Her father chewed on the inside of his cheek before answering. “The truth isn’t always right. And, sometimes, the thing thatisright, the thing that makes everything else possible, isn’t true.”
Greer frowned, adding this troubling idea to her bits of gathered knowledge. She turned them over in her mind, like colorful chips of a mosaic, twisting and trying to parse out what image they’d create. “So Mama stowed away on Resolution’s ship.”
“Stowed away?” Her father let out a short bark of laughter. “She didn’t sneak onto it, if that’s what you’re thinking. He brought her here in shackles!”
Finn’s head snapped toward Hessel, horrified. “Shackles? Ailie would never—”
“You can read the whole sordid story if you don’t believe me.”
“In a journal, left behind in a hidden drawer, miles from here,” Finn pointed out. “How convenient.”
Hessel shrugged, unbothered by the Bright-Eyed’s scorn. “Resolution was born in wild country, steeped in magic and folklore. The Beaufort farm bordered a wide heath. One night, when he was a young lad, his father foolishly remained working in their barn after dark. Resolution never saw him again.”
Greer raised her eyebrows, waiting for her father to explain.
“There were creatures out on that heath. Everyone knew to hide away in their homes before sunset, before the uncanny could come. Demons and Devils, things of nightmares and myth. Gray Trows, who walk backward, determined to kidnap the first maiden they stumble across. Silent Cù-Sìth, stealthily racing across the land, ready to devour. The Nuckelavee with its venomous breath, poisoning crops and animals alike. But none were as monstrous as the Betwixt.”
“Betwixt?” she echoed.
“Something between man and monster,” Finn murmured slowly, as if dredging up a long-buried memory. “My nan told stories of them. They could change form at will, and drank the blood of their victims.” His eyes fell on Greer, looking uncertain. “I’d forgotten her stories…”
Greer turned to her father. “What happened next?”
“After her husband died, Beaufort’s mother moved their family far from the heath, into the city, where the wild things dared not follow. Years passed, and Beaufort became a man of business and schemes. He met Crowley. He went to the new world. He came home, feeling wounded and betrayed, and went back to that heath to set a trap for his father’s murderer, painting it with his own blood. And it worked. He caught Ailie.”
Greer let out a strangled sound of disbelief. After seeing Laird andknowing the devastation her mother was capable of, it felt impossible for Greer to imagine her being captured by Resolution Beaufort. “Why would he trap her?”
“He saw the mills already built, the mills being planned, and he couldn’t stand it. He wanted this world’s riches for himself alone. He needed someone—something—that could stop everything, quickly. Permanently.”
“If he set Mama loose, she’d attack, and the mills would shut down,” Greer summarized, working through the steps Resolution must have laid out in his journal. “His would open without competition.”
“We’re still the only mill along the whole of the coast with Redcaps,” Hessel said with pride.
Her stomach churned, slick and oily, in her disturbance at how corruptible men could be in pursuit of the elusive promise of wealth. “That’s diabolical. And so terribly stupid. The mill wasn’t guaranteed to be a success, and how did he know Mama wouldn’t turn onhim? There wasn’t yet a truce. How did he know the Benevolence would come to his aid? To the town’s aid?”
She saw a look pass between her father and Finn.
“What?” she demanded.
Finn’s expression turned to pity. “Greer…there is no Benevolence.”
She blinked, certain she’d misheard.
Hessel cleared his throat. “When the first Stewards figured out what Resolution had done, they came up with the story of the Benevolence and the truce. They told everyone in town, making it so big, so grand, it would have to be believed, to be taken as a truth.”
Greer felt numb. “Why?”
Her father sighed. “It was meant to be a comfort. The settlers were alone. They were scared. They had no way of returning home. They needed one small thing to be all right, one thing they could hang their hopes upon. Tormond Mackenzie concocted the story as a mercy.”
Greer questioned the mercy of telling a group of desperate survivors such a fantastic lie, but a bigger thought troubled her. “If there is no Benevolence…if there never was a truce…where did the Warding Stones come from?”
“The rocks have always been here, dotting the land. But the magic comes from the old world, from Beaufort himself. After his father died, he became obsessed with learning all he could of the uncanny, of the occult. Before setting Ailie loose, he charmed the stones, casting a protection spell over them to hold back her kind, to keep future settlers safe within the cove. But Beaufort’s words were wrong and too specific. He didn’t live long enough to see how he’d damned everyone unlucky enough to see a sunset within Mistaken.”
“We truly are a town of mistakes,” she murmured. “Why would Mama have gone along with any of this? Surely, she was stronger than Resolution. She could have escaped or—”
“I think she was intrigued by the idea of a new world, a new continent to see, to explore, to feast upon,” Hessel mused. “She had an insatiable hunger formore. That didn’t stop when she came to live in Mistaken, when I pulled her out of that tree. Did you know she bought nearly all the books we have? When merchant ships would dock, she was always the first to market, ready to see their wares, see what new things she could consume.” His expression softened. “There is so much of her in you, Greer. The good parts, I mean. You have those hungers, too. Your wanderings, your maps. I…” He shook his head, discarding his next thought.
“What happened to her?” Greer asked softly, surprising herself. Every bit of Hessel’s story spawned a dozen questions within her. Questions that might never be satisfied. But this one could. “The day she died…you said there’d been an accident at the mill. But…Mama almost never went to the mill.”
