s my father and always has been.
Sometimes I wonder what it would feel like to have a normal family. Not that anyone I know actually has one.
“Mom . . .” I paused; took a breath. “Yes, Simon told me about August. He told me she disappeared decades before I was born, and that he wound up working for Evening because he was trying to find her. He’s a pureblood. Evening’s Firstborn. If the two of them working together couldn’t find her, what makes you think I can?”
“You have a gift for doing the impossible,” she said airily. “The things they tell me you’ve done! You killed Blind Michael. You brought his stolen children home. You stopped Oleander de Merelands, after everything she’s done. You found the lost Princess in the Mists, and chased a pretender from the throne. They tell me you’re a hero now, my October, and who am I to question the word of what seems to be all of Faerie? Heroes undertake impossible quests. Heroes complete them. I want my child back. You stole yourself from me when you chose wrongly. The least you can do is return the daughter I lost before I had you.”
I stared at her again. Our conversation had been more defined by silences than by sentences, in part because every other word out of her mouth made me want to turn around and leave the room. She was my mother. She would have been good at insulting and belittling me even if she wasn’t my mother—that seems to be a trait shared by all the Firstborn—but because she was, she knew exactly what to say to cause me pain.
“Mom . . .”
“Do this for me, and you will be forgiven.”
“Forgiven? Forgiven for what?”
“For refusing to be the child I needed you to be,” she said. “I tried to save you, my father knows I tried. I tried to do it without hurting you because you fought me when I went too quickly. I had already unwound more than half the damage I had done to you when my foolish brother-in-law came to carry you away. If you had been less recalcitrant, if you had been willing to let me have my way, when I knew better for you than you knew for yourself, you would have been human by the time he arrived.”
That was the second time she’d implied that things would have been better if I hadn’t held onto my fae blood. “Are you seriously saying things would be better if I were mortal? Mom, that was sixty years ago. I’d be lucky to be alive now!” Mortals can live to be sixty and beyond, but my luck has never run to the good, or to the safe. If it hadn’t been for my changeling resilience, even before I started healing at an accelerated rate, I would have been dead a long time ago.
“I know,” she said serenely.
That was the last straw. “If you wanted me to be human, why the hell did you save me when I got elf-shot?”
“Because the roses begged,” she said. “It seemed a shame to disappoint them, when they asked so sweetly.”
“Right,” I said. “Okay. No, Mother, I will not be taking the job. I’m sorry. It’s been too long, and I don’t want to deal with you, and I need you to leave now.” I felt bad even as I spoke. It wasn’t August’s fault that our mother loved her more than she loved me. Maybe my sister was out there somewhere, trapped, suspended in some terrible limbo, like Luna and Rayseline had been after Simon orchestrated their kidnapping. Maybe she needed me.
But I didn’t need Amandine. I could refuse to work for her and go looking for August anyway, on my own terms. I could bring her home without ever involving our mother.
“I was afraid you’d say something like that,” said Amandine. She slipped a hand into the froth of petals on the side of her dress. When she pulled it out again, she uncurled her fingers to show me two long, slender seeds, like something I might dig out of an orange. “I would ask you to change your mind, but that would be very much like begging, and I do not beg my own children to do what they should have done willingly. You will learn your place, October. I only regret that I have failed you so completely that the lesson is necessary.”
“Get out of my house,” I snarled. I stuck my hand behind myself. Tybalt dropped a knife into it. I wasn’t going to attack my own mother—I didn’t think I was going to attack my own mother, especially not when I had formally granted her the hospitality of my home—but I’d be damned before I went unarmed for another minute.
Amandine sighed. “No,” she said, and tossed the seeds into the air. The blood and roses smell of her magic was suddenly everywhere.
The seeds germinated instantly, bursting into tangled masses of thorny vines that whipped through the kitchen, wrapping themselves around everyone who wasn’t Amandine. There was a splash as Jazz’s pot of cocoa hit the floor. Jazz yelled, as much in surprise as from the pain of the hot liquid hitting her feet. Then the thorns were breaking our skins, and there was something more important to worry about than a little spilled milk.