“What’swrongwith her?” he’d demanded, once Silva had put the baby to bed. “Something is wrong with her, Silva. I want you to make an appointment with the doctor. We need to figure this out now, before it gets worse.”
She had gasped in offense, feeling her ears heat, fists balling at her sides. Silva of the Daytime was still missing in action, and the Silva who’d been left in her place wouldnottolerate slander against her perfect baby, channeling every ounce of angry kitten energy she possessed.
“What is wrong withyou?! Why would you say something like that?! Why, because you’re comparing her to your friends’ kids? The one who can’t walk yet or the one who has a diaper blowout every single time they’re in public?”
“She doesn’t act like a normal kid!” he exploded. “They’re playing with blocks together, and she’s sitting in the corner with a book.Actuallyreading.”
“She tried to play babies with them, and they wouldn’t! You saw that with your own eyes! That doesn’t seem likeshe’sthe problem.”
“She was trying todirectthem. And when they wouldn’t listen to her, she threw everything on the floor. Look . . .”
Tannar closed his eyes, rubbing a hand down his face. Silva could see he was trying to lower his voice, diffuse the anger he’d sparked, but it was too late for that. She was spoiling for a fight, and there was no surer way to pick one than to insult her daughter.
“She’s not normal, Silva. She’s only just two, and she’s talking in complete sentences. She doesn’t play like the other kids. She . . . shestaresat them. Stares at them long enough until she can copy their movements, like she’s some kind of alien. You’re right, some of them are just learning to walk. She’s learning to skip. It’s just not developmentally normal. And this isn’t new! She would never let anyone hold her when she was a baby. She cried constantly. She’s glued to your side every minute. It’s notnormal.”
A protective pit of lava had ignited within her. Silva might have had all the outward ferocity of a kitten, but she’d always known that somewhere within her lurked a dragon. She already knew Tannar was mourning the loss of his sunny, always smiling trophy wife. And now she was about to obliterate his memories of that sweet Silva from the breakroom, becausenoone was going to insult her baby and get away with it.
“I’mso sorryfor having the audacity to give birth to an exceptional baby, I guess. Oh no, an infant who didn't like being passed around to strangers like a tray of hors d'oeuvres! How terrible! If only her grandmother had taken note. I can’t believe you! You’re seriously complaining because she’s advanced. She likes to look at books because I’ve been reading to her since she was born. You know, when you wanted me to go play tennis and host parties. Did it occur to you that your friends’ kids might bebehind? Maybe if they’d been reading instead of getting dumped with the babysitter at the club during racquetball and gossip hour, they’d want to look at books, too.”
She smiled viciously, Silva of the Daytime a long-ago memory,wishingshe had dagger-like teeth to brandish.
“Ormaybe, the school curriculum here is so out of date and lagging that the parents who were raised with it wouldn’t realize it if it were? As it is, from the way Esta and Finnea talk, basic genetics were never so much as whispered about in the classroom when you were all in school. You all probably think a Punnett square is for playing tic-tac-toe. If our daughter being able to speak in full sentences is a disaster for you, that gives me a good indication of how much you’ll be able to contribute to her education.”
Tannar himself had been raised in this very community, with the same Elvish education she was disparaging. She watched his neck heat, a fiery bloom move up his face, satisfied when it reddened his ears. He’d slammed out of the house, and Silva hadn’t cared where it was that he went for the night.
As it was, he only knew the half of it.
She took Aelin to play one or two days a week with the handful of other children at the club, but none of the Elvish toddlers her age spoke more than a handful of words. Shewaseerily advanced, speaking like a tiny adult, with the coordination of a ballet dancer. Her little darling would regularly create intricatetea parties with the collection of dolls in the playroom, trying to instruct the other little Elvish girls where to sit, how to act, which baby was theirs, getting visibly frustrated when they wouldn’t listen, pushing things off the table in a fit of temper after.
