“Cullen likes him.” The hound looked up, and Thomas ruffled his fur. “That is always a good sign.”
I rested my head in the crook of his shoulder, bone-weary of a sudden, uncertain whether I had done the right thing. Those creatures I saw in the walls, the wee shadow fae, would come to claim Jamie. Broca would undo her protections, and the fae would steal the mortal child away, into a land that knew neither sickness nor cold, where he would never be hit with a rountree branch again.
But I would not see him again unless I should go there myself.
Thomas rested his head upon mine. “This must be hard for you, now you have been cast from your own home.” He released my hand to put his arm around my shoulder, kissing my forehead. “It is difficult when your family will not accept you. To be a cuckoo’s child, as you call it. Never to be welcome, and never to feel safe.”
To be ever the interloper, even if it is not of your own doing. Without a place, without a home, without a name. I nestled closer to the shepherd, as if I could crawl into his very skin.
Thomas stared off into the distance. “My mother was a servant in the baron’s hall. He would have cast us both out, had she not died shortly after I was born.”
I straightened to look at him, for the first time noting the sorrow hiding beneath his jovial ways.
“Aye. That much pity the baron had. I was raised in the manor house, but as a servant, never recognized as the baron’s own. Had my mother survived, or died when I was six or seven, he’d have left me on my own.” His tone went bitter. “I was meant to be grateful.”
Because he had a bed and a home. “You were not.”
Thomas frowned. “You’ll think less of me. I have un-Christian thoughts.”
I smirked a little. “I am the last to be bothered by un-Christian thoughts.”
He did not smile but stared as if I were elsewhere. “To see him, and know he was my father, yet not to eat with him, to have no inheritance of him, never to make him proud. I was apprenticed to the shepherd and meant to think myself lucky—and I’ve a half brother as well, Malcolm. He is nine years younger. The baron’s, with his lady wife.” His eyes narrowed, his face a mask of indifference, but I could read the pain on the other side.
“It is not easy on us, is it?” I said softly. “To be replaced?” The cuckoo’s egg pushed out of the nest.
“The past is in the past,” Thomas said. “Best to let it alone.”
I remembered the letter we had found in the fireplace.You first.
He turned to face me, brushing wisps of hair out of my eyes. “Ye’ve a place here, beside me. As long as ye need it.”
I wanted to believe that, to embrace him and let him fold me in his arms. Instead, I heard myself saying, “Don’t make promises ye may not keep.” And from far off, I imagined an eerie piping, blowing loud and clear.
Weeks later I came upon Broca, Tavish’s wife, as she made her way home from the market. Broca nodded at me but made no other acknowledgment, and why should she? I had been paid for my services; the matter of young Jamie was taken care of and best forgotten. But I could not forget, for a little blond head bobbed along beside her, and she clutched a tiny hand in her fist.
Jamie.
The wee bairn held himself taller, and I supposed children did grow, though to me the lad looked thinner, stretched. His ruddy-gold curls were smoothed down, and he kept pace with his mother, neither running forward in eagerness as children do, nor hanging back in daydream as was once his wont. He simply walked, with perfectly even steps.
I had never seen a child, especially such a young one, move like that.
Did I when I was a wee changeling bairn?
Catching my eye, the changeling cocked his head and said to Broca, “Mother? Why does that lady look at me?”
I shuddered. His voice was thin and reedy, his words formal and stilted, not those of any three-year-old I had ever known.
But his own mother did not notice. “Hush, child,” she said. “We’ve naught to do with your Aunt Bess these days since your grandfather sent her out of the house.”
The reminder stung. The insistence I was the wicked one, though Eamon had wed in haste, not six months after his wife was laid to rest.And Broca is a harridan, who stood by and let her son be hit with the rountree branch. No one whose good opinion you need to court.
I stared at the changeling, and behind the angelic countenance, his face—pointed and full of mischief—seemed older than the dawn.
Is the wee bairn safe?I longed to ask it.Do the fae look after him as I promised?
As if he heard my questions, the lad put a finger to his lips, with a sly smile. “Mother,” he exclaimed in that eerie voice. “The lady is scaring me.” And he fell against Broca, hiding his face in her skirts.
I had been dismissed.
