A russet-haired woman, pretty face contorted with irritation, careened into the clearing through a stand of ash trees. The little girl with the mismatched eyes froze at the sight of her.
“There you are,” Caitríona hissed, her eyes narrowing to cruel slits as she lunged for the little girl I had once been. “Just wait until I get my hands on you—”
Her grip was savage. The little girl cried out in pain, and the nursemaid immediately slapped her. The flat of her palm cracked vicious as a whip in the dimming, silent wood. The girl’s mouth opened in an O of shock; she began to cry in earnest, gulping in air as huge tears rolled down her reddening cheek. The nursemaid only scowled, yanking on her wrists with unforgiving force.
“Shut up, shut up, shutup!” Caitríona hissed between her teeth. “I am so weary of your nonsense. Why don’t you ask the Fair Folk to take you back where you came from, willful changeling whelp? No one wants you here. No onewantsyou!”
Night fell with a leaden hush as the young woman and the girl struggled in earnest—a tangle of flailing arms and screaming faces and kicking feet. At last, Caitríona caught the little girl around the waist and hauled her bodily off her feet. But the girl with the mismatched eyes twisted in her arms, her hands forming into claws as she grappled with her nursemaid. Where those claws struck flesh, Caitríona began to change.
I swallowed hard, my ancient guilt transforming into something closer to vindication. The trees at my back reached reassuring branches to brush my shoulders, as if to say,You were never alone.
In the deepening gloom, the changeling girl transformed her unfeeling nursemaid into a tree. Her legs became birch saplings;her hair turned to flowering vines; her face became a staring sunflower. The little girl fell in a heap, scrabbling backward from the horror she had wrought.
“I’m sorry,” she breathed after a moment, her face mottled with tears. “Caitríona, I’m sorry. Please come back.Please.I don’t care if I get whipped instead of you. Just come back.”
The little girl flailed her hands over the young woman’s transformed limbs, as if she sought to undo the magic she had wrought. But the nursemaid remained a tree. From their hiding places in the undergrowth, the Fair Folk slowly crept forward on stocky feet or lilted through the air on glowing wings. But instead of being comforted by their presence, the girl now lurched away from them.
“You.” Her small voice was sour in the dark. “Youmade me do this.Youlured me away from my home.Youmade me dream of the woods when I should have been learning my letters.Youare to blame for this. You are wild and wicked, just as Cathair says.”
The Fair Folk hesitated. The leipreacháin rustled the dried leaves below the child’s feet; the sheeries lifted the ends of her hair with nimble, glowing fingers.
“Go!” Little Fia shouted. She swatted at one of the sheeries; it tumbled to the ground, stunned. “Leave me alone! Stop bothering me!”
The Fair Folk dispersed swiftly among the shadows, leaving the little girl with the mismatched eyes and the night-dark hair alone. She would stay there until dawn chased her home to explain what she had done to a queen who was not yet a mother.
I forced my eyes from her small kneeling form. The now-familiar figure’s antlers glinted silver in the faded starlight.
“Well?” I asked tiredly. “Was this what you wanted me to find?”
They regarded me with the patience of eons.Was it what you wanted to find?
“The moment I learned to hate myself?” My throat worked around the taste of decayed leaves. “The moment I rejected the part of me I had not known I needed to accept? The moment I shut away the half of myself I did not know how to love?”
What does it teach you?
The memory felt raw as rough hide, chafing my softest places. “Caitríona was vicious. Cruel. I was not to blame.”
You were to blame.The figure’s claws lifted toward me.That does not mean you do not deserve forgiveness.
“From whom?”
Who do you think?they returned, with infinite gentleness, unyielding firmness.
Somewhere behind me, the trees began to expand with veins of molten silver. Steam floated like fog between the widely spaced trunks.Let me in.
I stared at the Bright One’s outstretched hand, their palm imprinted with recursive whorls—the striations of untold millennia.
“You have always been with me, haven’t you?” I lifted my eyes to their face, formless as the forest path. “Even when I did not know you. Even when I did not want you.”
Yes.The figure beckoned me through the gold-and-silver-streaked wood.Are you ready now?
I hesitated for one last, aching moment. “I do not know your name.”
Ínne, they told me, and it was the sound of trees growing and flowers blooming and stone eroding.
I wrapped my fingers around Ínne’s calloused, clawed hand. I followed them deep, deep between the arching trees.
Chapter Seven