When one of the other little girls, nearly two years older than her had pushed her down, Silva watched Aelin sulk in the corner with calculating eyes, watching the other girl’s every move, eventually setting a trap for her near the reading corner. Aelin moved quietly, taking the thickest books from the shelf and stacking them high at the edge of a table. Silva watched as she pushed them carefully over the table’s edge, just far enough that they were unstable, but not enough to tip, before she sought the girl out.
When the other child was wailing, buried beneath the stack of hardback storybooks that had been jostled at just the right moment, Aelin was back on the other side of the playroom, playing with a doll, her eyes wide and innocent.
Shedidstare at the other children. She stared at everyone, long and unblinking. Silva would never admit it, but Tannar was right — shedidn’tact like the other Elvish children. She was afraid of strangers. She took her cues entirely from Silva, only warming to people Silva demonstrably liked, which, here in their town, was no one. As an infant, Aelin was wary of Silva’s own mother and grandmother at first, closely watching Silva’s interactions with an intensity she shouldn’t have possessed, until they were deemed safe. Now she loved her Nana and Nani. Tannar’s mother, by contrast, was tolerated carefully, Aelin regularly looking back to Silva when she was sweet, as if to ensure her performance was being watched.
She didn’t want her little girl to grow up performing in the puppet play, constantly hiding who she was and tying her strings.
Silva had begun to research, possessing her own unvoiced concern.They took him. They sent me back a changeling. One of theirs. She’d had a mad, panicked moment, one she didn’t like to admit even to herself, one of those days at the club, watching her daughter silently stare at the other children present, that she had been given a changeling in Spring, when her baby had vanished from her body, that giggling little figure running through the trees . . .
“Once I went to see a bad lady,” Aelin had told the goblin minder in the playroom one afternoon, conversationally. “With mommy. She had so many flowers! She made me hide in the trees.”
Three of the other Elvish mothers present had been sitting there as well, their heads swinging to Silva. She had laughed weakly, feeling mildly vindicated that she had been right all along. Her little winghadbeen listening the whole time, paying attention since she was still just a little flutter beneath Silva’s breast.Could they have taken her? What could you do if they did?
But that was madness.Not everything is about the fae.And even if it were, Silva decided, it didn’t matter. She would love the baby she had.Are you going to be like Tate’s mother and reject her? No. You’re going to be like the mother in the story who carries her changeling on her back.
There were other explanations, hereditary explanations concerning the way the brain processed information, ones that even included some of her tiny daughter’s behavior.
She had once watched Tate yell at Rukh for playing music in the pub too loudly, breaking his concentration . . . when the music in question was from the restaurant across the street, and the task on which he was concentrating was attempting to scrub out a microscopic speck of dirt only he could see from the Pixie’s ice well. She’d watched him disassemble an unplugged vacuumcleaner because itmade an annoying sound,one he insisted he could hear. Lurielle had once commented that Tate’s tendency to stare without blinking was unnerving. Silva remembered the conversation they’d had about croquet, in which his grandfather had beenexcited that I was finally good at something normal.
If her daughter behaved differently from the other children, Silva was certain she’d come by it honestly, whether it was fae behavior or not.
Besides that, there were plenty more things Tannar didn’t even know about.
Aelin sat under trees, babbling and laughing as if she were having a grand conversation, running to Silva with tears in her eyes one afternoon, telling her that one of the trees had told her a mean story to frighten her.
“I-I don’t think you should talk to that tree anymore,” Silva stammered in concern.How does one scold a tree for inappropriate behavior?“Especially if it’s not nice to you.”
Aelin carried the cat with her from room to room at home, telling Tannar, on one of the rare evenings he was home with them, completely innocently, that she had named the cat Moonbeam, which the cat had approved, that it had come from the wintertime, and, perhaps most problematically,this was her daddy’s cat.It had traveled all the way to their house by following her smell, she’d finished, entirely pleased with herself.
