“He stood there for ages. It was your mother who sent him, you see. She laid you in his arms for the first time, and do you know what she said to him?”
Beatrix squeezes her eyes shut against the forest, against the river, against the faerie’s words. Tears spill down her cheeks.
The faerie leans close. She whispers in Beatrix’s ear. Her breath is cold against her neck. “Give her to the river.”
“But he didn’t,” Beatrix says. The words echo through her head.He didn’t. He didn’t. He didn’t.
The faerie leans against the trunk of an oak. “No, he didn’t. He left you in a hollow of a dying tree.” She gestures to the moss-covered log slowly rotting at the center of the clearing. “It was a test. If you were a faerie, you’d be taken away, and if you didn’t survive the night, then you must have been a changeling. Anything to keep his hands—and his conscience—clean. When he returned the next morning and found you alive, he took you home.”
Beatrix’s mind spins. Was it guilt that made her father return home with her, or love? Was he relieved to find his baby girl alive in that tree, or disappointed? And how did she survive the night alone in the forest? “I don’t understand—did you care for me?”
The faerie laughs. “I kept you alive. Barely, if memory serves.”
“Why?” Beatrix asks, her voice a choked whisper.
“Because you and I are not so different.”
Beatrix would laugh, if she wasn’t so terrified. The faerie is beautiful and powerful. Free. “I’m nothing like you.”
A flash of light sears across her vision. When it fades, Beatrix stands alone on a dark, frozen moor. A blizzard howls around her, the icy snow biting at her skin, the wind stealing her breath. And on that wind, a baby’s cry, piercing her through.
She follows the sound, searches the snow with her bare hands until they throb with cold. She finds the infant half buried in a drift. She snatches the bundle from the brush and clutches the baby close. She’s wrapped in rags, her pale skin tinged blue, her shock of copper hair coated with ice. She struggles to open her eyes.
“Hello, lovely,” Beatrix chokes. The baby’s eyes meet hers for a single moment before they close: one brown, one green.
Beatrix stands shaking on the riverbank, her arms empty. She sags against the trunk of a mighty oak, aching to hold her own baby. “Who was she?”
The faerie recites the words Beatrix knows by heart, whispers that have followed her since her own birth. “A changeling. A faerie. Cursed.”
“Who was she?” Beatrix demands, her voice trembling. “What was her name?” She doesn’t care about treading carefully. She needs to know.
“I was never given one,” the faerie says. “You don’t name a child you don’t intend to keep.”
Beatrix swallows hard. “That was a human child.”
“She was,” the faerie concedes. “A very, very long time ago.” She sneers at Beatrix. “I was like you. An innocent left to die by the people who were supposed to protect me. Betrayed by those who were supposed to love me the most.”
“Then how are you here?” Beatrix asks.Alive. In Lancaut. No longer human.
“The faeries found me,” she says, and something Beatrix can’t read dims the glow in her gaze, a candle flame guttering in a draft. “They made me one of them.”
“They saved you?” Beatrix’s heart thuds against her ribs, so loud she’ssure the faerie must hear it, too. “Can you save me? Bring me back? Is that why I’m here?”
The faerie scoffs. “Bring you back to your miserable human existence? After everything they’ve done to you, that is what you want?” Her voice is laced with disappointment and disgust.
Beatrix trembles under her unyielding gaze. “Please. I want—I need more time.”
The faerie gives her that perfectly mimicked smile. “Are you afraid to die, Beatrix? And here I thought you were different from the others.”
But that isn’t it. Everyone dies. It is part of life. It isn’t the dying Beatrix fears.
She is afraid of losing the life she hasn’t lived yet, afraid of letting go of the one she has. Of never feeling the warmth of William’s arms wrapped around her again. Of never whispering her daughter’s name as she rocks her to sleep. Of losing all the happiness she has finally found. She is only twenty-three.
“Please. I only want a chance to live.”
“I have something far better to offer you than this death tonight. Far better than your old life.” The faerie stands in the river. No,onthe river, her bare feet just breaking the surface. She beckons Beatrix to the edge.
Beatrix peers into the river she has known since she was a child. But this is not her river, not her reflection looking back at her. It is like looking through glass, into another world. Lancaut, but not. Brighter. Beautiful. Easier. Lancaut, but perfect.
