“That is not for you to know.” His eyes burned like dark coals, and he grabbed at the front of my kirtle. “Always judging, you are. Always finding us lacking.”
I flinched away, crying out in alarm. “I do not—I cannot understand.” Where was the shepherd now I needed him?
“Glenna is a good girl,” Rufus seethed. “Do you not claim otherwise.”
“I would not.” I breathed deep to calm myself, held my hands out. Energy passed through them, radiating out from my core to pacify Rufus as well. “I have never known Glenna to do another harm.”
Rufus straightened, placed my bread dough onto his paddle. “No,” he agreed, face relaxing as he returned to his work. “As I said, she is a good girl. Make certain your father knows as well.”
I moved aside to let him help the next patron.My father?Why should he care what Eamon Grieve thought? Unless they were competing to see whose spinster daughter had the greater virtue. Pregnant or not, I did think Glenna would win that one. At least she had been to chapel once in her life.
I meant to suss it out of Eamon, truly I did, and to spread the news of Glenna’s fine virtue.
Only when my bread was baked, and I scurried my way back to the cruck house, eager to leave the menacing baker, I found our trestle table covered with crushed pennyroyal, and a furious Eamon looming behind.
Ten
I would be brave. Imustbe brave. Eamon Grieve was only my father. Not even my true father. Bess’s. He was mortal, and a good forty years older than I. I had nothing to fear from him.
But you do not shake off eighteen years among the humans so easily. I bled as quickly as a mortal when Eamon’s rod cut into my back. My flesh recalled it now, stinging as if from a hundred cuts, and the packet of pennyroyal was rough against my front. I was caught between my sin and its penitence, though I belonged to a people who knew neither one.
And the voice of my people spoke in me, too, however much the fear threatened to drown it out.Beltane is nigh,it sang out.Beltane Eve is here.
The Veil thinned, and my birthright called me, but I could not bring myself to move.
And what if I go? I am only half-faery, vulnerable to cross and iron but with no magic of my own. Might I not be used and tossed aside, as mortals often are by the fae? Enslaved, even? Danced until my toes fall off, or even to my death?
I had no way to know.
Eamon stood before the table, perfectly still, like a troll who turns to stone with the light of the sun. He thrummed with energy, like the voice of Faery in my blood. And when he spoke, it would be as the thunder, and whatever remained between us would likely not last out the storm.
My breath caught; my chest tightened; my blood seemed to retreat from my skin.
“Have you been plying your mother’s trade?” Eamon said quietly. I did not mistake it for calm.
Excuses choked me, lies growing like thistles in my throat. “I...” I gathered pennyroyal. I crushed it, to brew into a tisane. It was for Glenna Baker, but I never did place it in her hands. The intention was there, surely, yet my sin, as he would call it, remained incomplete. Could I claim innocence, therefore, and not offend my fae nature?
Mairi and I were not even true kin.
Eamon slammed his hands upon the table before I could respond. “Do not lie to me!”
“I cannot!” I cried out, in and of itself a half-truth. My entire life was a falsehood, and my balance ever slipping on the careful path I trod.
Eamon loomed, breathing heavily as he shored himself up for the next outburst. I recalled that afternoon with the baker, how I had taken the calm inside me and poured it outward, into him. A tiny gift of my fae nature, but it had been something, at least.
The baker was in no way my father, and I had no calm inside me left to give.
“I have told you,” Eamon heaved, “not to follow in your mother’s footsteps. Not to go against the will of the Lord.”
“I do not know the will of ‘the Lord,’” I told him, hoping he did not notice how I stumbled on the last two words. “How can I go against it when I don’t know what it is?”
This was not the approach to take with Eamon. “You heed the words that come from my lips.” His voice was a rumbling echo. “I am the master of this house. I am your master as well.”
How this chafed at me, as a voice inside me protested,No man is my master!
“You ask me not to follow Mairi Grieve’s path,” I said, sniffling. “You treat the only mother I know like a criminal, something shameful. But I am not ashamed, not of who she was, not of what she taught me, not of what I know.”
I recalled walking through the forest with Mairi when I was but eight years old.
